One thing that a lot of companies don’t get is the importance of frictionless feedback.
All companies perpetuate the myth that they want to hear from customers. They pretend to value their feedback, and want to hear from them, regardless whether or not the feedback is good or bad. In very few cases is this really true. I’m not referring to actually abusive or threatening feedback, which obviously just gets binned.

Negative, but non-abusive feedback is good stuff to have, and so is positive feedback obviously. Any developer who has sat down and watched a ‘lets-play’ video of their game, or better still, observed strangers playing their game for the first time in real-life, can tell you that NO amount of brainstorming, agonizing or debating over design features is as good as watching people play…

Sometimes, people think that the only feedback worth having is the long and analytical email or forum post dissecting the games design and deliberating it’s strengths and weakeness, alongside constructuive suggestions as to how to improve things. Obviously this feedback is awesome, and much appreciated but it is not the only form worth having, because it’s delivery method implies some self-selection on the part of the player.

In other words, only a certain subset of hardcore, analytical thoughtful and time-rich gamers will ever commit their thoughts to keyboard in such an effective and clear manner.
What you really need to capture is the gamers who can’t be bothered to spend more than 10 seconds giving you feedback on your game, but nevertheless are buyers/potential buyers and have a viewpoint. they are gamings 99%
To do this, you need to reduce any ‘friction’ involved in that process. Is it easy to get feedback from your customers. Here is how I try to make it easy.

1) you can email me at cliff@positech.co.uk, and I will read it. I acknowledge almost all feedback, and I read all of it. Even if it’s a one-line email “The mechs are overpowered”, it still gets filed away and noted.
2) You can post on my forums at www.positech.co.uk. This is probably my best source of feedback.
3) You can comment on blog posts here
4) You can direct-message or just quote @cliffski on twitter. I read all that too.
5) You can comment on the facebook page for the game.

Ideally, I’d make it even easier, but true anonymous frictionless feedback is just open to spam. I experimented with anonymous guest posting on forums, but it’s a spam headache unfortunately. I guess the best thing to do is just make it really clear that feedback is welcome, good or bad and you can email me your thoughts on the game, and they will get read. Indies are lucky because people actually believe us when we say you can email the lead designer, rather than a customer service person.

I always wish when I read a comment on my games on some foum, that the person typing it knew that they could just copy and paste that opinion and throw it at me by email, and it would have 100x the effect on getting the game changed and refined than a post on a foumr (although such posts are to be encouraged too, anything that gets people discussing your game is clearly a good thing)
Any game developer hiding their email address behind a captcha or sign-up account is just throwing away a free source of honest feedback. Don’t do it. get better spam filters. It can be done, how else can I constantly type cliff@positech.co.uk on my blog and get away with it?

Bookmark to:

It’s taken me a while, but I have air strikes in the game, although they still need balancing. Here is a brief demo video:

Air strikes currently come in 2 flavours (although it’s all controllable by text files so modders should have fun). And are presented to the player just like a deployable unit from the deployment bar. I might have to fiddle with that a bit later, because currently they ignore divisions, which might annoy some people?

Air strikes last for a set duration and then drop fairly high damage blasts onto random 9and not-so-random) locations within the given radius over that time. Balancing them will be a pain, but currently my thinking is relatively low cost, high-impact and long recharge times, so that you use just 3 or four of them (max) during a battle.

The difficult bit, as ever, is the knowing you have balanced them right, but I’m sure people will let em know if I haven’t. This is probably the last pre-release added feature for the game, the rest will be mod support, bug fixing and minor tweaks and refinements.

Bookmark to:

One of the criticisms of more than one reviewer and beta player is that the post-battle unlock choices were not clear, because all you got to base your decision on was an icon and a name.

This was a fair point, and after a surprising amount of faffing around, it finally looks like this:

There should be a patch today or tomorrow with that (and may many other changes) in.

Bookmark to:

(Guest post by redshirt developer Mitu Khandaker)

So, Cliff asked me to blog my thoughts on developing Redshirt so far. My response as I sat down to try write this was “Gosh, where do I start in talking about this massive project that has been my life since last summer?

After all, I’d been a videogames PhD researcher, and I’d worked on smaller things before (as well as bigger, non-gamesy things), but Redshirt is my first proper commercial game project. Its origin lies in an idea I’d had – social networks govern the daily lives of so many of us now, and give rise to their own set of micropolitics and behavioural quirks, so why not make a simulation game about that? I briefly talked about the story of pitching the game to Positech in my first dev video, and how it evolved into Redshirt, so I won’t go into that here, but, as of 15th June 2011, I put cursor to code.

Making the Best of Highly Illogical Decisions
I’d opted for Unity as my development tool of choice, because I’d used it comfortably for smaller, throwaway personal projects and was definitely enamored with how it expedites things. As someone who insisted on Notepad for years when I was doing web programming, I certainly understand the impulse to shrug off fancy IDEs and editors and such, but I knew with this project, I’d have my hands full with PLENTY of challenges anyway, so, I wanted to make life easier for myself by using Unity.

Or so I thought, anyway. The thing is, Redshirt relies heavily upon its user interface; it is, by nature, a very UI-centric game – which meant that Unity’s notoriously lacking built-in GUI system wouldn’t cut it. Unfortunately, the available third-party solutions also didn’t do exactly what I needed them to do, or were otherwise incomplete in many ways. I ended up writing so much custom functionality anyway, and doing more work on fixing the UI than I’d anticipated; there was that time, for example, when I spent a whole long weekend fixing scrollbars. Scrollbars, of all things.

Of course, once they were done, I felt a massive sense of achievement – and, that’s something else this project has taught me. The motivational peaks and troughs that come with getting things working which no other sane person will even think about twice.

I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This
While I expected plenty of challenges (and wow, did I get them!), I did not prepare for stretches of time where progress just felt so slow. This happened around months 3-6, and things felt largely like trying to run through a pool of really thick, viscous liquid.

Around this time, I’d been busy working on implementing the Spacebook (more work than I’d thought it’d be, naturally!), but a lot of the other functionality remained unfinished, and things were taking massively longer than I’d projected.

I’d drawn out a huge, elaborate, multi-faceted system in the game, a lot of which still needed to be properly implemented. But, after numerous discussions with Cliffski, we decided it simply needed to be pared down for the sake of actually finishing the game on schedule. And, y’know, for my own sanity, too. This actually turned out to be a good lesson in practicing/really thinking about subtractive game design (http://www.sirlin.net/articles/subtractive-design.html). (For the record, the main thing that was taken away was the currency system on board the station, because it wasn’t adding much valuable depth to the game, really. Who needs these things in a post-scarcity society, right?)

Often, things still feel fairly painfully slow to progress, but either I’m used to the feeling it now, or I’m slowly coming out the other side, and seeing things come together. Either way, the thing that gets you through those periods is really loving the concept of the game, and what it’s trying to achieve, and knowing it just needs to get made.

The View from Orbit
Of course, the perversely funny thing is that all the focus I’d been putting on worrying about systems, and how they would interact, sort of came second to the feeling of the game ‘evolving’ when things happened which I thought should be inconsequential, or secondary. Like adding sound, or avatar animations, or seeing the UI mockups from our wonderful artists. It was an odd sort of experience, which made me refocus on the fact that games are these magical things that somehow feel like more than the sum of their parts.

And, oddly, no matter how much work you put into your own project, when someone else does a good job on part of it – like with the game’s logo art, for instance – it somehow makes it feel more real!

All of this means, though, that I’m getting to a stage where I’m beginning to feel that there is an actual game amongst all the mess I’ve been staring at for months. That is a good feeling! Right now, as I write, the majority of the core functionality exists for the game already; I’m working on character creation, and adding a few things to the Spacebook feature. Next, it’ll be a matter of adding a load of content – and, at the same time, beginning to incorporate the flashy new UI designs. Then, it’ll be more art, and a whole lot of testing, no doubt.

On the whole, I’m happy with how Redshirt is shaping up, and I look forward to sharing more about the game soon!

Bookmark to:

Soo… GTB has got some nice beta coverage in a lot of different places. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, but paranoid and delicate little chap that I am, I naturally get drawn towards criticisms or suggestions for improvement. One that I had not expected, (but in hindsight agree with) came from the rock paper shotgun preview which stated:

Because I’m not someone that ever pays attention to numbers or stats regarding game content (36 hours gameplay? for who? at what difficulty? at what speed?), I tend to have a bit of a blind spot to that topic in my own. To my mind, the campaign is just a teaser saying ‘here are some of the things you can do with maps’, assuming that even if 1% of the buyers ever made a map worth sharing, the number of maps would be huge.

However, it is fair to say that people don’t necessarily want to play user-made maps, and that obviously the person most fluent with the editor is me, so it makes sense to provide enough maps for people that user-made ones are entirely optional.

To that end, I’m happily chiseling away at the coalface making more maps. I’m 90% done on two new ones, a daytime snow map, And a nice evening desert battle.

I’m trying to be as inventive as possible. The snow map, for example has two main routes. One is short, but surrounded by concentrated enemies, the other is torourously long but the enemy locations are more scattered. So far, after many test battles, I can’t say that either route is an obvious choice, it all depends on your play style and unit choice.

I’ll almost certainly add more maps before release, especially once I get into the swing of creating them. The shadowmaps and the balancing take most of the time. So if you already bought the game, you have 8 campaign maps, and 2 more will appear in patch 1.04, hopefully this coming weekend. I’m hoping to add some more after that too, but I always try to be very conservative when it comes to promising stuff until it’s actually done.

If you bought / are considering GTB, how important is the number of singleplayer campaign maps to you?

Bookmark to:

A picture speaks a thousand words, and a video draws a thousand pictures?, or whatever… But here is a video of me explaining and showing how the new ‘divisions’ feature for Gratuitous Tank Battles works, and how to use it. I’m quite pleased with it. It will be in patch 1.003, which after a little bit of final testing will be release tommorow.

Like A dork I broke my wireless router today trying to install a new aerial booster. BAH. Tomorrow an urgently ordered new one shows up. There goes a days sales Plus hopefully my much wanted new desk, which is very English and wooden and cheesy and old fashioned, but it will suit my house, which a modern shiny thing would just look odd in. Anyway. Enjoy the video, critiques and comments most welcome.

Bookmark to:

There is one big usability failing in Gratuitous Tank Battles that I need to address. It’s something even as the designer that I notice mid-battle, so it must irritate a lot of players. It’s the unit deployment bar at the bottom of the screen. It works great with 10 or less units, and functionally, it handles hundreds, because it has a scroll bar and you can also rapidly zip through it using the mouse-wheel. But it has two issues:
1) It has no specific order to the units.
2) It shows you ALL your units, you cannot filter them.
I am investigating possibly strategies for improving the usability of it, maybe including some filtering options, allowing you to ‘hide’ units on it before a battle, maybe a system that lets you put together ‘armies’ of units that you can select pre-battle, I’m not sure yet.

More interestingly, I get the impression that hardly any players have realised that you can just mouse wheel anywhere over the bar and it will scroll. I obviously need to promote that more, but I think I have fallen foul of a popular designers dilemma, which is assuming the player thinks like I do. Family members always ask me how their DVD player / ipod / camera etc work, even though they have the manual and I do not, because they know I can work it out instinctively in seconds. I am a GUI ‘explorer’ and a usability geek. I am in the tiny percentage of people who have actually read ‘the design of everyday things’. I’m that sad.
What that means is, I need to remember that I am far more experimental and make far more assumptions and guesses about how GUI’s work that the player. I need to draw more attention to stuff like that.

Bookmark to:

Here’s a thought.

Good games are ones where we make unsure trade-offs. Most games are either about reflexes or decisions. Decisions are more common in the kind of games I make, such as strategy and sim games. I think the two basic approaches to strategy/sim games are plate-spinning and trade offs.

Plate-spinning is where tons of stuff is happening at once and you are trying to stay on top of everything and keep everything from falling apart. Democracy 2 is very big on this aspect of design.

Trade-offs are much more common. Even games that are conventionally reflex ones, such as First person Shooters have a lot of trade-offs. You choose to be a medic, trading ammunition capacity for the ability to heal. You choose to be a scout, trading everything for the ability to move fast. Choosing to have more of X, means less of Y.

Where this system goes wrong in games, is where it is too clear, too obvious, too analytical, to decide exactly what the trade-off is. In other words, the number are a bit too explicit. If I *know* the details of every variable in the trade-off, then it simply becomes a matter of Vulcan logic. It’s when there is a suitable amount of fuzziness around the numbers, that the trade-off becomes one filled with uncertainty, anticipation, risk and excitement. You *think* the best choice is to risk building a new factory in the city, trading off increased pollution against lower unemployment…but you can’t really be *sure* that the numbers will go your way…

To me… that makes for a fun game. I don’t always need to know the numbers. Sometimes, just a hunch makes for more fun.

Bookmark to:

A lot of people really liked the manual for Gratuitous Space Battles, and I’m conscious of this fact when working on the one for GTB. As with all complex strategy games, there is a ton of stuff to tell the player, and they will likely want to reference it after playing for an hour or two, in order to look-up or clarify stuff. It’s also a good place to put stuff like lists of hotkeys, or unit stat comparisons, although I probably won’t be doing the latter.

Some trendy designers would suggest that ‘a game that needs a manual is badly designed’. This is just silly. We don’t all want to play games as simple as Bejeweled, and sometimes, a separate reference manual is a good idea for a game that has real depth and a ton of features. I also like doing a manual because it means people can read how to play the game on their laptop, or a work PC, where maybe actually playing through a tutorial isn’t an option. Plus it means people who are really on the fence can read the manual before deciding to buy the game.

The manual is maybe half done. It’s mostly all there, but it will need some more images, some proof-reading, spell checking, and a second pass for actual humour and flavour text to make it more in-keeping with the blackadderish spirit of the game design. I might change my typewriter font to make it more typerwriterish, a tradeoff between authenticity and legibility. I like the idea of a 1914 army document that never got updated during 200 years of war. maybe the army spent all it’s effort on making more deadly lasers and none on word processors?

On the technical side, it looks like the server move went ok. Just quadruple checking it all before I turn off the old one. That still scares me…

Bookmark to:

Here is a theory, tell me what you think. I’m sure it’s rough around the edges.

The best games are made by people who feel ‘compelled’ to make a certain type of game. Invariably, this is because that sort of game does not already exist. If the perfect game (to that designer’s eye) already existed, they would

a) Waste a lot of their free time playing it

b) Not perceive there is a market for another game like that, and not feel as motivated or driven to make it.

If this theory is true, it follows that the designers that are churning out consistently original or refreshing stuff, are amongst the most frustrated and miserable game-players. They are constantly living in a gaming world populated by other people ‘doing it wrong’.

Now that theory is a bit arbitrary, and I am well aware of the fact that I’m just trying to rationalise my own opinions and convince myself that the fact that I find 90%+ of modern games to be rubbish is because I am perceiving flaws others do not. The other option is that I’m going off games, which I’m pretty certain is not true, judging by my huge addiction to Anno 2070 (dammit I WILL get enough fruity drinks to get that next level of eco inhabitant!!!!), or that I have unusual taste in games (quite likely).

Any other game designers out there who feel let down/ dissapointed / depressed by most modern games? I have maybe 20 games in my steam account (I admit, I tend to buy retail or direct from developer so that’s only a snapshot) whereas I know many people have 100+ 200+ games. I find most games to be unappealing, at any price. I judge games more by the time required, than the asking price. I’m not saying other games are *bad*, just that they do not appeal to me. Maybe the designer in me has just evolved to constantly find fault in games?

Bookmark to: