I hurt my back chopping wood, how tragic. This means I am a) in agony and b) not able to talk about gamecamp in London, because I couldn’t go

Instead, I shall waffle on about advertising!

I’m one of the few indie devs that actually believes in advertising. Everyone else seems to think it does not work on a small scale, as in <$500,000. It does. Even spending $1 on ads will make a difference, the problem is, that it’s a difference too tiny to measure. Measuring ad results is a minefield I’ve blogged about a lot in the past.

One thing I like about ads is that it’s truly remote and spontaneous spreading of news about your game. Most indies don’t get spontaneous website coverage unless they actively find a reviewer, send him a copy and pester him/her for a review. By definition, that narrows the circle of publicity about your game. Who knows how many Ukrainian gaming blogs have readers who are oblivious to Gratuitous Tank Battles, because I don’t know those blogs exist?

I rely heavily on hard evidence and stats to pick the best advert designs, but here are some GTB ads. Let me know what is good / bad about them, or if you have any cool ideas for them. I tend to use static, not animated ads, as I find animated ones have little real difference to CTR, and frankly, I don’t like being associated with cheesy flashing things.

I’m planning on using these on google adwords, but maybe project wonderful and game-advertising online. I like the way google lets me target certain countries and restrict it to PC’s rather than macs/phones, but I hate the complexity and approval delays for their campaigns. I wish many more gaming sites would investigate using project wonderful instead. They are really good.

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So why haven’t I patched the game lately? when is the release date? Here goes…

The release date is basically any day now. The final build of the game is done, tested, built and ready for distribution. That doesn’t mean it’s the ‘lat’ build. I intend to update the game later with a number of improvements, not least to enable easy mod-support for the game, and a bunch of graphical improvements, speedups and GUI tweaks etc…

But at some point you declare the game officially launched so people who would not preview it, get to review it.

Also, that’s the point at which third parties like steam etc get to sell the game…

And that’s currently the slight delay. Setting things up with third party portals is taking a little while. I have some minor tech issues with setting it up for one portal, another is frankly not getting the final build until I see last months royalties actually arrive in my bank account (god I hate this hassle…), and a few more I shall contact today and see if they want to stock the game.

while we wait..here is a tank made from balloons…

Previously I’ve launched on my site first, and the portals later, but I was hoping for a simultaneous release this time.

The good news is that I’ve written a web-based front-end for people who have bought the game direct, which tells them what their steam-key is, for when the game launches on steam. They will get an email from me on launch day.

So don’t think I’ve stopped working on GTB, far from it, it would just complicate stuff a LOT if I released a new patch now, and then portals started selling a version slightly older. Hopefully the first post-release patch will be bigger than normal and have more fixes as a result (or more important ones).

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Another, and possibly the final pre-release patch has been released for Gratuitous Tank Battles. I put more emphasis this time on the whole topic of stability and performance, rather than squeezing in new features. The full list of changes in 1.007 are as follows:

version 1.007
=============
1) Fixed bug where the deployment icons on the battle screen were no longer showing their popup windows.
2) Fixed crash bug when using very high amounts of muzzle smoke.
3) Increased minimum range of missile modules.
4) Fixed bug in displaying certain bonus effects on the design screen, notably for missile launchers.
5) Replaced 'gratuitous shaders' option with a toggle for the distortion effect.
6) Sped up the drawing of unit shadows.
7) Fixed yellow-screen corruption bug
  Fixed bug where the progress bar for the score would not always draw correctly.
9) Performance improvements allow for higher quality visuals when zoomed out on higher spec PCs.
10) Infantry do not now talk as frequently when onscreen in large numbers.
11) Some variety introduced in the placement of tiny props next to certain turrets
12) All turrets now have surrounding 'splats' to merge slightly with the terrain.
13) Special props can now be hidden from the editor.
14) Fixed bug which displayed an empty unlock dialog on certain occasions.
15) Some optimisations to speed up drawing of drifting smoke, and reduce particle effects when framerate drops.
16) Fixed unit design bug preventing ammo loaders being selected if a rate of fire aug was already fitted.
17) Fixed bug where a map would not tolerate starting supplies being higher than the mid-game supply cap.

The ones that really matter are 5,7,17 and 17 which were pretty critical functionality related things. I still have a bunch of purely aesthetic improvements I’d theoretically like to make, but they can wait. I am hooping that what is currently in the game represents a big list of features to attract buyers, and at the same time is also pretty fast and stable. Modding support is the next big thing to get my teeth into, but that is all under-the-hood stuff which won’t really affect 90% of the players.

The only thing (barring reported major bugs) between now and release is going to be making a new launch trailer that shows stuff like the extra maps and the airstrikes etc. Making trailers always takes an absolute age, and I’m never happy with them, but I should put some time into it because GTB looks so much better moving than as still images. I plan to capture and record a fairly high res trailer this time so it looks as good as possible. the trouble is Fraps can only record so big before it slows down the actual game and makes performance look bad when it really isn’t. That, plus the nightmare of uploading and rendering out massive video files.

I might try and take half a day off tomorrow. Yay!

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Ok, so patch 1.006 for Gratuitous Tank Battles is now live. There are, as usual a bunch of minor tweaks and improvements, but here is the stuff that you will notice more than the rest:

• Airstrikes are in! You only get them as defender, and be warned they can damage your units too, so aim carefully You need to unlock them before they are usable:

• There are some new augmentations available that work on defensive capabilities, such as boosting armor and shields etc.
• Defensive AI now takes into account attacking unit movement and tries to build ahead of the enemy, not just right on top of them (which often means they built turrets too late, and were useless by the time they were built).
• The tab key now cycles through all your divisions, if you have multiple ones set up, shift+tab reverses it.
• New progress bars in the UI to show supplies and victory progress.

Hopefully this all improves the game and makes it more polished. It’s funny how adding stuff such as the supplies / victory progress bars and the tab-button stuff makes it so much easier to play, but I hadn’t realised they were needed all this time. Nothing beats just playing & playing & playing your supposedly finished game

Existing buyers should get their game auto-patching today or tomorrow. Make sure you have entered your serial code and picked a username or it won’t happen. New buyers get a ready-patched 1.006.

Tempted to pre-order now? Here you go.

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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.

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There are a bunch of things that could be added to Gratuitous Tank Battles, all of which takes time, and lots of tweaking and balancing, and may or may not add to the gameplay. My pet idea is a ‘safe zone’ extending some distance behind heavy tanks, which gave infantry in that area a cover bonus against fire. Theoretically easy, but might it look a little weird? if there is obviously clear line-of-sight from enemy turret to infantry, how can I justify the bonus?

One thing that I have started on, because it was bugging me, is improving the defensive AI. A lot of people have been complimentary about the AI in GTB, which is very nice, as I am, in my heart a bit of an AI coder, but I see so many battles when the AI does dumb things. The two dumb things that really bugged me (but NOBODY has mentioned it) were as follows:

The Ai building turrets next to attacking units, rather than ahead of them, so they don’t stride past during construction

The AI not effectively demolishing and rebuilding units in the last minute or so of battle

The first problem is hopefully now fixed (The second has always been coded, but obviously needs more work), but it’s actually one of those coding problems that annoys AI people, because management will never understand the complexity (and think you are crap/slacking). In theory, the solution is simple – Don’t analyze the path next to each potential unit-build location, analyze the paths that are 5-10 path tiles ahead of them, so you can know what will be in range when a unit is built, rather than right now. Easy, job done, 10 minutes!

But in practice much harder. There are maps with branching paths, and worse, some with paths that flip back between two tiles (making for some interesting recursive gotchas), so that means that identifying which path squares to keep an eye on and calculate ‘urgency’ for becomes a bit of a pain. It’s also horrendously slow, but thankfully way way faster in release build, and only happens on map load anyway. (Theoretically it could be saved out and rebuilt only on edits, but it turned out to be fast enough not to bother). To code all that, test it, optimise it and debug it (with a debug overlay to check it worked) , took the best part of a day, but I think it’s worth doing.

So today, one thing on the list is the demolishing/endgame stuff for the defensive AI. No reviewer has yet criticised the AI for the game, but I guess I should be aiming at them praising it, and hopefully I’m nudging in that direction.

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So I’ve finally released patch 1.005 for Gratuitous Tank Battles, and I’ve been trying to get a patch a week released between beta and eventual final release. This patch might seem to have less stuff than the last, mostly due to one of the items taking a lot of re-working.

Here is a forum thread showing the full changelist:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=7210

And here are the highlights:

There is now a direct association between the flames and damage textures on a unit, and it’s current state of health, rather than the semi-random system there seemed to be before! That means that a unit that looks undamaged probably is (although shields and armor may be reduced), and a unit with several plumes of smoke streaming from it is probably in trouble. Of course, for player-units toggling ‘H’ or the health button will let you see the details (or select that unit). This took a lot of fairly tedious re-jigging.

On a similar note, shields now flicker in a strobey-way if they are below 33%. You probably won’t notice on units without big chunky shields, because once down to 33%, they are probably under attack and close to failure, but hopefully this makes things a bit clearer.

There is a gratuitous new visual effect for laser guidance. Previously, those red laser beams were on a lot of units, mostly mechs, semi-randomly. Now, they only appear if that unit is equipped with the top (VI) targeting system. They also swish across and illuminate some smoke, and pulse a bit and generally look pretty cool at night. Expect to see less of them, but for them to look better

There is a new campaign map (Tanks for the memories!) added at the end of the campaign. It’s another evening map, this time very trench-heavy, hopefully you will all enjoy it

There are some changes and improvements to the explosions, after a LOT of work on the explosion editor. I expect them to be better still in the next patch, now I have seriously tided up my particle & explosion editing code!

Enjoy the new version, and as usual, anyone pre-ordering the game right now gets the very latest version automagically (you won’t need a patch). Don’t forget to tell friends, family members and total strangers if you have played the game and enjoy it, it’s all much appreciated. There is an official patch 1.005 comments thread here:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=7225

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There is a todo list for the Gratuitous tank Battles beta, and something not officially on it (because nobody mentioned it) was to make the explosions and flames and so-on look better. People keep telling me they look great, but I want them to look tons better. That means a lot of tweaking, optimising and theorizing.

It’s amazing how many variables you need to get particles looking right, and then how much more code. I have special code for flames, for flamethrowers, for ground bursts, for smoke plumes, for debris, for emitters attached to moving units… and so on. It’s quite a spaghetti mess of complicated and differently designed systems, but it seems to work.

Hopefully by the time the game ships to final release, the effects will look a lot better. It’s one of those things I really enjoy coding (even on Good Friday when i should be eating chocolate!), so I can often justify silly amounts of time on it.

I also have grand plans for target designation laser effects, flickering shields and pulsing damage textures, but not enough hours in the day. How annoying…

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Ok, so I’ve put version 1.004 of GTB live, and it has a bunch of stuff in it which is listed in full on the positech forums here:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=7085&p=55380#p55380

But I thought I’d mention the highlights of the new version here.

• The battle screen now lets you scroll to the top and the bottom outside the actual map-bounds. This was a bit of a pain because it had to ‘fake’ a bunch of extra tiles that don’t exist which causes issues you can’t imagine, but the upshot of it is that you can now easily see the bottom and top row tiles which makes maps that have them in-use much easier to play
• The dog tags now flash for a duration independent of game speed, preventing you getting an advantage by playing slower.
• Recordings of your deployments now actually WORK in uploaded challenges, which was a BIG bit of broken functionality that people should now be able to enjoy properly.
• There are two completely NEW campaign missions added to the end. There will be more missions coming in future patches. This took the game from 8-10 missions, and I want the release build to have more than that.
• Health-indicators now default to on, and are implemented much more sensibly with a button to toggle (Which is remembered) and also reliable use of a hotkey to view them. damage indicators also default to on now.
• The unlocks window after a battle now displays comprehensive information on the choices that are on offer so you can make a better decision.

There is a bunch of other stuff too, and loads of improvements I want to make visually in the short term, plus all kinds of ideas for extra stuff medium term,, if the game actually proves to be popular. Anyway, this is one more step towards release, so that’s good

Here is a tank picture wot I took:D

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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.

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