I’m pretty sure I’ve already mentioned it, but I’ll be Rezzed in Birmingham UK this weekend with Mitu from the Tiniest Shark showing off our games Democracy 3 and Redshirt. (I’m the publisher of redshirt, mitu is the developer).

Rezzed is a PC gaming show run by eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun and the last one was totally awesome. there are developer talks and lots of games on show, including triple A stuff and lots of really good indie games. You should definitely go. It’s at the Birmingham NEC which is trivial to get to if you live within a bazillion miles of it :D

Right, that’s the sales pitch over with, so lets get to the more human interest honest heart-on-wrist stuff shall we?

PLEASE COME AND PLAY MY GAMES! I’ve worked for ages in this little bubble where I *think* democracy 3 is fun and looks good and is playable and intuitive and makes sense, but like all developers I really have *no idea at all* what gamers who haven’t played democracy 1 or 2 will think of it. It is VERY valuable for me to know peoples opinions. I’ll give you nice glossy flyers explaining the theme of the game, and badges! and mitu has stickers as well as two yes TWO different types of badge for redshirt. How are you not already buying a ticket at this news???

Seriously, it is very helpful to hear peoples thoughts on the game, and even more helpful to actually stand discretely and watch people try it. You don’t *have* to talk to us, just plonk yourself in front of a monitor and start clicking things, that’s the whole idea. And this is true of every developer at the show. They desperately want you to come and try out their games. Even if you just click a few things, read a bit of text, and decide it’s not for you and wander off, that’s still preferable to no interaction at all. And also…do not feel bad if you *do* really like the game and sit there playing it for twenty minutes. If a queue forms, I’ll wave a bat-leth at you, but I doubt a deep turn-based strategy game will be the star attraction among the explosions and car chases at a games show :D

Anyway, in all seriousness, come say hello, try the games, and tell us what you think. Don’t feel bad if you have criticisms or complaints about them. All feedback is good. I’m told I am ‘less scary’ in real life than online by people who meet me. I have *NEVER* done a games show in my entire career, so this is a big scary ‘argh will it be worth it’ moment for me (these booths are EXPENSIVE), and I want to squeeze it to get as much helpful feedback as possible.

And if you write a blog, or do lets plays, or whatever, please introduce yourself. We are very happy to talk about the game, be interviewed and so on right there at the show. I might even give you one of my legendary business cards.

See you there.

(For those who are new, RedShirt is a comedy/satire/lifesim/strategy game developed by indie devs ‘The Tiniest Shark’ and being published by Positech Games (me!). Enjoy…

Sooo…there is a lot going on in positech land these days, partly because Redshirt and Democracy 3 are both coming together at the same time. At the weekend I also had a sudden revival of adding indie games to www.showmethegames.com, which is my much neglected side project.

A bit of stats crunching in google analytics persuaded me that my homepage was slightly slow loading, but thankfully there are tons of sites that will test and analyze this sort of thing, and free utilities to minify your javascript and losslessly compress png’s and jpgs, so hopefully that’s all much faster now.

In the land of actual game development, I’ve been working on both gameplay stuff for Democracy 3 (adding in new policies such as Fossil fuel subsidies, Privately run prisons, Mansion taxes, Foreign Investor Tax breaks,  Fuel efficiency standards…) and also some graphical stuff, which included importing all the art assets for the achievements, which are new to the game. That also meant I needed to actually code the achievements system (which is separate and independent from steam, but which I’ll link to steam if they accept the game).

I’ve also been doing a bunch of playtesting, which has shown that I’ve now made ministers actually *too* cynical and bitter and destructive, with most current test games descending into a wave of resignations and widespread public indignation at my incompetence :D

In other news… I have started up a very bare-bones for now, but nevertheless to-be-promoted facebook page for Democracy 3. Please go and ‘like’ it if you are interested in the game. (There will also obviously be a proper non facebook page in due course…) I’ll try and post more stuff there over the next few months. I’ve bought a video camera, which I’ll be carrying about to gaming events like Rezzed to film people trying my games, and also capture the magical ‘boothness’ for the first time. Plus I’ve grabbed a ticket to the ‘Bit Of Alright’ event in London next month, just as a visitor.

In between all this, I’m madly trying to open a high street business bank account, despite them all being idiots, and clueless, and annoying, because only a big name high street bank will give me a US dollar account that everyone in the US (publishers,portals) are happy to make payments into. The way I do things currently means I lose a chunk of cash on poor exchange rates, and I’m fed up with that. However, the bureaucracy so far is testing my will to continue with this process. bah!

I think this update on redshirt from the developer pretty much speaks for itself

(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!