Click to enlarge.

I’ve played about 2 hours of it, and it’s kinda cool, very ‘impressive’ and clearly cost a lot. I’m not sure it’s genuinely fun for a player like me, for various reasons. Firstly I’m not a chisel jawed wisecracking American who punches lift buttons with his fists, so I already feel like it’s not really me playing, by my voice and my actions. Secondly, everything seems to be glowing. Nice bloom effect, but give it a rest please. These are fairly minor things though, that I’d happily overlook to experience adventure in what is a very interesting world.

The problems that put me off are more fundamental. Firstly, I don’t really feel like any skill is involved. I picked medium difficulty, but I haven’t run out of ammo, salt or health once, and that’s with me bouncing around like a hyperactive squirrel spraying bullets everywhere. I think I died twice, but it really didn’t matter. As a result, I don’t feel scared, or excited. I basically can’t lose, and am not challenged. I can burst into peoples homes and rummage through their house for money without a second thought, and nobody I’ve encountered has posed any real threat whatsoever.

Maybe that’s fixed on higher difficulty, at least for shootouts, but it certainly doesn’t require any stealth in the way the old thief games (or even dishonored, to a very superficial extent) did.

More fundamentally, there is no real sense of sandbox or player control. They have created an amazing world, but they then wrote a movie script for it, gave me superficial control of a character at certain moments, and spun me around like a puppet on a scriptwriters strings for the majority of the predetermined story. I say things I wouldn’t say, do things I wouldn’t do, and spend a lot of the game running predictably forwards as things fall down just behind me, or to one side. I know I could go slower and it wouldn’t matter. I know the pillar that hits me as it falls is scripted to and I can’t avoid it. I may as well just hold down the W key with one hand and play the game blindfold.

I see games like this as a missed opportunity. I know they appeal to a certain crowd, and are very well made for it. I just wish they could take that same awesome world, awesome design and huge budget and make a free-form sandbox game where I could adventure in that world with entirely emergent gameplay. Apparently GTA games do a lot of it. Thief did it better. Just Cause 2 did it exceptionally well.

To me, this is a horribly expensive use of art assets to just wheel me past amazing vistas as they explode. I know it sells, I just wish we could have true, challenging sandbox games set in such a world. No quests. Just free-form experimentation within systems. basically i want ‘sir you are being hunted’ with Bioshock infinite’s budget.

check it out, and try resizing the window if you have a big screen:

http://www.positech.co.uk/index.html

The bulk of the site is the same, but depending on screen width, you get 3,4 or 5 little images linking to other games under the big slider thing. I think this makes good use of 1920 res monitors without sticking horizontal scrollbars (ugh) on smaller browser windows. It’s easy to do as well…

You just need to use some CSS, and a few <div> sections here and there. if you name a <div>, you can adjust it’s width based on the browser window inside the css like this:

@media screen and (min-width: 1400px) and (max-width: 1648px)
{
  .gamesection {width: 1316px;}
}

That makes the gamesection div 1316px wide if the screen size is between those 2 values.

I can then hide/show the ‘optional’ boxes with the extra images the same way, using named divs in the html:

@media screen and (min-width: 1400px) and (max-width: 1648px)
{
  #optionalbox { display: block; }
  #optionalbox2 { display: none; } /*hide 5th game box if screen is too short*/
}

I thought it was cool anyway :D

I’ve blogged a lot about the work, and effort, and technical knowledge required, and the likely rewards (low on average) and chance of success (very low on average). What amazes me, is that in addition to all that, you also often get abuse hurled at you from people.

Granted it’s worse in the mainstream industry (no 45 person company that behaves like this is ‘indie’ I resent them using that word to describe themselves). in that your actual direct boss may be the one shouting at you, and threatening to fire you if you don’t work an 80 hour week, but the minute you have an online ‘persona’ and direct contact with gamers things can get kinda nasty. For example, a recent game developers tweet (I wont’ draw further attention to it, in case he doesn’t want any)  revealed how someone following him on twitter had threatened to turn up at his house and stick a knife in his throat, because (as far as I could tell) this guy wanted him to roll back a recent code change).

People like that should be in a cell.

It’s an extreme example, but I do not know a *single* indie game developer who does not have a story of harassment online from someone who is a gamer. I don’t mean the usual forum trolling crap that idiots on sites like you-tube are always guilty of.  I mean people threatening physical violence, wishing you would die from some disease, insulting you racially or threatening to spread rumors about you to destroy your business. I’ve had people threaten to kill my cats, to spread lies about me to try and break business relationships or put me out of business. I’ve had people saying they will dedicate their life to ruining my business.

Let’s just pause here and point out what I do for a living. – I make games.

I just thought I’d stick that in, in case you forgot, and assumed I was a gun-runner, drug-dealer, sex-trafficker or terrorist for a minute or two.

The general consensus amongst devs is that you never ‘engage’ with abusive people. You just delete the email / ignore them, act super polite and hope they will forget about it. But in a way, that’s how bullies go through life without changing their behavior. Eventually, they become senior management and treat their staff like crap, one can only assume? I don’t think as a group, indie game developers should treat ‘receiving abuse’ as ‘part of the job’. If we were actresses who were being abused, nobody would say ‘that’s just the job, deal with it’. People would be outraged. Why is it ‘ok’ to hurl insulting abuse at people who make video games?

I met a fellow indie dev at GDC who got on to the topic of dealing with anonymous internet abuse being hurled at him. We chatted a bit, and he had a big smile on his face as we talked about the different people and what they had said to us / threatened us with. He was smiling with relief, because he realized it wasn’t just him. He wasn’t being picked on, he wasn’t doing anything wrong, he was just a game developer, and that means the internet thinks he is a punch bag.

It’ s pretty crappy, and it’s no way to get what you want. People don’t listen to your arguments about games more because you are abusive to them. They probably just delete them. It’s about time that abusive 1% of the gamer community learned that lesson. I have some customers who can email me and ask for new features to be put in the game, and they go to the top of my list of things I need to do, because they asked for them, and they are great people, and I want them to enjoy the game. Nobody on that list is someone who was abusive, insulting or patronizing.  That’s probably the 99% of gamers who are great. pity about that 1%.

Behold my cutting edge game design tools!. Anyway, I got annoyed that ‘wasteful economy’ in Democracy 2 was pretty nebulous, and tried to fix it for the sequel, and realized I probably needed a measurement of wages for that, and then tried to avoid adding ‘competitiveness’ or ‘exports’ because frankly its complex enough as it is…

Generally I’m pleased with most of this,(BTW the bottom left circles are low and middle incomes), but I hav2 big phat question marks, namely

1) How does wages affect GDP and vice versa

2) how does productivity affect wages and vice versa

Can I fix this WITHOUT adding new variables? Do I really need wages? my plan is to be able to add a new item of ‘uncompetitive economy’ which is basically just an extreme example of low productivity. Essentially, we are paid too much and achieve too little (Italy! ahahahaha hahah ahah…). How does this fit in? Basically labour laws (restrictive practices) will keep wages high despite low productivity. Is that really possible? if so, maybe the combination of high wages and low productivity will reduce GDP (implicit hidden factor of reduced competitiveness).  maybe low wages could be another positive input into international trade, or perhaps I *do* need competitiveness and have both cheap imports and international trade (re:exports) keyed from it? with wages pushing competitiveness down and productivity pushing it up?

ARGHHHHHHH!

“AND ON THE EIGHTH DAY HE CREATED GAMBLING”

There is a relationship, coded into the game (data-driven of course) between gambling policy and the happiness of religious voters. By default, as you legalize and liberalize gambling, religious voters become more upset, with a degree governed by an equation, such as -0.2*(x^3), where x is the intensity of gambling (degree to which it is legal).

This equation is picked by me, as being my best guess of the general effects of gambling on religious people. However… In the USA, I get the impression gambling has a more negative connotation. You guys banned online poker, for example. Maybe religious people should be more annoyed? maybe -0.4*(x^3) or maybe the curve should be 0-(0.45*x), or whatever else you like… Overrides allow this to happen, because each country has a folder full of overrides which get automatically applied when that country is played, enabling me to tailor each country a bit.

It gets better…

In theory, adding the capability for a folder of player-designed overrides is trivial, meaning players who decided that in their view, gun ownership reduced, not exacerbated crime, could save out an override to that effect, and never be offended by cliffs liberal gun-hating ways again! :D

Also… it’s a modders paradise, because not only can you add new simulation values, policies etc… now you can zero-out existing effects. So if the game has object A affects object B, and you want to mod it so in fact A affects C and then C affects B, to add some subtlety and complexity and extra feature… then you could do that without *ever* having to alter the original game files at all. This should make experimenting with player-made mods much much easier, and less risky than normal.

I hope people get stuck in and use them :D

Instant crash!

Unless I add code which calls my thread manager and then calls TerminateThread(). This works…but then the app does not actually properly quit, so it can’t work right. Also… I now read that TerminateThread() is not the way to exit a thread anyway, and I’ve been using it all this time… arghhh!

How do you handle quitting a multithreaded app when the player arbitrarily exist it? Nobody seems to have a definitive answer…

Firstly, there is the topic of dilemmas. Dilemmas are a good mechanic because they are issues you cannot kick down the road. For example, there is an application to build a toxic waste dump. Do you say yay or nay? Saying yay obviously annoys environmentalists, but for how long? Right now… the answer is FOREVER.  I now think this is wrong. I think it should decay over a long timescale, and also that dilemma should possibly be re-usable. if the player *wants* to play an endless game of D3, surely they shouldn’t ‘run out’ of dilemmas? This is a change that needs making.

Secondly, the current system has a negative effect on your popularity after an assassination attempt. This was because I wanted it to reflect how bad and unpopular your government was, implying that people who were on-the-fence about you, would see someone trying to kill you and go ‘oh Obama must be a fruitcake, look at those guys shooting at him’. I now think this is just WRONG. Surely the opposite is true? I might not like the UK prime minister, but would I like him less if someone tried to shoot him? Especially if I was a ‘floating voter’. I suspect the spirit of ‘rallying round the government’ would kick in, and maybe have a positive effect on your support.

That also has the positive effect that it is a nice self-balancing game mechanism, rather than the current spiral of failure. I’m pretty certain I’ll replace the impact with a slight, short-term popularity jump.

I suspect that although desktop PC gaming may not be as healthy as it once was, it is still pretty healthy, and I suspect laptop PC gaming is probably stronger than ever before. Laptops always used to be an executive, wealthy-persons PC, with the majority of us putting up with big beige boxes whilst the high fliers had a Sony Vaio. These days, laptops are cheap as chips, and have more than enough horsepower for gaming.

Personally, I still do 95% of my gaming on my desktop. This is to be expected for a developer, because I have 9as I keep reminding people) a darned comfy office chair and a nice office. I’m perfectly happy gaming in my office. However, the reality for people not working like me is that PC use might increasingly be on a sofa, in the garden, on a kitchen table with a laptop, wherever.

I’m hoping to steer positech in a bunch of different directions over the next few years. here uis my grand strategy marvel/laugh at its genius.

LAPTOP GAMERS

Democracy 3 is aimed at you. I will try to minimize it’s file access and CPU usage to ensure it doesn’t drain your battery, and I pledge to playtest it on laptops at least as much as desktops. D3 is a thinking game, one you might prefer to play lying on a sofa with a laptop.

TABLET GAMERS

Redshirt is aimed at you (it will also be on mac/pc). We plan to get this game out on ipad as it really does look the part in ipad format. Plus it’s relatively low system resource usage means it actual fits in ipad RAM :D.

DESKTOP GAMERS

Gratuitous Space Battles 2 will be aimed at you, if/when it gets made. In fact it will be seriously ninja-aimed at you, trying to squeeze every ounce of processor capability that I can.  Possibly supporting big picture mode for TV’s and I hope to experiment with multi monitors too. bwahahahaha.

This is my plan. Annoyingly, there is still only one of me. I must rectify that somehow.