Lots of people mocked Rumsfeld for his classic ‘known unknowns’ and ‘things we don’t know we don’t know’ speech. It was an easy target, but it’s also an interesting topic. Although in theory, the older I get, the more I know, in fact I think the older I get, the more I know I don’t know.

My politics changed a lot between ages 18-30. When I was 18, like most 18 year olds, I could put the world to rights and know I was definitely correct. I was totally wrong, and I just didn’t know it. Now, I have different political views, but I know enough to know I’m not sure I’m right.

It’s not different with my job. Ok, I rant about me knowing more about customer interaction than big companies, and I’m pretty confident there, especially after this, but that whole episode just went to show that what I thought I knew about piracy (all pirates are cheapskates) was just wrong. It is very very difficult to change your views on a topic you feel strongly about. The chances are, everyone reading this has some views that are not based on their objective evaluation of the situation, but views they got from their parents, their friends, from TV, religion,  from an experience as a child, from irrational fear or emotion.

I used to be very anti-fox hunting. I was bought up that way, as a city dwelling son of trade unionists, and never questioned it. I knew nothing about fox hunting, or the countryside, it was just the de-facto position for me. I became less and less fussed about it over the years (It’s now banned in the UK, at least the fox-killing aspect is). Very shortly after moving to the country, I actually saw (for the first time ever)  a bunch of people on a hunt (I think they just go through the motions now), and it is quite a spectacle. I can see why people feel its part of their culture, community and history. It gave me a different perspective, and one I really lacked. I’m not neccesarily pro-hunting now, but I am at least aware that my teenage views on it were colored by my surroundings and not the facts. I now know what I don’t know. Experience has actually made me less certain.

Here is a scary admission. When I started working at Elixir, I didn’t know how to use a debugger. I’d heard of them, but never known how they worked. I was gobsmacked that you could step through code and look at variables. Holy crap that looked really cool. And I had already shipped 4 games at that point (yes, they were damned hard to make). I was suffering from that classic problem of unknown unknowns. It’s not that I didn’t know how to step through code, I didn’t even know it was an option.

I’m still learning how to code, learning how to run a business, how to design games , how to balance games. I always will be. And I wouldn’t have it any other way, it’s what keeps life interesting. Try to find out what it is you don’t know you don’t know

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Years ago, I did this blog post, which is why I now run a dedicated server, because mine just MELTED. I was even on the radio, in several countries, yabbering on about piracy. Its still a huge big deal in terms of people recognising my name.

Anyway. I’m sort of going to try and do the same thing, sort of, but on a different tack. it won’t be vaguely as popular, and I bet I get 10 replies, rather than 10,000, but that’s cool. So instead of ‘Why do you pirate my games’, todays question is

“Why didn’t you buy Gratuitous Space Battles?”

Please read this next bit:

I am NOT complaining. I am NOT moaning about sales. I am NOT unhappy with sales, I am not whining or anything like it. I just like making games that people enjoy, and I don’t know why the people who didn’t buy it, didn’t buy it. I’d like to know. The answers may well make it a better game for everyone, if I fix those reasons (if they make sense). It will make the game attractive to current fence-sitters, better for current owners, and more sales for me and my cats.

This cat demands answers NOW.

You can post here, or email me at cliff@positech.co.uk. Subject could be “Why I didn’t buy GSB”. As with the piracy thing, what I 100% absolutely totally want is honesty. Here are some prompts for what you might be thinking, and please email me if any of them are true:

• “I Thought it would be an arcade game, but it wasn’t and I don’t like strategy games.”
• “I Don’t like 2D games, or at least won’t pay money for them.”
• “The demo was too easy”
• “The demo crashed”
• “It ran badly on my PC”
• “I already have lots of space strategy games”
• “The demo was badly balanced”
• “I heard bad things about it”
• “I don’t trust buying it from your website”
• “It’s too expensive”
• “I wanted direct control of the ships, and that was frustrating”
• I wanted a campaign wrapped around the battles. It was too sandboxy”

etc. Obviously, feel free to add to the list, above all, be honest. I’m not offended if you email me and say “The games shit, my dog could make a better game”. I would disagree, but that’s your opinion .

If you have friends or interwebs-buddies who you know saw or heard about the game, and don’t own it, I’d love to know their opinions. Obviously if you *did* buy it, you don’t get a vote today. Sorry, and thankyou for buying one of my games. You are clearly happier, more intelligent, discerning and probably more attractive than other people.

My intention here is to hoover up all those comments that invariably get made, that could, in a perfect world, be fed back to the creator of something to make the product better. We, as a species really need to get our shit together on that. If you are like me, you *always* find something about everything you buy which is annoying*, there just isn’t a direct route to the inbox of the designer to send your feedback. My email address is cliff@positech.co.uk. Tell me what improvement would make you a buyer of Gratuitous Space Battles.

*those new nozzles on ketchup bottles give me less control over ketchup distribution, and are affecting my purchase decisions…

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For a long time, indie game development got completely sidetracked by an unhealthy obsession with making casual games. These games were all made for 40+ ’soccer moms’ whatever the hell that means. It got so bad that people on the popular indie developer forums even started equating indie with casual, claiming that indie games had to be 2D, use one mouse button and have zero graphical options, so as to minimise ‘confusion’.

These days, from a  developers point of view, casual gaming has imploded.  A single company (BigFishGames) pretty much killed off all the competition, and forced developer cuts so low that they all sodded off to make iphone or facebook games. (”The current goldrush didn’t work, quick! follow the next goldrush!”).

Personally I think indie developers are best off making games for hardcore gamers and here is why.

• Hardcore gamers have hardware that will run something more demanding than tetris, meaning you can flex your graphical coding muscles.
• Hardcore gamers spend money on games. Yes, some are sadly pirates, but the ones who aren’t are happy to pay for a decent game. They consider it a serious pastime, and thus worthy of expenditure. Not a coffee-break amusement. Hence, higher prices and deeper games. Yay!
• Hardcore gamers understand simple tech support steps and bugs and patches. “What video card do you have” actually gets an answer, rather than questions, making tech support much easier.
• Hardcore gamers are enthusiastic and chatty. They have accounts on web forums where they discuss games they like. They can evangelise your game, if it’s good, to dozens, hundreds or thousands of potential buyers.
• Hardcore gamers remember the developers name. They know who made World Of Warcraft, and they know you made your game. They are likely to join your newsletter, and may even read it.
• Hardcore gamers are the forgotten minority. Bad console ports have mistreated PC gamers for years. Give a PC gamer the option to mod a game, run in windowed or fullscreen, and choose graphical options and screen resolutions, and they think its christmas.
• Hardcore gamers are tough critics with a lot of ideas. This can be a nightmare, but it means you get feedback on your game, what to improve, and what should be added. If you are open-minded about reading feedback from customers, hardcore gamers are a designers best friend.
• Hardcore gamers are happy to buy a game online that isn’t from amazon or some mega-corp they have heard of. If you have a secure site, then you will get sales.  Hardcore gamers are also more likely to support a developer direct, rather than a portal.

You may disagree, but this is my humble experience I have no intention whatsoever of switching to making casual games, or simple games for non gamers. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could make a business case for it to myself, or my cats.

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I think one of the things that makes a GREAT game better than a GOOD game, is that the great game has atmopshere. People in suits think you can buy atmosphere by spending money on FMV or lots and lots of artists, but that’s just not true. Thief 2 had AWESOME atmosphere, at a twentieth the budget of Oblivion. (guess).

One of the ways I try to ensure I get the right atmosphere into my game is to have constant reminders of the theme of the game in my head. Most of the time game development is just typing and scrolling through code, so it is easy to forget that its about lasers, explosions and battlecruisers going pew pew. That’s where headphones and multiple monitors come in. The vast majority of the time I’ve spent coding GSB has been spent either blasting the music from Star Trek or Star Wars through headphones (or out loud now ) or having a DVD of some suitably epic space battle sci-fi playing in my extra monitor, like so:

It really helps me to stay focused on what I’m doing, and how it should feel. Good games are about feel, not polygons or features. Just Cause 2 makes me *feel* like an action hero, in ways that mere technical ability or hype or clever graphical effects never can. Thats a great feeling. The guys who do puzzle pirates have the money to take this a stage further and they do. Good for them.

The nearest I’ve got to atmospheric experiences concerning aliens today was visiting a crop circle nearby. Never seen one before. Here is me in the middle being silly

Here is the cicle taken by a proper photographer.

They are pretty dull at ground level tbh. I’m sure whatever aliens make them are not ferengi, because there was nobody selling hot dogs, or even a strategically placed big ladder that they could charge admission for, to get a  good view. “Twelve rungs up? That’ll be three strips of latinum please”.

Apparently it’s a maths equation, if the circle radii get converted to ascii. I bet it was those do-gooder vulcans.

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I spent today mostly working on campaign stuff. One of the features in the campaign game is that player-designed fleet deployments show up as rival fleets in the campaign. So rather than just facing a fleet designed by me, and always the same, in a given battle, it’s a fleet someone else designed. Another GSB player.
As I play-test this, I find it really cool. I have no idea what each enemy fleet will look like until they appear, and it seems somehow ‘more exciting’ than the idea that its AI-designed, or a fixed fleet designed by me.

Why is this? And is this just me?

Playing against other people is often described by PC gamers as way better than playing against the AI. When you ask people why this is, there are a lot of reasonable explanations about humans being better at adaptive strategy, more creative, and with the ability to actually suprise or confuse the player. Certainly this is true of most RTS games and FPS opponents, at least currently.

I do wonder though, on how we will feel in five or ten years time when AI is that much better. There is nothing to stop AI analyzing every RTS or FPS players movements, and ‘evolving’ play strategies that mimic real human players much more accurately. In twenty years time do we really think that we will be able to tell if our RTS opponent is AI or Human? Assuming we don’t, will we *still* get an inexplicable buzz of excitement knowing it’s another squishy human rather than some clever AI?

I really think we will. There is something very primitivly rewarding about pitting yourself against (or co-operating with) a fellow human. We can’t speculate much about the motives or emotions of some AI, but the thought that there is someone, somewhere who just got their fleet pulverised by ours is just somehow much more rewarding. Blowing up AI pirates in eve is kinda fun, but blowing up other players who then have LOST their ship, is awesome, albeit a bit cruel. What do you think? Do you think it makes a difference if you are directly, or indirectly (think spore) playing against real human beings?

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Yes, so Ubisoft put very tough, over-the-top DRM on Silent Hunter V. Its not exactly news. And some people say it’s cracked (I suspect not fully) and other disagree. Yada yada.

I don’t know whether the DRM was a mistake or not. And frankly, neither do you. There is only one person in the world who knows, and that’s ubisofts accountant. They used DRM because they thought doing so would make them more money. My own investigations suggest that it won’t, but their audience is not my audience. their budget is not my budget, and only they can see their figures. It may well make sense for them. Sure, a lot of ANGRY INTERNET MEN will post in 400+ comment threads about how they were ‘ass-raped by the stalinist scumbags’ at ubisoft, but 400 people are a drop in the ocean when it comes to the market size for AAA games.
Anyway…
The reason they did this is because piracy on the PC is a big problem. For EVERYONE. Gamers and developers alike. Just before posting this, I typed ‘gratuitous space battles’ into google, and saw two of the most popular searches are for ‘torrent’ and ‘rapidshare’. Thanks guys, you are the reason DRM exists. May I recommend the free demo?
Pirating COD 4 makes more sense than pirating a submarine sim. How many other sub sims are there if ubisoft throw their hands in the air and kill the franchise?

Anyway…
I may not know if the DRM was a mistake, but I’m pretty sure they made another one. A big one.

I am 40 years old. I am a hardcore gamer. I have some disposable income. I’ve read about the silent hunter games for years but not bought one yet. I’ve watched a youtube video that makes the game look cool. I am a world war II nut, who recently read churchills account of the war in the atlantic…

I AM DEFINITELY IN THE TARGET MARKET FOR SILENT HUNTER.

And yet I haven’t bought the game yet. Why?
Not the DRM, I’m online all the time, don’t resell my games as a rule, and don’t get too annoyed by it. Why then?
There is no demo

How the fuck do ubisoft think I’m going to know if I’ll like the game when…
1) All discussion of the game online is polluted by arguments about DRM and
2) There is no way to demo the game.

*Sigh*.

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Hello ubisoft, how are you? It appears from this:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=235290&site=pcg

That you are making DRM in your new game (Assassins creed 2) even more inconvenient for paying customers than before. Apparently if your net connection drops slightly, you will get kicked out of the game.

This is madness. Have you not heard that DRM is actually unpopular with paying customers? As a gesture of goodwill, I offer you the most exhaustive consultation on the causes of piracy ever done.

The conclusion is that DRM == net loss in terms of sales. Maybe one day there is flawless, transparent DRM, but that day is not today, and this is not it.

I am not some pirate at slashdot or digg telling you this, but a game developer who makes his living from copyright, and who strongly, passionately, fiercely opposes and hates piracy. DRM like this does not work, and it’s silly to keep using it. Please do not do this to PC gamers.

That is all.

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I did a pre-recorded interview for Canadian radio today. The show is question is this one:

http://www.cbc.ca/spark/

Because it’s a big proper national radio station, they wanted decent quality, so I had to go to the nearest radio studio which turned out to be the historic city of Bath, set for many a Jane Austen novel, and home of lovely bath stone, used for practically every house around here. It also meant having lunch in ye famous Bath Pump Rooms, a very old (1789) building, which just goes to show the elegance, care and grandeur with which people built everything back then. These days we build featureless glass boxes. Bah.

The show itself was quite good fun, I did feel a bit like frasier crane sat in front of a microphone with a light on the wall saying ‘on air’ (although it was pre-recorded). The show was about piracy, and involved me because of this blog post. I’m fine with doing that, but it’s a bit frustrating to be ‘the piracy guy’, just because I’m open about discussing it. There are a ton of hot topics in games I’d love to talk about, the mis-management of projects, development costs, sexism in games, game violence, game pricing, blah blah. Maybe next time

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I had two people from the Spanish BBC website at my house this morning to interview me for a thing on digital piracy. It’s pretty cool to be interviewed at all, but it’s unfortunate that it’s about piracy. It all comes from the ‘talking with pirates’ blog event from last year. I don’t really want to be seen as ‘the piracy guy’. I’d much rather talk about game design, or other issues within the industry. They filmed an interview with me, and took some shaky cam footage of GSB. If it goes on-line I’ll post a link here. Maybe I’ll be dubbed in Spanish?

I saw the new star trek film 2 nights ago, and it was weird seeing tons of spaceship debris and escape pods. it’s like they have been playing my game Yet more inspiration to make the GSB visuals look good…

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A recent (censored) blog comment:

is your anti-3D rant cos you’re shit at it and can’t code it very well?
most of the time coders who knock 3D struggle with the maths, if that’s you just be honest and say so.

–> Actually I was top in my entire school for maths, took my maths O level* a year early and got an A, with a perfect 100% score in my mock exam, then did pure economics at the London School of Economics. I can do sums thanks

*before you were born.

clearly as you’re just a one-man-band you struggle to hold a candle to a big 3D development so you resort to knocking them.

–>Absolutely, my game plan is to try and bask in the candlelight of big 3D games, You caught me out kid.

“Game designers need to get over the 3D obsession and make more considered design decisions” – Translation: I’m crap at 3D, I can’t do it very well, 2D is about my limit. I’m going to try to pass of my inability as an “considered design decision” YES! That’s it! I’m not crap! I choose to be crap, it’s consideration. Excellent, that fooled them.

–> Yup, 2D is my mental limit. That’s why I make diner dash clones in Blitz Basic, not original simulation games based on neural networks. Again, well spotted!

is the expression “considered design decision” the self-important ramblings of pretentious cXXt? I think yes to all of these!

–> Maybe I am pretentious, but I’m not pointlessly abusive. I know which I’d rather be thanks…

I’m glad you get your games pirated you cXXt. The more they get seeded on torrents the better. Now fXXk off with your silly public polls and asking the public why they pirate your shit. I don’t know why anyone would want to pirate your games anyway, they’re all shit nobody’s heard of.

–> Someone REALLY needs to get laid.

Also, why do you advertize yourself as from “England” is that american friendly? Isn’t your country of origin Britain or the UK? What’s this “England” shit? You’ll be saying London, England next you prententious cXXt. fXXk off and die Cliff.

–> I was born in England. You may disagree, but judging by your ramblings, it was about twenty years before you were born, so I hardly think you have evidence to the contrary. BTW advertise is spelt with an ’s’ here in ‘England’. Also, at least learn to spell pretentious, otherwise you look foolish.

I enjoyed that
EDIT: I’ve decided to post the retards later comments so people can see the shit I put up with just for trying to make indie strategy games and stop them being pirated. This is the mentality of the kiddies who are into ‘the warez community’. read and laugh. It amuses me to know none of them will ever get a decent job, because any employers with a brain cell would run a mile from employing people with such an abusive attitude combined with a sense of total entitlement for zero effort.

Enjoy *your* jobseekers allowance kiddies. My taxes pay for it.

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