Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: big pharma

Big Pharma update, GSB2 Trading Cards

Lots going on. Its good fun when you have two games in production, you get more stuff happening each day. Anyway… GSB2 is getting steam trading cards. I really enjoy getting art done for this stuff. here is a preview montage of some of it.

montage

Plus I’m working on adding web high score tables for every mission, so you can compete to win with the smallest fleet. Its a work in progress, but so far the empty scores table is here.

Plus big pharma is coming along. There is a nice preview of the game here, on Rock Paper Shotgun. And you might want to check out Tims latest video blog:

And because you *might* have missed the new, you can grab the Democracy 3 collectors edition from steam at 50% off all this week and weekend:

discount

Even More Gratuitous than before (1.19) + Rezzed

Sooo… because making decent mac & linux ports, and translating into French German and Spanish takes so long…I’ve put back my target release date for GSB2 to …

April 16th

Which is a pain, but on the plus side it does mean that I have more time to be careful about stuff like final mission and hull balancing, optimizing and polishing and general improvements. Plus it means I’ll have steam trading cards on launch day. I’m also hoping for a simultaneous Steam/Humble/GoG launch.

With that on the horizon, today is patch day to version 1.19. what has changed I hear you cry? Here are the highlights:

1) New more helpful text displays instead of ‘no effect’ in battle.
4) Improved tabbed interface with more data for the end-battle stats.
9) Simplified system for quickly and simply posting a ship design as a steam workshop submission added after saving a ship design.

(and obviously lots of minor tweaks & fixes).

I’m hoping the one-click posting of ship designs will work, and be cool. It *might* not work for anyone but me until the game is officially steam-launched, not sure TBH.

In other news, tomorrow I head off here:

london

That’s London. Hopefully there will be less cybermen and more gamers as I will be at REZZED showing off both Gratuitous Space Battles and Big Pharma, with the help of Tim from Twice Circled. COME TRY OUR GAMES. With any luck GSB2 will have dual monitors. Plus if you have a youtube channel and want some content, come interview us. We are photogenic and literally ooze charisma. We have boxes of leaflets (mine are printed wrongly because I’m a dork, so they seem to read backwards or in some funny order. I am too busy to care),

stuff

and boxes of badges. The GSB2 ones printed weirdly, again, I’m stupid, but the Big Pharma ones are cool. Tim *may* have jelly beans.

So please come along on Thursday Friday or Saturday and enjoy the show! Also I have a new phone. I may do some exciting live-tweeting from the show floor!!!!111oneoneone.

 

 

More Crunch than crunch itself

Gah! this may be the year I dump firefox, its bugginess and post-eating crashiness is finally starting to try my patience… Anyway I am in crunch mode. I know that in theory indie devs do not crunch, but GSB2 was originally scheduled for a December 2014 release. That became January, January became February and now I am targeting the end of March. And although that sounds four weeks ago, in game-shipping terms it is only a few days of work away and this is why…

I want to be PC+Mac+Linux capable on release day and I need time for the port to be done.

I want to have *at least* French + German versions on day one and they need time to do the translations…

blog

Plus…I have a bunch of ideas/tweaks/improvements from the beta to put in *before* I declare it ready for any of that. And then… even more timing related angst because I am going to both GDC and Rezzed between now and release. MADNESS. (I have to attend both, because I’m speaking at GDC and also showing off GSB2 and Big Pharma at Rezzed…). This might work out ‘ok’ because with luck, people will be working on translations and/or mac builds whilst I’m at these things, which is at least something that can get done while I’m busy smiling at people at shows.

Anyway…

There is also some other stuff to dop, such as extra ship module graphics for variants and also steam trading card stuff. And of course a lot of testing and general QA/Polishing. Even as I type this, I’m starting to think *cliff you are nuts…it will not ship in March, FFS get a grip and let it slip a few more weeks*.

Arggh,

Anytway, if you can’t wait (and who can!) you can grab the current build of GSB2 when you pre-order-the-game here!