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

Category: big pharma

JOURNALISTS..COME TO US…COME TO US….

Ok, this is my last day of peace and quiet amongst the fields and the cows and the sheep and the gentle tweeting of birds and clip-clop of horses. The next five days are one of BANG BANG BOOF-BOOF_WAH-WAH-ARGGGH. Or as most of it’s inhabitants refer to it ‘London’.

See what I did there? I subverted the conversational expectation for comedic effect. I’m wasted in games. Anyway…

Positech Games will be at the Eurogamer show, the big loud games Expo in Earls Court where gamers pay money to see early builds of games that developers have paid money to show to them. There is a discrepancy here somewhere…. Anyway, we have TWO yes count them TWO games at the show. On is the game we developed ourselves, called
Gratuitous Space Battles 2 and it looks like this:

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The other is developed by a third party developer and we are publishing it. It’s a strategy/tycoon/sim game called ‘Big Pharma‘ and it looks like this:

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Both games are on the show floor playable by press and public alike. GSB is not quite alpha. Big Pharma is very early, but both are worth your time to check out. Me and Tim (BP designer) will be there all four days. You do *not* need an appointment to come play the game or interview us, or ask us questions or anything like that. We will be there, just come say hello. You don’t have to be someone amazingly super-famous like Alec Meer to ask us for an interview, we will talk to anyone, even if you just have a blog with a dozen readers or a youtube channel with 10 subscribers. It must be ten though, none of you 9-subscriber losers.

We are not frightening or intimidating, we are like tigers, we are probably more scared of you than you are of us. We sit in dark rooms all day hitting keyboards, this is scary scary time.

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Please come along, get a free badges or two and a free leaflet. Ours are glossy!

 

Announcing Big Pharma – The pharmaceutical strategy game

Regular blog readers might know that I published a game by a third party indie developer called The Tiniest Shark which produced Redshirt, the sci-fi comedy social-networking life sim game, which you can buy HERE. I enjoyed taking on the role of indie publisher, for all kinds of reasons I’ve talked about before. And lo, so it came to be that I was pitched another indie game that I’d love to see made, and it’s called Big Pharma…

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Big Pharma is being developed by another UK studio called Twice Circled, and designed and coded by Tim Wicksteed, whose blog you will find here. We also have a bare-bones facebook page for now for the game here and an actual website for it (with some very early images) here. In terms of genre, it’s a strategy game based on running a large pharmaceutical company, that is part biz-sim, part isometric factory/lab building sim, and it looks like this…

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I LOVE the design and idea behind big pharma. I want to play it right now. It scratches that itch you get from games like Anno 2070 about laying out production lines, without having to use uplay or wait 40 minutes for the game to load. It’s also a proper biz/management game, which is obviously right up my street. It *is* quite early to be announcing this game, by positech standards. We normally wait much later, but the reason to announce now is that YOU CAN PLAY IT if you come down to the Eurogamer expo in London this coming weekend. Big Pharma will be there, alongside Gratuitous Space Battles 2.

So journalists…come…be our friends. We will shake your hands and talk enthusiastically about both games. You can have a go, and ask us questions. Big Pharma is NEW, nobody has played it yet, or heard about. Come and be the first to tweet/blog/write novels about your impressions of it. We dare you! And obviously come play Gratuitous Space Battles 2 as well. It is a sequel, but it has spaceships exploding, so swings and roundabouts…Plus we will have badges. Actual proper badges.

Me and Tim will be at the show all four days, so no need to book a time or anything. We will be in the indie area near prison architect. Oh, and if you like the look of Big Pharma, pls like it on facebook so we don’t feel lonely there…