Category: business

I NEED HELP.

Or to put it more accurately, me and Jeff need help. We are showing off Production Line at EGX, the trade show in Birmingham UK on these dates:

20-23rd September 2018.

Its a big show, the UKs biggest by far, and has a ton of stuff showing there, including production Line (wahey!). We have a little booth with 2 PCs, and have to man it all day for 4 days. I cannot even be there the first day because I have such an amazingly busy social life, but will be there the remaining 3, as will my padawan Jeff (of Democracy 3:Africa coding fame).

The trouble is:    I HATE MANNING A BOOTH. Because I’m far too introverted, but I know I have to ‘be there’ to talk to people now and then, so I tend to be there ‘a bit’ and then wander off and seek solace in dark corners to muse on the existential pointlessness of it all. because we always need one person at the booth, and even Jeff has to eat and get coffee and lie down now and then, we need someone to come help us out part time. Is this you?

Ideal candidate would be 18+, an indie developer themselves who lives in Birmingham and would like to go to EGX for free, plus earn some moneys. (probably not a sack of money, maybe a small bag?). Obviously you have to be available on the dates given. The show is from 10am-6pm every day apart from Friday and Saturday when its 7PM. I dont need someone every day for the whole day, we can work out some rota where one or more of us slink off early or start late each day. I never need 3 people at the booth, frankly I only NEED one, but will often have two.

What I need you to do:

Just *be* at the booth, and keep an eye on it, make sure nobody swipes my cool miniature car and robot arms, and that if the PCs crash, or the games crash, reboot the PC/restart the game. I will give you a free copy of the game which you need to play for a good few hours before the show so you can answer any really basic questions people have. If press show up and need me, and somehow neither me or Jeff are there, you need to phone or email me or give them my details. Its not exactly hard work, by any stretch, and it gives you plenty of free time to wander around the show and see cool stuff. Also if you are an indie dev who has not manned a booth before, its a great way to see what its like at somebody else’s expense.

YOU NEED TO BE ABLE TO GET TO/FROM THE SHOW EACH DAY. In practice, you need to be living close to Birmingham. The NEC is REALLY easy to get to, and its not in central Birmingham. Obviously you need to be a nice person, and happy to talk nicely to the general public who may approach you and ask for help. I genuinely dont give a fuck what your gender/age/height/race/shoe size is. Ideally you look more motivated than this guy:

IS THIS YOU?

If so, can you email me at cliff At positech dot co dot uk, and tell me a bit about yourself, and how many of my vast list of criteria you meet?

THANKS :D

 

I have a superpower, which is effectively useless. I may have mentioned it before. I have an uncanny, even seemingly impossible ability to memorize dialogue from TV shows and movies, even if I’ve only seen them once, depending on the style of the show. Sometimes its even from shows I just overhear and don’t watch. Its strange. A line of dialogue that comes to mind to me today is this, said by Toby in the west wing:

I asked him about his vote, he told me, I said then if he's asked about it
tonight he
should and only because it's the easiest thing to remember, tell the truth.

 

I like this quote, and I like to broaden it out to a general principle, which is, if you want to make life easy for yourself, you should, because it’s the easiest thing to do, be yourself. I think this applies pretty strongly to social media.

I was chatting to a dev recently about social media profiles, and what you should put on there in terms of your Bio, and whether you should admit to this, or highlight that… and it got me thinking about the fact that I never really bother spending too much time thinking about this sort of thing. The ONLY exception I make, and the only situation where I edit myself, or pay any attention to what I’m sharing or talking about, is that although I’m married, I don’t mention my wife a lot on social media, because I do not feel like I have the right to include her in any public discussion without explicitly asking her. Its generally good form to let people stay in control of their own privacy. I also dont make that many references to exactly where I live…because there are crazy maniacs out there, so why risk it?

But in terms of everything else, I’m pretty much ‘me’ on social media, and I thus tend to ‘enjoy’ it more than many other game devs I talk to. I do *not* spend a lot of time thinking about ‘what to tweet’ or ‘what I should write a blog post about’. My twitter and my blog are basically my diary, and my chats in bars with buddies. I’m not writing the Gettysburg address here, and I dont think what I type here will accelerate or destroy my career in a single paragraph.

There is a brilliant ‘German living in England’ comedian called Henning wehn, who makes a whole career out of affectionately mocking his own Germanness, and he has a great line, which I find very funny, and if you don’t see that its funny, I think you might be taking it the wrong way:

“I’m just one accidental holocaust denial away from ruining my career”.

Which if anything is mocking people who cant see that they are being offensive, whilst also giving a nod to the English view of Germans. He also has a lot of jokes about stalingrad, I’ve seen him live twice, he is awesome.

Anyway…

My point is, you ARE NOT going to lose half of your steam revenue because you say something mildly controversial on twitter, or because you admit that you enjoy a certain band, or comedian, or that you eat meat, or you are gay, or bisexual, or trans, or black, or white, or anything else. 99% of your customers don’t follow you on twitter, and 99% of those who do follow you because you make games/art/whatever. If you are a republican, or Christian, or communist, or animal rights activist, then fine, thats part of YOU, thats the honest YOU. Unless your hobbies include serial killing you are unlikely to shock people with revealing the true you, so go ahead and do so, its incredibly liberating. Plus people are easily blocked and muted on twitter anyway.

I do all of my weekly blog videos in one take, unless something catastrophic goes wrong. I’m not going to go back and edit out things I said that were dumb, or if I swear, or I make an unfunny joke, or I screw my face up and look baffled. I am an unfunny dumb guy who often looks baffled and forgets what he started talking about, and letting me do that on video makes video recording a breeze.

And yes, a non-trivial proportion of my twitter posts are made after a drink or two (especially the really bad ones). I still (sort of) remember this night:

omg swords..haggis,,,wine…wshikey.,…si=o uc fluippingalcohola nd dancinf, Its burns night, boody ehekkl Ive ne er bebe so drunk,

— cliffski (@cliffski) January 22, 2016

..and hey, thats fine. This is what I’m like, and I think people prefer to really know someone is a real person rather than just a stream of PR fluff like:

“We at positech are so excited to have #ProductionLine in this years #SummerSale. Its our most popular SKU, going forwards.”

Who cares?

And I don’t think it really matters to have some politics in your social media. I don’t hide mine. I’m a liberal-minded capitalist with a passion for environmental issues. I’m sat here typing this wearing a Greenpeace t-shirt and not afraid to say so. You might hate my views on tax, or dislike Greenpeace, or think I swear too much, or be shocked I’m an atheist. Thats cool. everyone’s different, but it makes little difference to whether or not you will enjoy playing production Line, and I’d rather be honest about who I was than spend half my life trying to play a bland inoffensive ‘role’ to add 0.1% to my income.

Be yourself, its not as stressful as trying to be something else.

Not me…hahaha! I wish. My company is now twenty years old. That isn’t twenty straight years of indie game development with no breaks, but its twenty years of existence. Our first ‘real’ game was ‘asteroid miner’ which was released around 1998 and looked like this:

You cant even buy it now, it used directx5 and doesn’t work on many PCs. It was ok, but kinda sucky by today’s standards. Multiplayer asteroids with mining, basically. I did the art myself. Impressive huh? It sold a few copies in shareware, and then it got bundled into a collection by a retail company called egames. After that I made a game called StarLines INC, which eventually got renamed Starship Tycoon, and got revamped and improved graphics. I think I actually used some paid art for that one. it did much better, and it looked like this:

I still like the idea for the game. maybe when i retire I’ll do a re-make?

I then got distracted by doing some really bad top down racing games called Kombat Kars and Rocky racers, I even made a minesweeper clone, and some space shooty things called Space Battle 3001, and Saucer Attack. Not long after all that I think is when I ended up working at Elixir, then left there and made ‘Planetary Defense’ which looked quite reasonable:

Then I got a job at Lionhead. I think by this time I’d already made Democracy 1. I quit lionhead, and made Democracy 2, and Also Kudos and Kudos 2. These started making proper money, to the extent that I didn’t vaguely regret leaving my job. I then made Gratuitous Space Battles:

Which was a big hit, my first game on steam, my first game to earn a million dollars. Then came Gratuitous Tank Battles and GSB2, and the publishing of redshirt, my first 3rd party game. At roughly this time I made Democracy 3, which was an insane hit and also made millions of dollars, and not that long after that I think I published Big Pharma (I think this was the third million dollar selling game), then came Shadowhand and Political Animals, and Democracy 3 Africa (The first game where I employed someone to write code)

Along the way we have twice donated a chunk of earnings to war child and built two schools in Cameroon. Positech has made a profit every year and made enough to live on since Gratuitous Space Battles, which I guess is quite an unusual feat. I’ve avoided growing the company at the rate at which most people would. At one point I was developing (coding one game) managing the coding of another and publishing two others, all without any help on the admin side, and that was too much for me. Unless I was to hire a personal assistant or someone similar, I’d never be able to scale to that many games at once again.

So now in 2018 my focus is on first-party games (not publishing). We are developing one game (Production Line) and there is another game that will be announced once there is something to show. I have a full time coder working on that project. In terms of people management and time-management and project management I guess I’ve learned the following things:

1) At a certain level, time really is money. I’ll pay very high amounts of money for software or services that save me time. I’ll also not waste any time. Unless you are Gabe Newell, or someone who I KNOW is going to earn me lots of money if I talk to them, I’m never going to ‘hop on a call’ or ‘catch up’ with someone for ‘networking’ purposes. I’ll not schedule a meeting with any company whose business I haven’t already skimmed by an emailed proposal. I pay people to clean my car and my windows, because the opportunity cost of me doing is > the cost of hiring someone.

2) Dealing with people is the most stressful part of expansion or development or project management. No technical bug, hardware issue or monetary/scheduling problem is anywhere near as tricky as dealing with humans with emotions. I’m a bit ‘on the spectrum’ and not good at dealing with people anyway, let alone people I’m paying money to. I’d hire someone I could get along with with an average skillset over someone who is a pain in the ass but with l33t skillz.

3) You have to speculate to accumulate. its a cliche because its true.

4) Don’t feel bad about just saying ‘no’.

5) Some things that make money just aren’t worth the hassle to make that money. This includes porting a strategy game form PC to ipad, or…linux in any of its forms. If you prot games ‘for fun’, thats different, but I don’t.

6) Unicode is hell.

Two things I’ve managed to do that effectively grow my company but don’t require me to hire people is to invest the income, and to spend on advertising. I can double my ad budget with a mouse click, whereas doubling my games dev output requires interviewing hiring and managing another person. I know which is easiest. Over the years, Positech has invested in other indie games (in a hands-off capacity), Solar & Wind farms, tidal energy projects, a number of US tech stocks and ETFs/Funds, some commodity ETFS, UK & global equities, P2P lending to both businesses and individuals and corporate bonds. I even dabled in shorts and leveraged investments, even did some day trading of CFDs. This has gone on long enough that right now its fair to say that Positech is 80% Game Development, 20% investment vehicle. I enjoy picking stocks and shares and average 10% return per year, over the last 4 years, which is pretty good.

Its been a good twenty years so far. I’m happier as a person, and definitely calmer, and work just as hard as before. The industry has changed beyond all recognition, but its definitely possible to make a good (even great) living from indie games if you do the right things and make the right decisions and work like crazy.  UK retirement age is currently 67 but probably 70 by the time I retire, so I am likely only half way there.

Yikes.