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

Category: business

Touchscreens and deep strategy games

Don’t panic just yet. Stay calm. But we might…we just might be in trouble.

Apples market share seems to be climbing quite unstoppably. PC sales are sluggish, tablet sales are booming. Whether the future belongs to apple or samsung, it does look like a big chunk of the future may be on tablets. Even my famously non tech-savvy gaming buddy, when told I’d been playing a ‘new’ game (portal 2) asked me immediately if he could play it on his ipad. Not his PC, his ipad.

We might be in trouble.

Ipads are perfectly good for gaming. I’ve wasted a good few hours on fieldrunners. I know some people live and die by their ipads. I think it’s a perfectly good platform. The trouble is, there is an absolutely perfect match between all the downsides of tablets, and all the demands of deep hardcore strategy gaming.

If you had to list tablet downsides as a developer, I reckon they would be small screen size, low memory, no right-click and no mouse hover. For the kind of games I make ALL of these things are a real pain. I *rely* on tooltips. I think they are awesome. I LOVE right-click menus, they are such a handy bit of functionality. And I like deep, complex games with a lot of information on the screen and a big hefty simulation that gobbles a lot of RAM.

Democracy 3, at the start of a new game has 156,000 neural connections in memory. Am I going to fit that on an ipad or an ipad 2? I doubt it. Now I know there are workarounds, some cunning retooling of GUI’s can have alternatives for tooltips and right clicks, but regardless how ‘retina’ the screens get, we aren’t looking at a 20 inch or 24 inch monitor any more, we aren’t able to assume near-pixel perfect mouse selection, and we aren’t about to get 2 gig or 4 gig of RAM in a tablet any time soon.

So that means taking a perfectly good strategy game design, which frankly any modern PC can cope with with one hand tied behind it’s back, and squeezing and compromising and squashing it to fit onto a tablet. Obviously, I don’t want to do that. Obviously, I’m not going to do that. I’m a PC gamer, through-and-through. If I wanted to compromise a PC game design because of a console, I’d go work for EA. Ahahahahahaha….

Anyway… I do worry the more tablet computers get popular. I know I’ll inevitably have to take the idea of tablet ports much more seriously in future, and I can’t help but feel that I may end up looking back at the days of windows dominance as the easy times. Maybe if I simply stick with PC-centric strategy gaming, I can carve out a big gap in an otherwise abandoned niche?

Just because you CAN do everything…

I have had a few discussions with friends lately about the merits or not of me doing certain stuff myself, or getting (paying) other people to do it. When you are an indie developer, you essentially have four choices when it comes to a particular aspect of your business (for example, managing advertising).

  • Do it yourself
  • Pay someone else to do it on contract/ad-hoc basis
  • Partner with someone else to do it
  • Employ someone

I rule out the last one, because I work from home, and having an actual employee with pensions and national insurance and not easily dismissed and all that sounds like huge hassle (thanks government!) so I am left with the first three. I used to always do everything myself, then I made a transition to the second and third options for stuff like art and music, where the end results were much better than anything I could have done myself. I am currently wrestling with the problem of what to do with stuff I *could* do myself, but am too busy to do.

Take, for example, the idea of porting games to new platforms/devices. I *could* learn to do this myself. I’m clearly not *that* bad a programmer, and I’m sure I could learn OpenGL/Mac/Linux/Smartphone stuff/HTML5, etc and spend the next year just porting my next game to all those different environments. The question is, is that a good use of my time?

cat_types

If you aren’t familiar with the terms ‘opportunity cost’ and ‘comparative advantage’, you should google them right now. They are fascinating concepts, that you learn in economics, but are applicable to almost everything. I still remember being amazed at LSE when I learned that country A can be better than country B at producing absolutely EVERYTHING that country A or B makes, and yet still there is benefit to the two countries trading. Look it up :D

Anyway… to get back on topic, I think there is a natural tendency amongst indies to only outsource/contract out work that they ‘cannot’ do, rather than do the maths and accept that there is stuff you *could* be doing, but it makes more sense to do something else, which earns enough to pay someone else to do that stuff for you. We do this in our daily lives. I *could* wash the car, or I could pay a robot to do that. I *could* learn how internal combustion engines work, but I pay a mechanic to fix the car. I think you should apply the same logic to game development.

So I won’t be doing the last one on the list, or the first, but I still need to work out the right combination of the middle two for any new stuff I take on. These decisions are never easy…

Blog woes…of a minor kind, and trouble with RSS

So… I have better things to do then muck around with RSS, but it seems the gods of the internet do not want to hear that…. Anyway, there is a spanking new update to the positech games website coming (it may even be here as you read this…and the link is www.positech.co.uk you might need to shift+refresh to see it). The site now includes blog snippets using RSS, which isn’t as easy as you’d think in 2013. With all this talk of going to mars, you’d think it would be something you could just plonk in an html tag like <rss> now, but oh noes…

You need to use javascript to do it, so there is a javascript plugin, which itself uses another plugin, which itself uses some library or other, and all of this has to connect to the third party service which is feedburner. Now that’s fine, because feedburner is free but… it’s owned by google who apparently have lost interest in fixing it’s many bugs (it doesn’t seem to want to update it’s grab of my feed at all today. yay! and the contact email link is dead. yay!).

More details:

http://www.feedblitz.com/feedburner-shut-down-the-facts-and-tales-from-the-front-line/

I wish google would just be honest and tell people they are going to close a service, or maybe even charge for it, but to just let it fall apart is kinda shabby. It is is a blot on an otherwise reasonably productive day implementing the new homepage stuff.

Gratuitous Space Battles FREE weekend on steam

…has now started. behold:

gsb_free

I could (and probably will) talk at length about the reasoning behind doing this, from a business POV. Suffice it to say for now, that there are always people who are skeptical of buying a game based on reviews, or a demo, and feel they need to play the whole game properly before they can commit to buying it. I guess this is the appeal of pay-what-you-want in some ways (I guess retrospectively…) and also FreeToPlay games. Never let it be said that cliffski is an old man afraid of trying new things :D

If you don’t know what I’m talking about here, Gratuitous Space Battles is my best-known game. It’s a space strategy/management game, that in some ways is like football-manager with space fleets, and in some ways it’s a puzzle games, and in some ways it’s an RTS. You can control the ships mid battle these days, by the way. The game has sold VERY well for a small indie, and won awards and stuff. You can check it out for free this weekend on steam (and there is a nice tasty discount to tempt you too).

So as to show off some of the latest shininess, here is the video for the last GSB expansion pack: The outcasts again… PLEASE TELL EVERYONE ABOUT THIS FREE WEEKEND!

Website revamp(s) incoming

It never rains but it pours. Tons of stuff that I’ve been lining up for aggggeeesss is all about to happen at once. In the not too distant future, there will be a new look not only for Positech’s home page, but also this blog. I know both sites look a bit rubbish. They are one step away from someone’s geocities homepage. It’s a bit sad really…

For a self-confessed business and stats-junkie like me, this brings painful confessions, because there is no easy way for me to be able to say in six months that ‘getting my websites redesigned gave me a ROI of 14.23% due to the increased sales thanks to the pro-look of the site’. Nobody ever emails you to say they had considered buying Democracy 2, but only decided to do it once the background graphics of my blog looked more professional. There is no way to quantify this stuff except by gut feeling.

The best way I can look at it is to say ‘I make $X. I should spend $Y of that on making sure my company store front looks good, and is well promoted’. It seems to be working so far.

In actual gamedev-related news, work continues on Democracy 3. I have been working on a much better financial model for government debt. In the old game, it was rubbish because you just accrued more and more debt at a fixed interest rate, and it it went beyond a fixed debt-ceiling, you got thrown out of office immediately and the game ended. That was partly because back when Democracy 2 was made, the idea that any western government could even get close to defaulting on their debt, even enough to seriously affect the interest rate for their debt…was laughable.

OH HOW THINGS CHANGE…

Democracy 3 will be much cooler. There is an equation that relates the level of debt to GDP of a country to the ‘riskiness’ of it’s debt as perceived by the bond market. This gets assessed behind the scenes and the countries credit rating is calculated. If it drops, there is a short term ‘shock’ effect on the market, as well as a rise in interest rates. It’s all rather cool :D That means that the finance page for the game can now show you the global economy in a graph, along with the current debt interest rate and credit rating, and debt/GDP ratio. GDP in this case is kinda fudged (it’s a fixed range, which is multiplied by the GDP value from the game), but it all works pretty well, and is a huge improvement.