Category: business

Yeah I know…Everyone and their cats has been to GDC before, but I haven’t, partly due to distance, and partly because I prefer not to fly (for eco, not fear reasons), but it’s getting a bit ridiculous to not go any more.
The thing is I’m not really going for any specific promotional purpose this time. Democracy 3 is coming along nicely, but it’s not the sort of game that is easily shown off on a noisy show floor to a journalist who is distracted by booth babes and exploding airplanes. That isn’t to say I’ll never promote games of mine at shows, but as I’ve not been to GDC before, this is more of a social/checking it out trip than a promotional one.
There are a whole bunch of indies that I chat to online that I’ve never met, some of them might read this! and it will be cool to bump into some of them. I’m going to one big indie meetup thing on Monday night, and a meal on Tuesday night, and apart from that I’ll probably be dithering around on Monday/Tuesday wearing a gratuitous space battles t-shirt and trying to look like I fit in :D. If you see someone in a GSB t-shirt, you can probably assume it’s me.
I’m only going to be at the conference for Monday/Tuesday, I’m then heading off for five days of sightseeing somewhere with more trees and bears and less traffic. I think I’ll get the vibe of GDC in two days.
In the old days, indies would be clamoring for meetings with publishers, but in 95% of cases, they are now more trouble than they are worth. However if anyone has a good reason they want to meet up with me regarding press/pr or stuff like that, then I’ll be in San Francisco for two days, so best to contact me now if you are around.
I might even check my email daily while I’m there!

Well it should be immediately obvious to anybody reading this, that I finally got a proper design for my blog sorted out. It’s been a long time coming, and the blog gets more and more popular over the years, so I thought it was about time I invested in having a theme properly designed and implemented. I admit that I am way too busy with other stuff these days to learn the finer points of CSS and HTML, let alone javascript and flash. it makes much more sense to do what I’m good at, and use the profits from being more productive to hire someone else. That’s just good old fashioned division of labour. If I ever go the extra mile and employ people to write my blog too, you know I’ve sold out. (yes…some people DO so that…)

Quite a few indie devs write blogs these days, and I find a lot of them very interesting and readable. it surprises me that the big companies can’t see through the legal paranoia and allow their lead designers and coders to keep a regular blog. I’d love to read a blog by the lead coder or designer at Maxis. I don’t mean a once-a-month update that has been vetted by three different marketing departments and lawyers, but a real blog, with regular updates on what it’s like to do that kind of stuff.

Anyway I digress… I will have lots of very technical explanations of the inner workings of Democracy 3 coming up. if I ever start suggesting I’ll code Democracy 4, just tell me to have a lie down, and remember how involved this one was…

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?

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…

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.