Category: business

EDIT EDIT EDIT

See the comments section below, plus zero-g games have contacted me to resolve the matter and send back payments of royalties. It looks like the real villains of this piece are the casual ‘portals’ who increasingly screw the developers, and guys like zZro-G out of paying on time. I should point out that steam pay within a month, so anyone who is taking a lot longer than that is just hoarding other peoples cash.

Anyway, anyone looking for something newsworthy here should probably look towards the causal games portals rather than the spat between me and zero-G.

EDIT EDIT EDIT

oooh did I really type that?

I guess I did, and it would be a disaster if a well trafficked blog became a prominent search result for the casual games publisher zero-g games wouldn’t it? But then… That’s what happens if you stop replying to your developers emails, and stop paying them, and 3 other fellow developers I’ve spoken to.

If you work for bigfish games, or any other casual portal that stock these titles:

Kudos

Kudos: Rock Legend.

You will want to check your inbox for my email. Basically you are selling a game you don’t have the rights to any more, so I strongly suggest stopping that. As for anyone who wants to buy those games. DO NOT BUY THEM, unelss you buy them direct from me, or from impulse, gamersgate or direct2drive. Everyone else is depriving me of my share, and I made those games, so that hardly seems fair.

Also if you see a game called ‘oval office’ don’t buy it. It’s a cut down bastardised, casualised, americanised version of Democracy 2, which is much much better. Buy that instead.

And lastly, to any of the many publishers who keep spamming me wanting to sell GSB or my older games, and annoyed I’m not replying. Give up now. I’m never replying, I route all your emails to the bin.

Selling direct FTW!

I love making and playing games, I hate the liars and thieves in this industry though…

So Friday was world-of-love conference day for indies. It meant waking at 5.30am and banging my head on a metal railing in the dark. Bah!

The conference itself was worth going to, met a bunch of people from indie development which was cool. Alice taylor and Sophie Houlden gave some great presentations, and tak’s talk was interesting too. I did a sudden ’10 seconds-notice’ interview with radio 4 for a program about indie games which will go out in june at some point. I hope they don’t edit me out :D I probably sounded a bit nervous, and didn’t say anything wildly controversial, but I got through it, and I’m glad I said yes to it.

I had a few of those ‘maybe I should have business cards made?’ moments, but decided maybe not. Afterwards was pub, then pizza. Just like the last world-of-love there was no room in the pub for anyone, and nobody could hear a thing. Surely there is a better way?

The bad news, is when I got home, we realised the next day some scumbag had tried to break into our garage. Very unusual, apparently they tried everyones. It’s not like where I live is high crime. They cut the lock using boltcutters, so I had to go get a new one, and then got bolts that were too short. doh! Still, you learn a few knacks as a boatbuilder, and those screws aren’t coming out in a hurry. Plus, I’ve ordered one of these. Maybe it’s time for me to invest in a night vision attachment for my bow. I already have a night vision scope, but I need both hands to shoot someone. Bah.

Also, a casual game publisher has stopped paying me my royalties. I hate publishers, they are almost all a bunch of criminals. Another lesson learned I guess, and another reason to ALWAYS sell direct to the customer if you can. Maybe they will suddenly appear and pay me, if not, they just go on my list of people to get revenge on when I rule the galaxy.

I’m going to london indie conference ‘world of love’ on friday. I’m not speaking this year, but I’ll be there. I’ll probably have a few drinks with some people afterwards too.

I know some indies just never go to stuff like this, and don’t think it’s worth the hassle. I can sympathise, I live a LONG way from London, my alarm clock will go off damned early, even if I’m only aiming to get there for 10amish, and miss the start. I have a major drive, and a tube journey ahead of me, plus the entrance fee. Bah.

But I suspect it is worth it. I know a lot of people think these are good opportunities to meet publishers etc, but I don’t really care about that. I’m already selling my games through every portal I’m interested in, do not want any retail deals, and frankly, if someone wants to work with me, they should email me. I read them all.

I don’t feel more likely to work with someone or trust them because we have ‘pressed flesh’. I’ve never met my mac partner, or the people who do my art or sound. Why do I need to? I treat such relationships as a meritocracy.

My aim is more to meet and chat to fellow developers, and share tips and horror stories and ideas and warnings about how to do what it is we do. We don’t meet up often and there is always something to say. Plus I have to tell Nicholas how wrong he is about freemium :D

If you are a UK indie developer, not sure whether it’s worth going, I humbly suggest it probably is :D

I haven’t blogged in 4 days, madness. It seems like a lot must be going on at once.

Item #1 is probably the new game, the mysteriously titled ‘GAME FOUR‘. There will, of course be more details to come in time, but currently it’s looking like I know the general theme and design, it’s just frustrating to look at crappy coder art, plus some bits stolen from GSB. The game is supposed to look jaw-droppingly awesome, and currently looks BAD. Still, I think the general principle is a good one.

Item #2 is insulation. It all started with a new light fitting for the bedroom. Electrician amusingly informed us that the bedroom ceiling is effectively made of thin air, and will not support it. No problem, we need to lift some floorboards in the attic. Damn. Floorboards are tongue and groove and tucked under the walls. Damn. Cue removal of wall panels, and excavation of several tons of straw presumably used as nest material by god knows what… arrrghhh. At least we get to put some insulation in there now. Still a work in progress…

Item #3 is ShowMeTheGames. I am working on a site redesign, plus the february ad campaign. I talked about it a bit in an interview here.

Item #4 is fighting spam on my forums. I think I’ve finally won by introducing brand new ‘hard to AI-bot-guess’ sign-up questions. Hopefully that reduces it a lot.

Item #5 is memory-footprint reduction for GSB. It sells well on the app store and I’d like to get it to run on the ipad. That means some serious memory pruning, and I’ve done some work on that. I shake my head at my wasteful, rubbish IniLoader class. that was 8MB wasted. I thing the hash table for my strings wasted a lot too, all fixed now. My main concern is that lots of per-frame STL allocation stuff might be fragmenting memory. Why isn’t it easy to just take a live snapshot-chart view of a programs memory usage, including all associated DLLs calls?

I’ve probably been doing a dozen other things too. Boring ones, like updating the copyright notices on my website. Oh Joy.