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

Category: business

Bad online habits from companies…

I’ve encountered some amazingly silly behavior from online advertising companies recently. The first one, which I’ve spent lots of money with over the years  (for anonymity, lets called them ‘schoozle’), lets me place new image adverts, and then sticks them in a queue where they ‘pend approval’. This goes on for 3 days (or more, they are still waiting). That means that I can’t actually spend any money with them, so I am forced in the meantime to spend it with their competitors.
Imagine going to a hi-fi store and selecting an ipod, you take it to the checkout, where they say “with you in a minute”. They then leave you waiting there with your wallet open for 3 days. Do you think such a business will last long?

The second (and this applies to about half a dozen ad agencies) will not actually show me their prices, or what sites they offer ads on. Presumably I get to know this after they force me to ‘register’. During registration, they want to know what site or product I’m advertising, and what my monthly budget is. Presumably, if they think I’m worthy of giving them money, they may email me.
Imagine the hi-fi store has windows but they are blacked out. You have no idea if they even sell ipods. A security guard at the door tells you how great the store is, but demands to see your bank balance and know your home address before you are allowed to come in and look at the products on sale. That won’t be today, but at a time when they decide to review your application to be their customer.
Do you think such a business will last long?

For those of you thinking “‘duh’, it’s to keep out the cheapskates and the riff raff”, you are missing a trick. The simple phrase “Regrettably we currently can only cater to customers with an ad budget of over $10k / month” would keep everyone happy. They don’t get registrations from people they don’t want, they don’t insult potential future clients whose ad budgets may shoot up, and they don’t get a reputation for being assholes.

Smart companies always want to know if and how and why and when they might lose business. If people ever email me to tell me why they did *not* buy or could not buy my games, I may not always reply, but I always read them, and I often act on them. I’m not sure you ever get rich by learning how to turn people away.

Penny Arcade Traffic

In case you missed it, GSB got mentioned on penny-arcade, which was awesome. It also brings in some decent web traffic, and I reckon generated about 100 sales (no way to be 100% sure). This is all very welcome indeed, it helps feed jack and jadzia, and as an afterthought, me. Here is the blatant stats-porn: (filtered by penny-arcade as a referrer, so the graph spike isn’t relative to my normal traffic!)

I’m working on more interesting spatial anomalies for the game today, and tomorrow (at least) That will involve rejigging some fleets, some balancing etc.

How complex?

How complex should a game be? Obviously it’s a huge question dependent heavily on genre. Most simulation games are pretty complex. Turn based strategy can be uber complex, MMOs too. Flash games are often very simple and iphone games can be simpler still. Is it a question you can even attempt an answer to?

I think an interesting take on it, is “what are you asking?”. Too complex can mean two things:

“This game is too complex to enjoy”

“This game looks too complex. I’ll pass”

Similarly:

“This game is very simple”

“This game is too simple to be worth buying”

There are loads of games out there I might find fun, that I would not buy. There are also games out there that look awesome, and incredible, and wonderful, and I would not buy them either, and it comes down to complexity.

Take a game where you make a single mouse click to time a guy swinging a bat to hit a ball (there are many, some involve penguins). As a web-based flash game, this can be fun. You might even waste a whole lunchtime on it. But ultimately it’s throwaway disposable fun that we all know someone coded in a weekend. It’s very unlikley you would pay more than $0.99 for it at the very very very most.

Now, Take Eve online, or any of those Hex Based wargames. Or, take Empire: Total War. These are all great, awesome games, with TONS of stuff to do, incredible depth and complexity, but tbh, life is just too short for me to play them. I played eve for years, playing an hour a day or more, and never more than scratched the surface. I never got far into 0.0 space. In E:TW, I played ONE campaign game a third of the way through, then gave up. It was taking ages, and there was too much to do.

The weird thing, is not only are games like that more complex than they need to be in order to get a sale from me, their complexity actually has a negative impact on my chances of buying. Even though I know it’s irrational, I am put off buying them because I’d actually resent having paid for content I’ll never see or use. (ironically I do own E:TW anyway, but I’m aware of my own niggling feeling about it).

I’m probably not alone. I think almost everyone has a ‘complexity’ curve for games that influences their purchase decision. We all regard some games as too trivial or simplistic to buy, and some are too overcomplex and involved to buy. Obviously mass market games need to be in the sweet spot at the top of the aggregate curve. Niche developers like me can cater to the other extremes, and GSB possibly heads slightly towards ‘too complex’ rather than the opposite.

What I find a lot of game devs forget is that a game can be fun, enjoyable, playable and cool, and well made, and addictive and generally excellent, but a LOT of people will play the demo and never buy it, because they resent buying a game that seems like it’s too simple in form.

Are you one of those people, or is it just me?

Trial By Fire. And Bugs…

I did mention it was a beta didn’t I?
Actually people have been VERY understanding, given all the bugs that leapt out of the woodwork the nanosecond I put this pre-order link up. As expected, its a combination of hardware-related crashes I can’t re-produce (The menu battle bug, the sound crashes) and just UI things that I never thought to check (submitting a blank serial code, deleting every ship, fielding ships with zero modules…)
I’ve fixed a bunch of stuff, the real urgent ones, and released a patch, and hopefully my auto-patcher will automatically update everybody. As of this morning, the game is much more stable and playable.

But

There are a TON of things I need to improve in terms of UI, to get the game more usable. I was amazed to discover so many people prefer mousewheel zoom to be reversed to the way I like it, but that’s an easy fix. I have to totally re-code a lot of Ui stuff (ship hull browser, challenge browser) to make them more usable.
And I’m going to crack on with that passionately, because only when all that is done do I get to do the real fun stuff, which will be the reacting to balance and gameplay issues, ‘stacking’ of ships, better AI orders for the crews etc.
I’m overwhelmed with the feedback from everyone and pleased that people seem willing to put up with a few days of crap in order to get a polished game. My priority this morning is the sound-related crash.
I’m working on it!

Theres is always something I forget…

The problem with being a lone developer is there is nobody else to cross-check stuff with. Tomorrow I’ll be putting GSB up on pre-order and beta download, so real paying gamers are going to play it for the first time.
I’m pretty sure I have everything covered. I have the final code working and tested, the website pages are ready to upload. My trusty proof-reader is proof-reading the manual, the payment stuff is all set up. The database has been cleared out of my test challenges…
There is always something that gets missed. I’ll realize it 10 seconds after the first person buys it and sends me an email saying “hey cliff…”

At least I haven’t pressed 5,000 CDs like you would have done in ye olde days. I’m sure a patch will be released in the first week with big fixes and updates. Even if there isn’t a single bug, I’ll be adding new and better graphics for some of the bits I’m not happy with.

I’ve never been this nervous about releasing a game before, despite the fact that I think this is my best game. It comes right at the tail end of sales from my last games, in the middle of a games price-war and a global recession, with me about to move house and suddenly we are 100% dependent on games money to pay the bills. Added to this is the fact that this game probably appeals (at first glance) to the more piracy-prone slice of gamers, which can’t help. The trouble is, I’ve never been able to make games that aren’t exactly 100% what I want to play. I could have made 3 or four diner dash or zuma clones instead of GSB, but I’d just be depressed doing it, even though I’m pretty sure I’d have made a more reliable income that way. People I know who do that are doing very well out of it.

It’s a bit weird (and scary) to think that my ability to buy food next month is dependent on whether people think I’ve balanced the ranges of fusion beams and multi-warhead missiles correctly.