Category: business

I was chatting to Jeff from Wolfire a few weeks ago about their game overgrowth, and we started experimenting with ideas for cross-promoting our games. Since then I’ve been insanely busy, but I did get as far as putting this rather cool, and (to me) amusingly rabbit shaped spaceship (complete with Overgrowth logo) into GSB:

Why a rabbit? Well I think I should let Jeff himself describe what the rabbit connection is:

“Overgrowth takes place in the savage world of Lugaru where rabbits, wolves and other animals are forced to use paws, claws and medieval weaponry to engage each other in battle. Combining 3rd person adventure platforming with intricate melee combat, Overgrowth achieves a unique feel. Overgrowth also benefits from Wolfire’s brand new Phoenix Engine which has been built from the ground up to allow the use of cutting edge graphics, animation, and physics.”

Overgrowth certainly looks like an amazing game. I remember being impressed by the original Lugaru game, and OG looks like it will be a big hit.

The thing I find really interesting though, is the way in which our companies can do stuff like this, where we promote each others games, even stick content from one game in another, with the minimum of fuss. When I suggested we stick a rabbit ship in GSB to see how it could work, I didn’t need to get my lawyer to talk to wolfires lawyer. I didn’t need a strategic planning meeting with the head of corporate strategy, or have to justify to shareholders why we should help out what they would see as our competitors…

This is what I like about the Indie attitude.  Indie devs often share tips on game coding, getting decent contract work done, promoting websites and running forums, even the financial side of the best payment providers and who knows a decent accountant etc.

Can you imagine the head of EA giving the head of Activision tips on how to save on their bandwidth bill?

This is the indie attitude, and the indie advantage. We tend to take it for granted, because at the end of the day, me and jeff are two guys who love games and love making games. Somewhere along the line, the mainstream industry forgot that.

I had two people from the Spanish BBC website at my house this morning to interview me for a thing on digital piracy. It’s pretty cool to be interviewed at all, but it’s unfortunate that it’s about piracy. It all comes from the ‘talking with pirates’ blog event from last year. I don’t really want to be seen as ‘the piracy guy’. I’d much rather talk about game design, or other issues within the industry. They filmed an interview with me, and took some shaky cam footage of GSB. If it goes on-line I’ll post a link here. Maybe I’ll be dubbed in Spanish?

I saw the new star trek film 2 nights ago, and it was weird seeing tons of spaceship debris and escape pods. it’s like they have been playing my game :D Yet more inspiration to make the GSB visuals look good…

I’m looking into using some splines for a few things in GSB. The thing is, I need super-fast splines, which I haven’t found yet. Still… it’s my task for the day.

I’ve been reading more and more about the whole piratebay trial and peoples attitudes to it, and their attitudes to intellectual property and copyright. I’m a strong believer in IP and copyright. I’m glad they exist, because they are what enables people to make movies like Star Wars and TV series like Star Trek. I’m glad we have those things.

But increasingly it seems like it’s the ‘general consensus’ that copyright is somehow evil, and that people should have the right to copy anything they want for free. I find this really sad, because there are only two alternatives for me in the future:

1)Use some really harsh-ass DRM to try and force people to pay for the games rather than pirate them. or

2)Somehow engineer all my games so they are based around being on-line to play them, or micro-transactions.

I’ve always lied the idea of micro-transactions because I believe they give more freedom and options to both the gamer and the developer, as long as you can’t ‘buy’ an advantage in a multiplayer game. However, the idea of designing a game to be always-online annoys the fuck out of me. A lot of people have flaky web connections or game outside or on the train, and it also means I have all those people hitting my server all the time they are playing. Plus it means doing a ton of web coding I don’t especially enjoy.

Ironically, there *is* a lot of really cool ways to integrate GSB on-line, which I have at the back of my mind, and would probably do anyway if I was more familiar with web coding. Unfortunately, I’m now looking at this sort of thing as essential and inevitable because I just don’t think you are going to be able to sell singleplayer games on the PC within a  year or so. Stardock recently discovered that even original PC strategy games without DRM get pirated to oblivion, and supposedly stardock are the good guys.

I like singleplayer offline games. I just wish our friends in sweden and their pals hadn’t done such a good job at making that whole genre almost unsellable :( Nice work guys…

I often forget birthdays, things I’ve arranged to do socially, where I’m going for lunch, or what I agreed to do for someone. Why? My brain is just full. Here is some of the work related stuff I’m juggling right now

• A port of Kudos 2 to a new platform by a partner
• A translation of Democracy 2
• Artwork for GSB
• Arranging a musician for GSB
• Chasing money from a Russian Publisher
• Getting a portal to use my wire transfer details to pay me
• VAT (sales tax) return for the last quarter
• Possible use of Democracy for a magazine article
• Checking payment from a US publisher for something under NDA
• Advertising budgets
• Checking my forums to reply to tech support or similar discussions
• This blog
• Analyzing web traffic to see if some recent changes were positive or negative
• Keeping an eye on the casual games portals payment schedule so they don’t fall even further behind
• Selecting sounds for GSB
• Programming GSB

That last one is obviously the biggest, and GSB is effectively four games in one, so it’s a bit of a nightmare all on it’s own. The truly depressing thing is there is very little out of this list I could easily hand over to someone new, even if a) I could afford someone, and b) I found someone suitable.

I guess at least it’s indoor work with no heavy lifting :D