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

Category: democracy3

Build Management Hell

This is part of indie life nobody warns you about. In your mind, you create a game, test it, upload it, then sit in front of windows showing the sales figures and the bug reports. That’s what happens right?

Not quite. The modern indie game, even one that is a pure-desktop (not mobile/tablet) experience can end up with a scary amount of build-management. If you are really organized and clever (clearly I’m not) you can manage it without too much stress. If you don’t plan ahead, you end up like me.

Democracy 3 has, primarily it’s ‘direct sales’ build on PC. This is the ‘master build’. It then has a separate build for steam, which is uploaded through valves tools. That’s 2 builds. Then there is a build for GoG without steams API in it. Then there is the build for the humble store. And also there is the secure copy uploaded for reviewers. That’s five builds. That’s no problem. Then each of those has a mac and a linux build. Ouch, that’s 15 builds now. This is a pain, but doable. Then it gets translated into French and German. Ok, that means 45 builds now. Yeah, 45 builds.

No big deal right? But don’t forget each one is about 40-50MB in size. That’s 2 gigabytes. No big deal? Try uploading that with 45k/s upload speed out here amongst the sheep. You can see why I don’t get to play any online games around ‘democracy 3 patch days’. Also, you can see just how infuriating it is when you find a bug that needs patching. 20 minutes debugging,  an hour fixing and checking, 12 hours uploading.

And because I’m so dumb, all of those builds are entirely separate, even though 95% of the files are shared across them all. Learn from my mistakes, get your build process sorted out beforehand!

Democracy 3: Social Engineering

Sooo.. I slipped this in  a bit under the radar yesterday because of the amazing 50% off deal this weekend for Democracy 3, but you may have noticed that Democracy 3 now has an expansion pack/DLC/whatever we call it these days. That expansion is called ‘Social Engineering’, and I talk about it in my relaxed and charismatic yet fascinating way in the video below…

For those who skip the video, first of all note you can grab the expansion from my site here or on steam here. It’s $4.99. basically it’s a policy & dilemma pack which adds 26 policies and 8 new dilemmas, but not randomly, more on a theme of ‘social engineering’, in other words, all those subtle imperceptible ways in which society is shaped by the government. The main game already has the ‘big blunt instruments’ like income tax and spending on health care, but this pack has the slow-burn stuff like public awareness campaigns and cycling subsidies. It also has policies that encourage entrepreneurship and a pro-business mindset from a  young age, and many of the policies take ages to take their affect.

This whole area is a thought-experiment hobby for me. One of my whimsical policy ideas if I was UK Prime Minister would be to reduce the temperature of all government buildings in winter to encourage people to wear warmer clothing. NOT just because it would save money & the environment, but because it would remind people in general that *in winter, you dress warmer*. This is a lesson the UK has forgotten. From what I’ve read: average indoor temperatures have risen from 12C in 1970 to about 17.5C (63.5F) today. Thats a huge increase in energy expenditure, and it doesn’t surprise me one bit. Recently, a government minister had the ‘cheek’ to suggest that in cold weather people put on warmer clothes. he was hounded for it, but it’s just common sense. Personally I think government should be more about this (long term influencing the behavior of society for the common good) and less arguing about relatively trivial tax/benefit changes that amount to under 1% of government income/expenditure…

Anyway, hope you like the expansion pack :D

 

Democracy 3, 50% Weekend Sale (Direct+Steam)

So at last all those people complaining that I was literally hitler because Democracy 3, the ultimate political strategy game, was still full price can….. Go grab the game! Currently, and for the next few days, you can grab it at the insane discount of 50% (that’s right, HALF PRICE) both from my own lovingly hand-crafted website here. Or from steam which you will find here. Tell your friends and enemies! Go grab a copy, your country needs you! (Don’t forget the game is DRM-free and comes in Mac Linux & PC varieties.

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The big wide world

It’s a big wide world out there. What percentage of that world is buying my games? Well obviously it’s a tiny chunk, but more relevantly, what percentage of them are in any position whatsoever to buy my games even if they wanted to?

Well first of all, they need internet access, but frankly there is nothing I can do to help there. Then, they need a way to pay for them. I use a number of stores now, including direct sales through BMTMicro, who will take credit cards, debit cards, amazon payments, Google and PayPal, so that’s a LOT of people covered.

Then they have to speak English.

Wait! What? Lets backtrack a bit. The problem with being an English Speaker is you are historically linked to either the UK, North America, Australia or New Zealand. two of these are remote islands where you aren’t going to routinely travel to see foreign-speaking neighbors. One if a country so huge you can travel extensively and still never leave it. Another had a huge Empire and thus arrogantly assumes everyone understands English anyway… As a result, people who speak English tend to think everyone else speaks it. And they don’t. There is a huge world of non-english speaking gamers out there! Now let’s assume that a lot of them speak a language that requires unicode, and my games don’t support it (ouch!). Lets also assume that some are in developing countries and can’t afford games (or piracy is rife). Let’s assume cultural differences prevent a lot of others from considering buying my games. That STILL leaves a huge audience for them that could be enjoying Democracy 3  and my other games if they were translated. How big? Well certainly bigger than the population of New Zealand (4.43 million) If you suddenly found a group of 4.43 million people who might like your game, wouldn’t you go to the effort to sell to them? I’m planning to.

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Democracy 3 can now be bought in English German and as of today, French! (BONJOUR!!!). I may not stop there. The biggest hurdle is simply admin. The hassle of new steam builds, and the management of getting the relevant linux/mac builds done is the bottleneck. This is the LAST game where I will have this hassle. GSB2 will have multiple language support built in from the start and handled entirely by an in-game option. All I’ll need to handle is different store pages. I still have other things to tweak. BMT Micro store pages need to be multi-lingual, as do the confirmation emails and download instructions. I’ve still never sent out a foreign-language press release yet.

I can’t see any reason why the MAJORITY of GSB 2’s sales should not be from non-english speaking people.

In other news you can now get Democracy 3 on the Apple App store, if for some reason you refuse to shop anywhere else…