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

Category: gratuitous space battles

Gratuitous Space Battles is a modding juggernaut (and I’m slow to catch on)

Well this is embarrasing in a way…

I am a big fan of supporting modding. I love the mods people make. Mods are why PC gaming is the best kind. Some of the ebst games out there started as mods, and many games exist purely on the backs of some incredible mods. I recall that when I was a firm Call of Duty 2 addict, we NEVER played the boring standard maps…

I made GSB as mod-friendly as I knew how (back then). I tried to nurture the mod scene as much as I could, then I needed to make a new game and pay the bills, and GTB became 100% of my life. It took me over big time (and still is…).

But today, for a spot of relaxing, I checked in on the GSB modding forum…

Holy cow…

There is a single mod with a 108 page forum thread about it. Just ONE mod. It has extra ship hulls, extra ship TYPES in some ways, it has new background art, new weapons types, sounds, it has a back-story, it has it’s own flipping music, it has it’s own flipping Trailer!


They have done stuff with the numbers to enable you to build corvettes, to build dreadnoughts, to include cargo modules (cunningly with negative costs… see what they did there?) to include anti-matter detonating power plants.

This mod is big :D It’s called Praetorian Industries. It isn’t perfect, there are some slightly amusing typos in the trailer (did I mention the trailer?), so maybe it’s done by a non-native English speaker, and I did get one occasional crash bug, possibly due to a texture missing? But who cares?

I find it incredibly inspiring that such a mod exists, and that  people have put so much effort into extending and enlarging the experience you can get from GSB. If you are a GSB player who hasn’t looked at the mod scene, go check it out, it basically lives around the GSB forums here, as far as I know. But what would I know?

I’ll be reading up on the mods a bit more over this weekend. This really makes me smile.

Back on the IPAD -> Gratuitous Pad Battles!

Ok, so after hurriedly yanking a slightly buggy version of GSB from the apple app-store, the IPAD version of GSB is back on sale and you can all go rush out and throw money at it right now. Hurrah! Here it is:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/gratuitous-space-battles/id517457294?mt=8

(The expansion packs in the PC version will end up being added at some stage. The campaign add-on won’t make it to ipad, it’s just insanely big and complex and involved and not pad-friendly)


Here are a few lessons learned from the ipad experience thus far:

1) The ipad has hardly any memory. Developing on PC, then squeezing it onto ipad is seriously hard!

2) A game where you zoom in and out and drag stuff around is really cool to play on the ipad. It feels very l33t.

3) There seems to be basically no way to get any attention on the app store unless apple chooses you. Admit it, you all only found GSB by searching.  Even the category search function seems broken on my ipad 2. It’s a trainwreck, compared to other portals.

4) Everyone who insists that nobody buys ipad games > $0.99 is just wrong. They do.

If you are a high-powered famous and influential mac-blog-owner or reviewer with a bazillion readers, and you have NOT got a press-review copy of GSB on ipad, just email me, and I will see what I can do.

In other news…. very close to setting the GTB release date now. It will also be on GamersGate, Impulse and Steam. Yay!

Humble Indie Bundle 4

So have you all seen this?

Quite a few people probably guessed it was coming due to my tux image tease, but GSB is part of the Humble Indie Bundle. Yes, that means there is a linux port of the base game, for people who prefer to run native linux builds I do NOT have the final linux installer yet, so if you want a linux build and you bought GSB direct from me (so I can verify the sale), then you will be entitled to it for free, once I have it. Don’t email me asking for it yet, because I can’t reply with a link, and it will get complex and bottlenecked. Obviously I’ll blog it when it’s all ready.

A few words about the bundle, and Gratuitous Space Battles being in it (as one of the ‘beat the average’ games).

Some people have expressed surprise about this move, because I rant about devaluing of games, and bundles a lot, so why am I doing this?

Firstly, it’s the beat the average game :D You can’t pay $0.01 and get GSB, can’t be done, so there is that in there.

Secondly, GSB is actually quite old now. It got updated a LOT, but it’s release was September 2009. It’s been full price everywhere for a long time, so I’m much more flexible regarding stuff like this at this stage in the games sales cycle.

Also, there is a new game coming in the first quarter of 2012, it can’t do any harm to remind people about GSB, and to get people who sat on the fence for those two years to grab a copy at a discounted price. Hopefully when GTB comes out they will be more inclined to buy it at full price rather than wait another two years. I hope!

I often talk very frankly about sales figures and games revenue, but that’s regarding direct sales. Humble Bundle is a proper publisher arrangement with contracts etc, so don’t ask me for financial details about splits etc, because I can’t talk about that.

As I typed this, the total raised has passed a million dollars. That’s good then  :D.

Platform fun

Wow. Getting GTB to run smoothly on my laptop might prove fun. Methinks it uses more horsepower than GSB did, at least judging by my first tests. The photo reflects badly from the GTB battles cloud-cover effect :(

But it runs, that’s the main thing. Time for some serious profiling on my min spec laptop now. Plus, GSB running on something called the ‘i-pad’. That looks fun!