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

Category: programming

The post-release crush

There is tons of stuff to do after you release an indie game. There isn’t much of a relaxing pause as you might assume. Sadly, many indie devs DO take a few weeks off after they release a game, which is a mistake. There is much work to do! (I am planning on a holiday but not for about 3 weeks yet).

Firstly there is the telling everyone you have released a game bit. I’ve done a *bit* of that, and a proper press release will go out to people on Monday. I told a few journalists I know personally, and have a few more to do. If anyone knows a website that reviews games and might be interested in Kudos 2, point them my way (or me at them)

Then there is the download sites like download.com. They are less and less useful these days. They are still worth submitting to, but their relevance compared with ten years ago is minuscule. These days it’s all about the ‘portals’. This sucks slightly, because the download sites ranked stuff according to popularity and often thus, how good it was. The portals rank stuff based on how much money they make from that sale. This is very different :(

Then there is the tech support. All games ship with bugs, and Kudos 2 did too. And even after the patch it seems I still have one. It’s to do with the script parser. Basically, some of the scripts have blank newlines in them. This is no big deal, as any script parser worth it’s salt will discard empty lines and not process them. Mine does this fine, at least it does on my two test machines, and all my friends test machines.

But lo! There are machines which seem to interpret low level text reading code differently and thus the empty string discarding isn’t working. I think this is trivial to fix, and tbh, I could have fixed it in the last patch, but I wouldn’t have been understanding the bug then, just sticking big sticky tape over it and pretending it was dealt with. That is the WORST way to debug. Proper debugging means you find out exactly what circumstances had caused the problem, fixed it, and verified that those same circumstances now no longer cause issues, as well as being 100% certain you are aware of how the new code operates in all circumstances.

This is harder, and takes longer, but bitter experience eventually persuades you it’s the way to go.

So far sales are ok, but nothing that inspires me to buy a new yacht, or indeed a new car. I am going out for a meal at a pub tonight (it won a gastro pub award once!) so that’s about the level of riches the game equates to.

“Cliff is a stressed, tired software-developer.“

The unavoidable Kudos 2 patch

So the game is now on sale, and a few early buyers had a horrid crash bug, which I’m hoping is now fixed. I’ve certainly fixed *a* crash bug, so I’m assuming it’s the same one, as the crashes I used to experience in certain circumstances only on my XP laptop have now definitely gone. A few minor typos and other fixes are in the new patch too.

So right now I’m uploading demos and full copies of version 1.01 and will be doing a patch for those early buyers soon. Sales have been reasonable, but not earth shattering, although it takes a few days to get going normally, and press releases and review copies have not been sent out yet.

I’m in it for the long haul anyway.

Adding some basic mod support

People really liked modding Kudos. Maybe it was because that game was (like all of mine) amazingly easy to mod. Adding a new job is just a text file. Adding new books and other purchasable assets is similarly easy. I intend kudos 2 to be just as easy (if not easier) to mod for.
Eventually.
But right no I’m concentrating on finding and squashing any bugs. I’ve just spent some time today getting modded jobs to work (still needs testing), but it won’t be the perfect easy user-friendly experience I intend it to become on it’s initial release.
Hopefully, I’ll eventually have some separate tools to produce new jobs and scripts for the game, but I’d rather worry about that in the week after release, and the weeks after I get back from the hugely needed holiday I have booked for the end of October.
So if you buy the game (expected release date is Wednesday) and you think it doesn’t allow enough modding, don’t worry, that will change almost immediately.

Widescreen support, publisher logo things

Three things got done in the last 24 hours.
Firstly I got wide-screen support in the game, which kicks in automatically if your desktop resolution is 1280×768 or 1280×800. It then runs the game full screen as 1280 x768. In a window, it is always at 1024×768. This was basically a move to support wide-screen laptops, which are very commonly used for the more casual and indie games now. The game looked a bit crap when stretched to fit those resolutions, so I did 5 minutes fiddling and it all works fine. I’m really pleased with how easy it was to get this working, a sign that the underlying code is good :D

The second thing, which I did today was add support for those tedious logos at the start of the game. Don’t worry, that aren’t in the Positech sell-direct version, but some of the casual game portals insist on having their logo present. The main game screen looks so cool I don’t ant to clutter it, so I decided to support the full screen fade in and out thing you normally get. Not an inspiring job…

The best thing was rewriting the background display code so when it changes from normal rendering to super-funky ‘you are drunk’ wobbly buildings, there is no really bad jump (it still skips a bit), and a lack of clever color-fading. Now it’s all one system, which makes everything look a lot nicer. This was just a bit of graphical polish I wanted to get done.

It’s going well, and I’m on track to put the game up for sale on October 1st.

Brits who made the modern world

There was a short 30min documentary on Ch5 in the UK last night, about the guys who made the game ‘Elite‘. They were 2 college kids from Cambridge, UK. One of the best facts from the program was that when they released the game, there were 150,000 BBC computers in the UK. And their game sold 150,000 copies. Now THAT is a hit game. That makes World Of Warcraft look like barbies riding school.

The bits I enjoyed hearing about was how obsessed theyr were with optimising the code and getting the machine to do much more than anyone had before. They had no debugger, and no tools. If the game crashed, they couldn’t step through code line by line as we do now, they had to stare at the code (all 16k of it) until they found the bug. That’s serious hardcore programming. I managed to code 4 games before I worked out how a debugger worked. I never even saw people step through code until I got my first job at Elixir. Sad eh? It’s MUCH easier with breakpoints and a debugger, trust me!

I miss the days of having to optimise code to oblivion. I love reading about tricks like compiled sprites and loop-unrolling, even though many of them are irrelevant now. I’m not the worlds best programmer, but I have managed to code some pretty optimised stuff now and then. I’m very happy with the particle systems I’ve coded, especially how well they run on low spec machines. Given no worries about actually finishing games and shipping them to bring in some rent-money, I think I’d happily spend ages ripping out huge parts of my games are re-optimising the, just for the hell of it. One day maybe…