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Many years ago I had long hair, a leather jacket and even leather trousers and a bullet belt. Oh yes. I was a rock-n-roll wild child geetar-hero wannabee. I was even in a few bands, and played maybe 100 gigs around the south of England with them. I still have fond memories of kebab places in chelmsford (great times man…great times…), sleeping on the beach in cornwall, and one gig somewhere where the local biker gang was ‘security’ for the gig. It was all very rolling stones, only with less money and longer guitar solos.

Anyway, today marks the end of an era of sorts, because I threw my old fender amp in a skip at a recycling center. It was a bit crackly and unreliable, and not really worth anything, and it’s fine because I got a lovely new modern fender amp last Christmas anyway, so it was redundant. Still… that trusty little box followed me around the UK and belted out many a sweep-picked arpeggio, I can tell you. It was kinda sad to throw it out, but then you can’t lug around all your childhood possessions your whole life. That’s living in the past, and I tend to think of my boat building self, my guitar-playing self and my suit-wearing IT consultant self as like my previous hosts, in DS9 speak, and you can never go back. I’ve still got the trusty ibanez guitar though, the one with the cool monkeygrip handle :D.

It’s a sign of age when your youthful exuberance was captured on celluloid, not binary.

The latest humble bundle has been updated to include previous games, such as Gratuitous Space Battles , so you might want to check it out if you are one of those crazy people who doesn’t own GSB (or know some people who may want to grab a copy) :D

Ok lets talk about something indie game developers don’t talk about much, but it affects quite a lot of us.

Loneliness.

Many indies these days are in teams of 3 or 4 or more people, so the problem in that case is not acute. However, the genius of al gore’s internet means that often those teams are geographically distant and scattered anyway. I have contractors and partners working with/for me in all different countries, but in the majority of cases I’ve never met those people, or even phoned or skyped them. Some people think that’s weird, but I like the idea that I’m employing people based on the portfolio, reputation and skills and that their country of origin, accent etc never occur to me.

Of course the downside of this is that you sit in a room on your own with a keyboard, and there is nobody to just go ‘hey wassup?’ to. This makes me very very productive, when I need to be, but it can also be a very lonely job.

For a lot of people, especially the more insular sheldon-cooper style geeks, this is not a problem. Some people at Elixir and Lionhead would sit there with headphones on and never talk to anyone at all. I found that weird, but it was quite common. Other people, like me, actually enjoy the whole ‘water-cooler chit chat about nothing’ that you get in a normal workplace. Intellectually I know this is just some primitive portion of my brain that wants to metaphorically pick fleas off fellow humans, but there’s no doubting it does make me happier to hang out with a group of buddies and chat about stuff.

MSN, Skype et al, are great, and I do chat quite a bit to other indies over them, but of course it’s not quite the same. Private forums are also very good, because they become like a bar filled with friends, rather than the vast mass of trolls and flamebaters you get in most public anonymous forums. Meeting up for a beer is ideal, but generally for me that involves at least a 100 mile car journey, because if there’s a bright center to the universe, I’m in the county it’s farthest from.

What’s the solution? Well I think it’s yet another justification for going along to indie meetups and shaking some hands. Indies can probably recognize that slightly shy, rabbit-in-headlights stare that other developers have when they spend too long debugging and not enough time actually socializing. I’m lucky in that I’m not in the home alone like I was when I made Kudos and Democracy, and I don’t suffer from paranoid shyness like some indies do. I’ve also been around quite a while now, so someone normally recognizes me at all these indie things, which is great. One indie told me that I’m ‘much less scary in real life’ which I assume is a compliment. I’m at the eurogamer expo on thursday, BTW.

So I guess what I’m saying is, if you feel lonely,and isolated and it gets you down, don’t think it’s just you. This can be a lonely job, especially if the only people you chat to in your working day are family members who have no idea what you do, and are desperately hoping you will give up and get a proper job. They say the first step is recognizing you have a problem. The second step is normally to get a cat, or probably better a dog (because you need to walk it, and thus it gets you out in the fresh air that way). I’d definitely have a dog if we didn’t already have a sufficiency of cats.

Any other lone wolf indies out there howling at the moon?

I’ve been working on an expansion pack for Gratuitous Tank Battles, but hit a bit of an admin snag in releasing it right now, which gave me time to do something else. As I’ve had this GSB update pending for ages, I thought I’d get around to finally releasing it for everyone. This isn’t just a minor tweak and bug fix, it adds some good stuff. You might want to update your copy, and try this one…

So what is in version 1.60 of Gratuitous Space Battles? Well a little list of tweaks but the two biggies are these:

1) New Feature: Direct control now lets you (optionally) issue orders or edit existing orders for ships mid-battle.
2) New Feature: Shockwave distortion and shield impact distortion effects have been added.

(Full list at the bottom)

Essentially, I have added an option to singleplayer GSB battles that lets you play the game like an RTS. For all those people who hated one of the central elements of the game (no control during battles), you now have that as an option. If you have played the game before, you might enjoy giving it a spin with the new option. (Sorry, the demo isn’t updated with this feature yet). If you were always on the fence about buying the game (which you can get here) because of the lack of control, now is the time to buy :D.

This is patch number 60, so it took me a while, but I thought ‘what the hell’.  I demonstrate how it works, along with some new visual effects added in this patch, in this video below. Please upvote it, or retweet it, or do what ever trendy things you socially-enabled gamers do these days. It’s much appreciated. And tell me what you think of it, too. BTW it’s a free update, not DLC. This update *will* make it to the steam copy, I just need to get them to update it.

Full change list:

version 1.60
1) New Feature: Direct control now lets you (optionally) issue orders or edit existing orders for ships mid-battle.
2) New Feature: Shockwave distortion and shield impact distortion effects have been added.
3) Tripled the maximum supported submunitions per missile from 6 to 18, as requested.
4) Game now supports instant re-start with new settings from the options screen.
5) In mass-deploy mode you cannot now accidentally snap out of it by selecting an existing ship, which was annoying.

All that’s written on my big handy Positech Games office chalkboard right now is this:

ONE THING AT A TIME

Which I consider to be something I need to be reminded off. Unfortunately, I don’t naturally look at the chalkboard much. Really it should be written all over my monitor on post-it notes, or on the office door.  On the topic of office doors, it always depresses me that billionaires waste their money on jets or private islands. I’d spend it much more sensibly, like on having replicas of the Deep Space Nine airlocks made as my office door, which I think we can all agree is a far more sensible use of such money.

I was going to write a big tirade here about how the games industry is scarily too hit-driven, and I think there is a bit of a ‘people buying-what other people are buying’ thing going on, but it’s hard to put into words how I see that being bad without it sounding like I’m whining. People on the internet always hate anyone sounding like they are bemoaning their own lot, even when they actually aren’t. I remember all the abuse I got for asking people who had decided not to buy GSB why they had done so.

What I was hoping for was people saying “that’s cool, a guy asking for feedback on his game to win over people on the fence’. Whereas I got ‘This guys such a dick, moaning that nobody ever bought his shit game’.  Which is kinda funny, because GSB has sold easily over 100,000 copies without counting humble bundles. I just like to make my games as good as they can be.

That’s the internet for you anyway.

In any case, I decided not to type up such a rant, even after a big bang marathon punctuated by mixing various bottles of wine, which is the cause of most of my embarrassing rants.

I actually typed that ‘whine’ the first time by accident. Oh the hilarity.