Category: Uncategorized

I keep blathering on about G4, as my next game. It’s the working title, obviously. I have a title in mind, but I’m not announcing anything until I am 100% sure this is the design that I’m going with. I thought I might as well explain why I’m calling it G4, when obviously I’ve made loads of games, not just three.

The thing is, a lot of the games I’ve made have been pretty amateurish hobby efforts, and have been about me learning to program, not how to design games. You can have the best game idea in the universe, but if you try and make it your first game, you are likely to ruin it through inexperience. I reckon it takes four or five games before you finally find your feet and can do a decent game idea justice.

I know people might think that if they do a course in games programming, or get a great degree, or go to a few game jams, or read a lot of books, that this counts for the first four or five games. It does not.

The experience you need, is the complete full game lifecycle. The picking of an idea, and a name, choosing the technology and coding the engine, the play balancing, artwork, marketing, selling, promotion, and the tech support.

Anyway…

I’ve only really made three really good games. Three games where I did justice to the idea. Some of the other games are good *ideas* but the presentation and implementation is lacking.

Those 3 games are:

Kudos 2

Democracy 2

Gratuitous Space Battles

I’m determined that G4 earns a place in the list.

Occasionally I have the pleasure of spending time with people who are not internet-savvy. People who are not tech-savvy. People who are certainly not geeks. I think I’ve spotted a symptom of non-gameness…

Those people, when presented with information they do not immediately have, for example ‘how to turn this on’ or ‘how do you change the channel on this?’ or similar, will, if at all possible, ask the nearest ‘tech savvy’ person. They will not, under any circumstances, unless the situation is desperate, try to solve the mystery themselves. They definitely will not press a button to see what happens, or go with a hunch.

In short, they are wary of experimenting and exploring.

Gamers, I suspect are not like this. Games are safe environments in which you can explore, investigate, and try out new ideas. With console games, it’s even more true. You can’t accidentally format your console by pressing wrong buttons. You can blindly press things and see what they do. Often, you will guess correctly, and get a nice dose of dopamine for doing so. Hurrah, you learn to associate experimentation with success, and reward.

Compare that with earlier, passive forms of entertainment, such as books, movies and the theater, where there is nothing expected from the audience. They are certainly not encouraged to participate. In fact, any sort of noise from a theater audience can result in anger. Non tech-savvy friends often express barely contained fear that they might press the wrong button and a gadget may explode, possible resulting in the death of millions. Maybe that’s also a generational thing. Health and safety obsessions mean me live in a world that practically has corks on forks. It was not always so.

I think these different approaches lead to different mindsets. The passive entertainment form is great for factory workers, the military, or any career where you are supposed to follow orders, and not step out of line. The interactive form is far better for careers that involve experimentation, creativity, critical thinking, design and originality. As technology marches on, less and less people will be doing simple, assembly line jobs. If your kids are 14 today, they are much more likely to have creative and expressive jobs than people from 50 years ago.

In summary, encourage your kids to play computer games. It’s good for them :D

1. Because you are making a game that you don’t genuinely enjoy, and feel de-motivated
2. Because you keep quitting game dev projects, and that feeling is more natural to you than to keep on slogging
3. Because you have MSN, or another instant messenger / email active, and always distracting you
4. Because you have no way to force yourself to work for a set amount of time (buy a timer)
5. Because you keep jumping platforms/ technology to keep up with whats trendy (d0n’t)
6. Because you hate the business /marketing side and dread having to start on it when the game is done (deal with it)
7. Because you get out of bed late
8. Because you watch TV every night, even if it’s rubbish
9. Because you kid yourself that playing Call of Duty is research, and thus work
10. Because you never re-use code
11. Because your day job means you never really have to get your game on sale, so you don’t take it seriously.

None of these apply to me. How many apply to you?

From what I see, it’s mostly2,3 and 5 that affect indies.

Ages ago I blogged about how I used a kill-a-watt gadget to measure my PC power usage. I was recently motivated to check on the usage of my newer PC. Read the old post, and you’ll see it was a Dual Core 6600 Intel PC with 2 gig RAM and vista. The bootup power usage was 160 watts.

I have since upgraded, and am typing this on an Intel 8 core i7 chip, running at 2.80GHZ. There is now 8 gigs of RAM running on 64 bit windows 7, rather than vista. The PC has an ATI Radeon HD 5700 video card. The measurement was abse unit only, no monitors.

Do you think the 8 core 5700 combo uses more or less power?

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The readings are as follows:

• On boot-up, after windows has just loaded and no apps are running 133 Watts (less than the old PC)
  
• After a while to let everythibng settle down, and stuff liek steam had all been turned off to minimsie network traffic. (I couldnt get the hard disk to totally shut down though)  107 Watts (less than the old PC)
• Running Gratuitous Space Battles with an average battle in a window at 1680 x1050 res, all options set to maximum 143 Watts.
• Running Gratuitous Space Battles fullscreen at 1920 x1200 res, all options set to maximum 141 Watts
• Re-compiling the game, using Visual studio, maxxing out all 8 cores, and no doubt some fair amount of disk-thrashing 192 Watts.

What surprises me is that GSB, as a mostly single-threaded single-core game, uses 73% of the power of a maxxed out CPU-thrash. Could all that power really be going on fans and hard drive gubbins? and maybe powering the other chips on the motherboard, the video card etc.

In any event, 132 watts for a PC that is theoretically doing sod all is in some ways a LOT, and other ways nothing. The UK price for power is 11.5p per unit which is 1 killowatt hour. That means my PC, when on, is costing me (132/1000) * 11.5 = 1.51 pence per hour, or at 10 hours a day 330 days a year, roughly £50, or $75. Peanuts really.

But given that my electricity usage is £39 a month, that rates it as 10% of my power usage. That’s without the router, printer,scanner or two monitors. Obviously this is only electricity, not heating.

In comparison, assume I boil a kettle 6 times a day, it uses 2000 watts for 2 minutes each time. So thats roughly £16 a year, or 3.4% of my power usage.

I suspect the biggest power usage is the PC and laptops, and everything else just makes up a multitude of tiny power draws around the house. Bah.

For top-secret reasons, I’ve recently been looking at a bunch of indie game websites. Some are great, most are not. Some are laughable.  I’ve had an indie games site since 1997, and obsess over it’s performance. Here’s some things I think newcomers to indie game selling should take note of.

1) Show me a game. NOW.

I’ve arrived at your site. well done, that’s 99% of the effort done. But if you want me to skip a flash intro or hunt the screen for a button that says ‘games’ then I may well get bored. Check your webpage stats for people who arrive at the site but bounced out before even seeing a game name. That was money you just set fire to.

2) Show me a screenshot. NOW.

I know, I know. Your game isn’t about graphics, it’s about the fun! You need to engage the user in the fascinating story of your protaginist ‘klaude’ and his awesome backstory about when he was a small boy…<click> That’s another bored visitor. You need a screenshot, because that’s how people make an immediate editing choice about continuing further. I can tell your game is a high quality and colorful side scrolling 2D platformer within 2 seconds of seeing your screenshot. Quicker than I can even read ‘high quality and colorful side scrolling 2D platformer’. Screenshots are what get people to hang around and read about the game. You need them. Preferably lots.

3) Give me a demo and a buy button.

Preferably two of them. One at the top, so I can immediately skip to the demo if I like. One at the bottom, so when I’ve finished reading the blurb, I am right next to one. Use a big clear font, make it obvious it’s clickable.

4) If the game warrants it, add a video

Watching a 30 second youtube video tells me tons about what your game will be like as a player, at least initially. Video is often better than static screens, but it depends on the game. Kudos looks crap on video, so does democracy. Gratuitous Space Battles looks way way better. While we are on the topic, use youtube. Youtube works for everyone, and hosting is free. having some fancy java video player embedded in the site will go wrong for a non trivial percentage of visitors. Make sure you have a good reason not to use youtube.

5) Study your web traffic.

Which gets more downloads. This

or This?

I don’t know yet, but I will do in a weeks time. Yes, this sort of testing does make a difference.

6) Optimise

Go to googles homepage, look at the source. Holy lack of whitespace batman. That’s getting really anal, and I don’t bother much with the text, but try to be sensible with screenshots. Jpgs can very very often be reduced in quality and nobody but a computer can tell. Not everyone has fast broadband, and some are sharing it with other people streaming video or surfing other sites. Assume the worst, and make sure the filesizes are as small as possible. It takes just minutes to do this.

7) Don’t make it too short.

Is your game worthy of my time? If you can’t write two decent length paragraphs about the game, then I guess not. I guess you knocked it up in 10 minutes and have nothing to say on the topic. The screenshots get people to stay, but the text is what justifies to people that you should get their money. People making an adventure game have it easy here. By all means have some backstory, some concept art sketches and so on. If your game is a casual game, you are screwed on the PC selling direct anwyay, so assuming it’s a relatively hardcore PC game, there should be LOTs to say. make it look like your game is worth buying.

I know, some of the games on my site break these rules. But not the big ones. Not the ones that I promote, and that sell.