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

2008 for Positech Games

I’ll be away for a few days over new year so will not be blogging. So this is the last opportunity to sum up what happened in Positech Land during 2008.

What I did:

  • I finished and released Kudos 2. Arguably my most polished game to date, although due to the US elections, Democracy 2 is currently outselling it slightly.
  • I finally changed my game engine to support DirectX9. This was long overdue.
  • I wrote a blog post that catapulted me onto the radio, slashdot, digg, kotaku and lots of other places, and got me briefly known as the ‘pirate-sympathising game developer’, which is a bit of a miscast role, but it proved to be a fantastic way to get real honest feedback about my games, and also my website from people who hadn’t heard of me. Also got me my first ever check for writing for a newspaper.
  • I Switched to a dedicated linux server mainly to prevent the piracy article traffic killing my website. It’s MUCH more expensive :(
  • I met up with some fellow indie game developers in Birmingham, got extremely drunk, and then met some of them again in much more local Woking. Finally met people like ‘grey alien’ ‘princec’ ‘papillion’ and the pickford brothers all of which I’d previously chatted to only online.
  • I redesigned the positech website, and made it look tons better than it used to. Short of throwing money at a web designer, I’m not sure what else I should do to it right now.
  • I seriously considered emigrating, because the UK sucks, and the cost of living here sucks. I’m still thinking about it.
  • I changed the blog address to be cliffski.com

What I failed to do:

  • Make lots more money. The profit for 2008 was a bit below 2007. 2007 was a bumper year thanks to some good sales of the original Kudos, and the fact that Kudos: Rock Legend didn’t take that long to make. I still make a reasonable amount of money for one guy programming games, so I’m not complaining.
  • Make the obscure top-secret game. I have this game idea I keep talking about. It’s either doomed, or awesome. I just don’t know yet. In any case, it’s been put back again. maybe a full year while I do this space thing.
  • Hire anyone. I’m still one guy working in a spare bedroom. I’ve employed contractors from time to time to do art and sound and music, but it’s still just me designing and coding. I have thought a lot about how to expand the business, but still haven’t made any concrete steps towards doing it.

All in all, 2008 was a pretty good year. Kudos 2 was fun to make, and I’ve kept the business afloat despite the casual games ‘boom’ narrowing to just remakes of about 3 different games, and the global financial meltdown.

Bottom line is, I’m still here, still making indie games for the PC, not shabby console ports based on movie tie-ins, and there are free demos, mod-support and no DRM.

Happy new year everyone.

Guitar Vs Piano Vs C++

I haven’t played the guitar for ages, and just picked it up and hammered out a few notes. I find doing so very frustrating these days. Years ago, I could easily practice up to 12 hours a day, but the guitar is like weight lifting, you need to keep doing it to stay up to a certain standard, a little each day (or a lot).

The thing that I find most frustrating is the lack of precision. I used to spend hours playing through the simplest scales, making sure each note was perfect, that there was no handling noise or slurs, and that every note sounded clearly and precisely. It’s important to practice really slowly and cleanly with a metronome if you want to play fast, because the slightest imperfection when you speed stuff up and it just sounds like a mush.

Life is much easier on the piano. you can’t accidentally apply some vibrato or a bend, and it’s very hard to actually miss a note as there is no bending involved. You don’t need two hands synchronised to play a single note.

But C++ is right up the other end. The code is either correct and works, or it doesn’t. Better still, I can step through the code and even step backwards through a frame render and see exactly what I did, when and how it went wrong. There is no fuzziness, ambiguity or degrees of perfection. The code works or it does not work. Its binary, not analogue.

Somehow, I’ve become inteolerant of analog stuff where you can screw up ‘a bit’. I find it frustarting and I’m never happy with what I’ve done. Years of playing thr guitar and working with wood have probably taken their toll on my ability to perform analogue tasks. Binary FTW!

Give me micro-content

People keep talking about micro-transactions and paid items on online games, but they are 100% focused on MMo games and nothing else. 

I’d love to have a few extra units for company of heroes. $10 for 2 new russian tanks and a few new infantry units? Go for it, my fingers are poised over the buy button. I wish I had a single mass-market game that supported that kind of stuff, because I’d love to be able to release ongoing expansions for stuff like Kudos and Democracy. The thing is, such expansion content is 99% fixed costs, and it’s just not financially viable. Maybe the next game it will be.

The problem will always be transaction costs. I’d happily release some new policies for democracy 2 for $0.20 each, but it would cost treble that in credit card processing costs. We need someone like google or amazon to set up a mass market, one-click economic micro-transactions scheme. Great things are ahead when such a system is in place.