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

Tips for Using Google Analytics

Here’s an article I’ve added to the positech website today. It’s a few basic tips for people who sell software (like me) and use google analytics to look at their website data:

http://www.positech.co.uk/content/analytics/analytics.html

Hopefully some people might find it useful. maybe one or two of them will check out my games. Who knows? I’ve submitted the article to digg, and you can digg it here if you have a free digg account:

http://digg.com/software/7_tips_for_using_google_analytics_for_webmasters

And if you can stumble it in stumbleupon that would be great! I’ve actualyl really come to like stumbleupon. It genuinely does seem to be able to find websites you like, but didn’t know existed. Check it out if you haven’t already.

The future? Casual? Strategy?

I’ve learned a lot from the success of Kudos, from making kudos Rock legend and Kudos 2. Especially Kudos 2. Those 3 games have taught me what polish really means, how to ship a product once it’s finished, rather than when I’ve had enough, and how to make games easy to learn and balanced enough for most players to enjoy right out of the box.

But most of the casual games out there bore me to tears. I want games that make me THINK. Not in a predictable, mechanical way like sudoku. Not just give my eyes some boring seek and find workout such as in the hidden object games. And certainly not in the click-fest time management sense.

I want a game that makes me think creatively. that challenges me to think outside the box, to evolve strategies and plans and tactics.

that’s what I hoped Kudos and Democracy did. Democracy was mroe clearly a strategy game, but Kudos was one too. My next game is all about strategy. Not TACTICS. That’s what most RTS games are about. This one will be about STRATEGY. But it will be (hopefully) as polished and accessible as the casual games.

The only emails I don’t reply to (sorry!)

It seems every tenth person with a computer is a composer of music for Video games, who currently has a gap in their schedule and wants to make music for my next game.

At least, that is what you might think if you saw my inbox. I’m sure I’m not special, I bet anyone who makes indie games, and who has the budget to actually pay people to make music gets the same number of CV’s and emails sent to them as I do. generally speaking I try to reply to everyone who emails me, regardless what it is about (unless it’s yet more justifications of piracy – I’ve read enough now thanks). However, I confess I don’t reply to unsolicited CV’s from music composers.

Partly this is because there is such a glut of them right now that I know I’ll never have a problem finding one when I need one, and partly because the guy I used for my last two games does exactly the sort of music I’ll need for my next one, so the chances of me needing a new composer in the near future are pretty much zero.

So if you are reading this at music college and hoping to make your fortune in the games industry doing music for games, trust me, get a different plan, because there are WAY too many people out there trying to do that right now. Learn C++ instead :D.

The early art dilemma

When I worked at Elixir and Lionhead I often got really distressed over how much artwork got thrown away. It seemed mad to spend so much time and money on getting artwork, only to ditch it and start again. Some of this was just typical inefficiency, but some of it becomes more understandable the longer you work in games.

games are very visual things. We can rant about game play vs graphics all we like, but the first impression of 99% of games is visual. It’s REALLY hard work to slog away 10 hours a day, every day on a game that actually looks really bad. Most coder art is really bad, so in order to get an idea of whether or not the game will feel any good, and to inspire you to work hard and believe in the current game, it’s important to have something that looks nice as soon as you can.

There are two approaches to this. One is to spend a lot more time than you usually do on really polishing your ‘coder art’. I’ve spent some time doing this. I know my way around photoshop, and I’ve read hundreds of tutorials over the years on how to do all sorts of arty things. I still do some of the artwork for my games (less and less of it each game. The problem with doing this is it takes up a lot of time.

The alternative is to pay an artist to do some work before you really know what style you want, or if you will keep it. This can bexcellent, because they can prompt you into a new direction, or just turn out higher quality stuff, but it also obviously costs money. Indie games are done on a shoestring. Wasting money on artwork you know you will not ship with the game is scary. But right now, looking at my mystery new game and it’s crappy coder art, I am tempted to spend a few dollars and get a proper artist to mock up some basic stuff for me…

Exchange Rates

Do you want to be a currency speculator? Because if you are outside the USA and considering a career doing what I do, you might have to become one.

Most games sales come from the US, and generally people tend to price their games in dollars. Plus, most of the big sales portals charge in dollars, and (more importantly) pay the developers in US dollars. I’m in the UK, and this means two big things.

  • I have to pay a fortune each time in bank fees when the money gets converted into UK Pounds
  • I am at the mercy of exchange rates.

Recently, the pound and the dollar have been all over the place. here is a 3 month chart:

Generally it’s been good news, because a stronger dollar and a weaker pound means I earn more for each game I sell in the US.  However it’s not that simple, because I tend to pay for my advertising in dollars. Advertising is my major expense, once the games are done, so it really matter if the adverts are suddenly 20% more expensive than they were a week ago. As a result, one of the many parts of my daily routine is to keep an eye on the exchange rate to see if now is a good time to stick some money in the advertising account and get a few free dollars (effectively) by ‘picking my moment’.

If I was really organised I’d probably have a US bank account that people could pay into (in dollars) and avoid a lot of currency-changing fees. Does anyone know how easy it is for a UK busienss to open a US bank account?