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

Next Game clue #1

Might as well keep you guessing. But here is a very general clue as to what sort of game I’m doing next.

More clues to follow

Beating Multiplayer Cheating

Could it be that the best way to deal with jerks in online games is to just make their efforts futile by doing way entirely with the idea of anonymous massively multiplayer competition?

That’s what I reckon, and here are my expanded thoughts on the topic.

Democracy 2 adverts

I still occasionally pay for ad clicks for democracy 2. It’s an older game now (just over a year old) but it still sells, and has had a bit of a welcome boost thanks to the US elections and the resulting increase in interest in all things political. I figure that if people are more interested in politics than usual, that the same ad spend as usual should have better results. It’s true that the credit crunch means people have less money, but that also means people spend less on ads so ad space should have less competition and be cheaper :D

Right now I’m only using google adwords to place some democracy 2 leaderboards. I’ve also been reading a book about brain structure and advertising, which covers the whole topic of how advertising works (in real low-level neuroscience style), which also has me thinking about ads a lot. According to the book, almost all of our sensory input gets channelled first through an area of the brain called the ‘amygdala’ which is in charge of our fear response, before being passed on to other areas for detailed contextual analysis. This is so that the brain can recognize danger (a snake, a hand grenade etc) as quickly as possible. It’s also why we jump back instinctively if someone throws a fake spider or snake at you, even when it’s an obvious fake. The higher level pattern-recognition parts of your brain that say “its clearly a toy” haven’t even received the data yet, let alone come to conclusions.

I find this interesting because it explains US political TV ads. Most of the successful ones are based on fear. Fear of terrorists. Fear of immigrants. Fear of crime. Fear of poverty. The fear response takes over before the higher level rational bit even gets a look-in.

Which is interesting, but doesn’t help me sell games :(. I’ve tried a few different banner ad styles and wordings and will let the wonder of A/B testing evolve the one that sells the most copies.

Scary lack of indies

Why are so many indie PC developers only making casual games?

It seems every new ‘indie’ game I hear about is just another hidden object or diner dash clone with its sights aimed clearly at getting into the top 100 games at BigFishGames.

It seems that nobody is remotely interested in doing original, interesting games for the PC aimed at the 18-30 mostly male hardcore gamer.

I really hope that there are a bunch of people in that category, probably people loving Company of Heroes, Civilisation and Galactic Civ II who are looking for more games to buy, and will buy (not pirate) them on the PC. Because that’s my current plan. It may seem like swimming against the tide, but when the tide is making Diner Dash clones for bored housewives who can’t use two mouse buttons, for a 25% royalty, I think I’d rather stack shelves in ASDA than do that.

I’ve been distracted by various tedious non-game-coding stuff the last few days, but progress continues on the new game. It’s looking ok, and I’m still very keen on the idea. There’s a ton of work (especially a lot of GUI and AI work) to do before I can sit and play it and know how it’s going to end up. Recently, a lot of the work on the game has been doing faster rendring stuff, although tbh it runs at over 300 FPS on my machine, so I doubt it’s a major issue. Next week I’m determined to work on the ‘second’ part of the game (the game is basically three major components interlinked). Thats much more GUI-centric.

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.