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

Game designers are blind cockney elves

Posted on September 19, 2008

All game designers are blind. Every single one of us. Peter Molyneux, Will Wright, Sid Meier, even little old me. We are all massively totally hugely blind.

In some areas.

It’s inevitable.  That game you enjoy and play a few hours each week, we spent at least a year staring at it EVERY DAY. We possibly sat in three hour meetings about the inventory screen and whether it should be done another way. If we did any serious play-testing, we saw the “you have been attacked by a cave troll” window about 500 times. It’s not news to us, it’s just like the furniture. No big deal.

When I used to work in city server rooms, I ended up totally blind to the security, and the cabling. City server rooms are so security concious its laughable. One room even weighed you on the way in and the way out to check you didn’t swipe anything (or leave anything in there). Many of them had CCTV pointing at you at every stage of the torturous trip in and out (swipe cards, pin entry, physical keys all combined). After a while, you ignore it. Most server rooms have so many cables running from computer to computer that it all gets put under the floor, and round the back of some of the racks is an exercise in cable tangle hell. After a while you ignore it.

The problem with being a small team or lone game designer, is you ignore those really obvious faults, inconsistencies, confusions, bugs and irritations, not because you don’t care, but because you cannot see them. Most US game designers don’t realise all the elves have mid-west accents. Nobody thinks their accent sounds weird, but it always does, to other people. Cockney elves may sound amusing, but to a cockney, a mid-west elf is just as silly.

I’m sure I’m making the same mistake with my new game, but I’m doing what I can to avoid it. Different people, of different ages, genders and nationalities are giving it a try. They always spot things I never would have, because I’m blind to them. If you are making a game on your own, you are also blind to your mistakes. Get someone else to take a look, and listen to what they have to say.

Making Vista Stable and FAST

Posted on September 18, 2008

If you run Vista home premium and have never taken the time to strip it down to its basics, or done any un-installing of the crap that some PC makers pre-install, you *might* be having stability or performance issues. Vista is NOT a horribly slow and bloated O/S, or at least not as bad as people claim, but it can easily get cluttered. If you run task manager (right click the bar at the bottom of the screen and select it) you should see something like this:

If your list of running processes is bigger than that, you are running stuff you do not need. You might run it anyway (I run msn and the sidebar normally) but most people have junk running that achieves nothing but instability. I don’t like itunes thinking it deserves a permenant position in my memory, same with quicktime, the BBC iPlayer etc.

I thought this might be helpful for people looking at a list of 34 processes, and thinking “These must be essential”. They aren’t :D

sandbox games and spore

Posted on September 16, 2008

I wrote a new article for bit-tech, you can see it here (courtesy of digg)

http://digg.com/pc_games/What_happened_to_sandbox_games

It’s about how sandbox games are getting less sandboxy, with a lot more in the way of aggressive hinting and quests to tell you what to do. I consider this to be a slight dumbing down of otherwise good freeform games. I don’t play games to be told what to do, I could get that in a day-job :D

I got thinking today about spore, my slight disappointment with it, and thinking about whether it’s a genre I could tackle in the future. I certainly think the game is too simple and dumbed down, no doubt to appeal to the mass market. The section of the game I enjoy most is the creature stage, but it’s far too predictable, and simplistic. There really isn’t enough in the way of simulation complexity to give me enough of a freeform game there.

So I was wondering about whether I could do a different take on the ‘cell stage’, which is more of a ‘sim fish creature’ game that anything really cellular. I love the ‘look’ of that part of the game, but I thought the gameplay was too simple. There are basically two food types (meat and plants) and you avoid big things and eat little things. Also there are some bits of meteor you need to hoover up. I’m pretty sure there is huge scope to expand on all this and make a better game. It’s certainly the sort of game I enjoy coding, and it would fit nicely in with my general portfolio of stuff whilst being a new game (non sequel).

Just a thought.

Some changes to Kudos 2 (for the better)

Posted on September 15, 2008

I’m really pleased with some of the last minute improvements and additions to Kudos 2. For one, there is an NPC drawn from a portrait of everyone who worked on the game, which is kinda funny and cool. Another thing I’m pleased with is a new system when someone asks you out for the evening. If you can’t afford it, you can say so, and they aren’t *that* snubbed. But better than that, you can just lie and pretend you can’t afford it. This reduces your honesty :D (BTW A friend of mine reckons honesty should be a pre-requisite to a science job, what do you think?)

I’m also putting a system in where once you have customised and selected your avatar, it’s saved out as a random pre-set, so you might see your old creations come back as defaults (inspired by spore, clearly :D).

The biggest difference in working methods between Kudos 1, and 2, has been getting family members and friends to try the game at an earlier stage. It’s amazing how many issues other people can identify in just five minutes that you will never think of. An example is “why don’t people thank me if I pay for their evening?”.

Good point :D

Customer attitudes

Posted on September 14, 2008

Which of the following two attitudes do you think is best:

I went to download your game after I lost my copy which I bought a year ago, and can’t find the email, I have no idea how to get hold of the game I PAID FOR. Send me a new link for a game that I PAID FOR NOW, or I will forward the details of your company to the police and have you prosecuted for fraud.

or

Hi, sorry to be a pain but I formatted my PC and didn’t back up my email for purchasing your game, and need to re-download it. I bought Democracy 2 around November last year using this email address and the name Joe Smith. Is there any chance you could resend the original email? Thanks!

Which one do you think gets answered first?

I agree, it’s the second one, so why do so many people make their first port of contact with a business an angry aggressive and insulting rant? I have had people insult my intelligence (when they could spell it), call me a thief and a fraudster, say my games are shit and they could do better in a weekend, had people email me asking for tech support on a pirated copy, accuse me of being ‘in bed with the MAFIAA’ etc etc. It’s not like I’m the local drug dealer, or some kind of evil fascist dictator. I just make PC strategy games for a living and sell them online. Chill out people.

And why we are on such topics, I feel duty bound to point out something else that people seem to ‘not get’ about the internet. All websites are owned by someone. All forums have admins, all forums are hosted by someone paying the (often large) bills. I’ve seen so many cases of people crying out that “This is FASCIST CENSORSHIP!!!” when a forum admin or site owner removes comments that they want removed. This is just being silly. In a free country, you can say what you like, but you can’t demand that other people pay for a website for you to do it.

I mention this because today I removed a few posts from my forum that were completely silly and tired rants about all intellectual property being imaginary and arguing that the price of something should be it’s marginal cost (wrong!). I’m sick of reading such twaddle, especially from people who try to lecture me on basic economics as though I never did my degree in the topic…

Anyway, there are penty of sites like slashdot or digg were amateur economists can try and justify piracy on some shaky belief that marginal costs are everything and that content is manufactured by space pixies who don’t need food. I don’t need that stuff clogging up my games forums :D.