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

Yet another podcast interview thing

Tonight at 7PM GMT. it’s here:

http://www.wcradio.com/

diggable here:

http://digg.com/gaming_news/Cliff_Harris_interview_on_WoW_Radio_Aug_25th

Blurb:

The show will air on Monday at 7pm British time (2pm Eastern US). Listeners
can visit http://www.wcradio.com and tune in from the frontpage.
Alternatively, loading http://www.wcradio.com/listen.pls into most popular
media players will tune automatically into the stream. The show will be
available after airing in the form of a podcast, via itunes, all popular
podcast aggregators and on our website in the TB’s Show about Videogames
archive – http://www.wcradio.com/shows.php?selectShow=96

I’m actually getting some work done on Kudos 2 today (yes I know it’s a bank holiday). Just some minor improvements such as getting people to phone you when you get back from an event and complain about you not accepting their offer, etc.

Dropping More Prices

I just dropped Democracy 1 (the original game) down to just under ten dollars. As of right now you can get the game for $9.99.

This is partly because it’s an old game, and partly because it’s a response to all those piracy comments about the price of games. I think the game is pretty good value at ten dollars. The basic game design is the same as Democracy 2, although the way it simulates stuff is a bit simpler, and the interface and presentation isn’t as slick as the newer one. However, if none of that bothers you, you can get a pretty decent stratgey game for under ten dollars now!

My companies year-end is at the end of September, so yesterday I entered all the data to see how I was doing in the run up to the business year-end. It’s not as good as I would ahve liked, definitely making less money than last year. Tbh, most of the profit of last year was selling Kudos and My other games on portals. Democracy 2 sold well, but Rock Legend didn’t. I didn’t really make any money worth getting excited about from retail at all. This is all a bit worrying, although I guess you could blame the ‘credit crunch’, but that just sounds unlikely to me. I’ve possibly spent too long making Kudos 2 (and it’s not done yet), and I really need to get my ass in gear now.

Here’s hoping Kudos 2 sells as well as Democracy 2 did (or better!). That would keep things ticking along.

Brits who made the modern world

There was a short 30min documentary on Ch5 in the UK last night, about the guys who made the game ‘Elite‘. They were 2 college kids from Cambridge, UK. One of the best facts from the program was that when they released the game, there were 150,000 BBC computers in the UK. And their game sold 150,000 copies. Now THAT is a hit game. That makes World Of Warcraft look like barbies riding school.

The bits I enjoyed hearing about was how obsessed theyr were with optimising the code and getting the machine to do much more than anyone had before. They had no debugger, and no tools. If the game crashed, they couldn’t step through code line by line as we do now, they had to stare at the code (all 16k of it) until they found the bug. That’s serious hardcore programming. I managed to code 4 games before I worked out how a debugger worked. I never even saw people step through code until I got my first job at Elixir. Sad eh? It’s MUCH easier with breakpoints and a debugger, trust me!

I miss the days of having to optimise code to oblivion. I love reading about tricks like compiled sprites and loop-unrolling, even though many of them are irrelevant now. I’m not the worlds best programmer, but I have managed to code some pretty optimised stuff now and then. I’m very happy with the particle systems I’ve coded, especially how well they run on low spec machines. Given no worries about actually finishing games and shipping them to bring in some rent-money, I think I’d happily spend ages ripping out huge parts of my games are re-optimising the, just for the hell of it. One day maybe…

Playing catch-up

So much has been going on. I did a podcast interview thing as part of this:

http://savygamer.co.uk/2008/08/savygamer-podcast-episode-2.html

Then there was another interview here:

http://insidergamersloop.com/?p=437

Then i joined a tech podcast thing here:

http://saunderslog.com/2008/08/20/squawk-box-august-20-iphone-vs-n-series-smackdown-and-talking-piracy/

And there’s another interview today hopefully, plus some stuff for a UK newspaper, hopefully Saturdays Guardian. I also have been bugfixing in Democracy 2, some pesky bugs I can’t believe I missed. Plus I’m trying out a new payment provider right now. All this, and I saw the stage version of Mort last night. Eeek.

I have got SOME work done on Kudos 2, and hope to get a lot more done today and maybe the weekend.

Everything is changing

It’s been a busy few weeks. The whole debate over piracy basically swamped me for days (and it’s still having repercussions now), and it’s lead to all kinds of positive changes. Obviously the big one was taking DRM out, and the kudos price drop, and this will be followed by some demo changes and similar stuff later on. One of the other changes was that I got a lot of (brutally honest) feedback from people who had one or another criticisms of my site, my order process and my games.

To be honest my site isn’t anywhere near as good as it should be. I’ve been tweaking it the last few days (I’m the web designer and webmaster too), starting with the main page, and I think it’s a bit better already.

I also changed the site from sharing a server to having its own dedicated physical box, which took ages and involved a lot of learning some linux stuff to set up the site properly, debugging email problems etc. That all takes time.

Then finally, there was attempting to address the issues people had with my order process. I basically have 2 problems here:

1) People don’t trust the payment provider because they haven’t heard of them before and

2) Regardless of fraud protection, legitimate customers are annoyed at the occasional processing delays in ordering games.

Now I *thought* I fixed this today, because I found a new payment provider which seems to entirely address the second point. HOWEVER, I now hear that my current provider may be working on implementing amazons one-click payment system (complete with using amazon accounts). This is VERY tempting.

So right now I’m undecided, whether to switch to the payment provider that offers smoother fraud checking, or stick with the one that will put amazon in. Of course, the problem is, all of this waffle takes TIME, and none of that time is going on game design and coding. So tomorrow, I’m going to ignore it all, and just work 100% on testing, coding and design for Kudos 2.