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

The curse of staggeringly slow code

No, I’m not talking about mine, but about *other peoples code* that I encounter on a day to day basis. Some choice examples:

When I start aqtime ( a profiling app, ironically), it hangs for about 10 seconds. then when I load a project (the file is under 100k) it hangs for another ten seconds.

There is no discernible network activity during this time, and the CPU is not thrashed either. How is this even POSSIBLE? A quick check shows that my i7 3600 can do 106 trillion instructions per second. (106,000 MIPS). Thats insane. It also means that in this ten seconds, it can do one thousand trillion instructions. To do seemingly…nothing

Also… for my sins I own a Samsung smart TV. When I start up that pile of crap, if often will not respond to remote buttons for about eight seconds, and even then, it queues them up, and can lag processing an instruction by two or three seconds. This TV has all eco options disabled (much though that pains me), and has all options regarding uploading viewing data disabled. Lets assume its CPU runs at a mere 1% of the speed of my i7, that means it has to get buy on a mere 10 trillion operations per second. My god, no wonder its slow, as I’m quite sure it takes a billion instructions just to change channels right? (even if it did, it could respond in 1/10,000th of a second)

These smiling fools would be less chirpy if they knew how badly coded the interface was

I just launched HTMLTools, some software I use to edit web pages, and it took 15 seconds to load up an present an empty document. fifteen seconds, on an i7 doing absolutely nothing of any consequence.

Why the hell do we tolerate this mess? why have we allowed coders to get away with producing such awful, horrible, bloated work that doesn’t even come close to running at 1% of its potential speed and efficiency.

In any other realm this would be a source of huge anger, embarrassment and public shaming. My car can theoretically do about 150mph. imagine buying such a car and then realizing that due to bloated software, it can only actually manage 0.1 miles per hour. Imagine turning on a 2,000watt Oven, and only getting 2 of those watts used to actually heat something. We would go absolutely bonkers.

an intel i7. So much capability, so little proper usage.

There is a VAST discrepancy between the amount of time it takes optimized computer code to do a thing, and the amount of time the average consumer/player/citizen thinks it will take. We need to educate people that when they launch an app and it is not 100% super-responsive, that this is because it is badly, shoddily, terribly made.

Who can we blame? well maybe the people who make operating systems for one, as they are often bloated beyond belief. I use my smartphone a fair bit but not THAT much, and when it gets an update and tells me its ‘optimizing’ (yeah right) 237 apps… I ask myself what the hell is all of this crap, because i’m sure I didn’t install it. When the O/S is already a bloated piece of tortoise-ware, how can we really expect app developers to do any better.

I think a better source of blame is people who write ‘learn C++ in 7 days’ style books, who peddle this false bullshit that you can master something as complex as a computer language in less time than it takes to binge watch a TV series. Even worse is the whole raft of middleware which is pushed onto people who think nothing of plugging in some code that does god-knows-what, simply to avoid writing a few dozen lines of code themselves.

We need to push back against this stuff. We need to take a bottom-up approach where we start with what our apps/operating systems/appliances really NEED to do, and then try to create the fastest possible environment for this to happen. The only recent example of seen of this is the designing of a dedicated self-driving computer chip for tesla cars. very long explanation below: (chip stats about 7min 30 in)

Why I am obsessed with electric cars (esp: Tesla)

If you follow me on twitter you will know I bang on about electric cars a lot, specifically Teslas, and why I get angry at the FUD and nonsense spread about them online. Why do I care?

Lets get the disclaimers out of the way. Yup, I own one (A 2015 85D Tesla model S with autopilot 1) and yup, I own some tesla stock. Obviously I am biased because I don’t want people to criticize my purchase choice (I am human) and because I have some financial interest (although TBH thats a relatively minor concern. I have stock in Microsoft and Nvidia too but I don’t bang on about em…). So given those obvious points, why else do I care?

Climate Change

First up..the obvious one. Climate change is real. Its also predominantly caused by humans, specifically CO2 emissions, and if you actually ‘do not believe’ that, then please think about what other widely accepted scientific conclusions you would like to dispute. Maybe you don’t believe in magnetic forces either? or perhaps even gravity? maybe the earth is not a sphere but flat? There is a wealth of scientific consensus on this, and you should not only accept the fact, but be absolutely terrified of the consequences. Don’t think about ‘it getting a bit warmer’ think about agricultural yield collapse, food price spikes, food-rioting, mass immigration, resource-wars and global upheaval. This should scare the crap out of you…

…and one of the things we as individuals can do is switch to a cleaner form of transport, notably: an electric car. They are not practical for everyone right now, but will be very soon, and once you buy one you dramatically cut the amount of CO2 you personally are stuffing into the atmosphere. Its a great way to do your bit.

Pollution

Secondly…Pollution. EVs not only emit no CO2 at the tailpipe (and electricity grids get greener every day), but also zero fumes or pollutants of any kind. That means cleaner cities, quieter roads (less noise pollution!) and fewer kids with asthma. And the car behind you on the road is no longer sucking up your exhaust fumes and blowing them into the driver & passengers faces. Plus the newer teslas have HEPA filters in that mean the air in the car will be substantially cleaner than the air outside. ideal for polluted cities.

People sometimes repeat some FUD about cobalt, implying its all from congo, and batteries are full of it. Actually its a mere 3% now, and dropping to 0% soon. Plus its dramatically less of a problem than the impacts of oil dependence…

Convenience

This is the one people just do not get, and will NOT accept…until they own an EV. The caveat here is assuming you have off-road parking at home, OR you work somewhere that has an EV charging point in the car park. (This is getting much, much more common).

Charging an EV is super-cheap (here in the UK I work it out to be just under £0.04 per mile in ‘fuel’, assuming 100% home charging), and actually MORE convenient than owning a petrol/diesel car. The fact is, with an EV, you have a fuel station *at your house*, and it can fill up while you sleep. In some cases you can set the car to charge during off-peak (cheaper) electricity times! The fact that the car charges while you sleep means every day when you get in the car, it has a full battery, so you can drive maybe 200-240 miles before recharging (real-world range in UK).

That 240 sounds low compared to your petrol car, until you realize that petrol car has to go to a special recharging place to get fuel (which costs a fortune), and where you have to stand there like an idiot holding a trigger to fill it up. Oh BTW that fuel is smelly, environmentally damaging and catastrophically dangerous.

On the average day, you do NOT drive 240 miles, and if you *do*, you are likely on a motorway, where you can stop and charge your car (still cheaper than petrol) while you grab a coffee and a donut. Charging speeds are getting faster than ever:

TBH, like 99% of tesla owners, even though I have access to the amazing supercharger network (which the car auto-navigates me to if it thinks I need power), I hardly use it, unless I drive to London and back with passengers in the car. Even then, I don’t *wait* for it, I just pick up an extra 50-60 miles while I have a coffee that I’d have stopped for anyway. No queuing to pay, no holding a pump, no logging in or barcode scanning, just stick the cable in and go grab coffee…

Technology

Electric cars have phenomenal batteries. These are NOT the same as the batteries in your mobile phone or laptop. They do not noticeably lose any charge (in fact the range of my car has gone UP since I bought it…thanks free software upgrades over the internet!). You do *not* have to give even the slightest thought to replacing your battery. You will likely need several new batteries for your old petrol car in the same time that you would notice even a minor degradation in your EV range over time. Battery tech in 2019 is amazing.

Performance

Holy crap they are fast. You might not care (I only care a bit), but since owning my EV, going back to my wife’s car (lexus CT200H hybrid) feels like driving a horse and cart, even in ‘sport mode’. EVs have instant power, real throw-you back in your seat with some force’ levels of power. For real car-geeks who want something sporty, trade in your petrol-car now, its history.

Maintenance

LOL. Whats that? I’ve owned my car 3 and a bit years now. It had an intermittent screen problem which is being fixed this week (under warranty), but apart from that and a minor thing with one door handle (see above, fixed), nothing has gone wrong. It was serviced once, but TBH it didn’t need it. Annual service? LOL. why? whats going to go wrong? the exhaust (nope)? radiator (no)? the drive shaft? (no)… EVs are actually WAY simpler than petrol cars. They are electric motors, a battery…errr and seats and doors I guess. The maintenance costs on them are *trivial*. Oh and satnav updates are streamed automatically while I sleep. For free, obviously.

The Future

Tech like EVs represent tipping-points. Right now they seem niche, but the sales are accelerating FAST, despite a super-well-funded FUD and bullshit campaign by multiple dying industries. Right now finding a petrol station for your old-tech car is easy, ditto a mechanic but that will crossover soon. The future of cars is undeniably electric, and we aren’t far off the point where the re-sale value of a petrol car starts to drop when people realize their next car will be electric, even if they won’t be able to buy one for a few years.

Safety

The top 3 safest cars on the planet right now? All EVs:

…oh and no engine in front of you means your body is not crushed in a front impact, plus the whole front of the car is a crumple zone. And the battery in the floor makes them bottom heavy, meaning they *do not roll*. Oh and I nearly forgot the complete lack of 50 liters of highly flammable liquid that just isn’t in an EV. You want a safe car? You want an EV.

Oh and BTW all electric cars are automatics. Learning to operate a clutch and a gear stick is so 1970s. This isn’t a skill we need to bother learning soon. I thought I’d hate an automatic but OMG I love it. Assing around with gears feels like being in some costume drama fiddling with cumbersome stupid old technology for a joke. I don’t miss it one bit.

I feel very strongly about electric cars mostly because there are so many lies spread about them. Mine is my favorite purchase of all time, except perhaps my house, and I’m not a car guy. I still don’t really know what torque is or what any bits of a traditional car do, nor do I care. But I like cutting edge tech that is so cool it makes you laugh out loud.

If you ever get an opportunity to try one, do so. Even the harshest skeptics are won over the minute they drive one.

BTW if you do buy a tesla, using this code ( http://ts.la/cliff7605 ) gets you some free supercharger miles. I already have unlimited for buying an early one, but at the time of writing this earns you 1,000 free miles.

The #1 metric for your indie game

People do not want to hear this. It will not be popular. There will be denial. I have spent a long time, in phases over the years, in denial about it. I have wanted to believe it was not true, because realizing the truth is often very depressing, and if you are like most passionate and committed indie devs, you associate a lot of your personal self-worth with the success of your game, and you absolutely do not want to hear what I’m about to type. You may disagree, you may REALLY disagree, and for all I know, I may be wrong, I’ve certainly been wrong many times, but I assure you that when I type this, it is absolutely what I believe to be the case right here, right now in 2019 making an indie game for the PC.

The #1 metric for your indie game, in terms of determining its success is how good it is.

There. I said it. Unleash the rage hordes.

There are a whole host of reasons why we may try to argue that this is not true. Maybe luck is the biggest factor (seriously? you can do better than that, especially as some developers,/studios then seem to be weirdly consistently lucky…), Maybe its marketing spend (definitely a factor, but not #1. what was minecraft and flappy birds marketing budget?), maybe its nepotism and who you know? (really? was notch super-connected? was he a regular at GDC parties before minecraft) Maybe its originality (seriously? is rimworld a huge hit because of the original art style?) Maybe its timing? (seriously? when did making a game about income taxes gel with the zeitgeist of gaming tastes then?)

Face facts, we WANT the reason for a games success or lack of success to be something OUTSIDE our control. We want it to be something that we can shake our fist at, and complain about to our friends down the pub. “My game would have been a huge hit, if only I was friends with Mike Bithell, or if I lived in San Francisco, or if I had a bigger art budget, or if I had released it a month/year/decade earlier/later.”

I’ve made loads of games. Seriously loads. Many more than people realize. have you tried Kombat Kars, Space Battle 3001 and Kudos: Rock Legend? Probably not, but I’m responsible for all of them. None of them did that well, and they all kind of suck. I did a game called Planetary Defense, which kinda did ok considering the super-short dev time. It was ok, but the gameplay was fairly shallow. Kudos:Rock legend couldn’t decide if it was serious or casual. Kombat kars was hampered by my total lack of understanding physics programming. Space battle 3001 looked like someones first space game, and played like it too.

There is an absolute art form, to which many devs acquire olympic style skills, to come up with reasons that your game failed. People could write whole books on all the various outside factors that were beyond their control, which meant that inexplicably their last game was not a success. Its quit impressive to see the mental gymnastics. The only factor that is never considered? The actual game. maybe the game is just not good enough. It might be good, but not good ENOUGH.

Its a topic for a whole blog post in itself to explain why if you game is 90% good enough you will get 10% of the sales, when its 95% good enough you get 20% of the sales and when it hits 100% you get 100% and buy a sports car. Just trust me, its true, I have long experience of each stage of that.

And now before you hurl abuse at me, I’ll explain the nuance of what I mean when I say ‘not good enough’. Its probably not polished. The gameplay is not balanced just right. The tutorial is not good enough. The player options are not comprehensive enough. There may not be enough content. The art style may clash. The sound effects may be annoying. The music may be too repetitive, or annoying. There may be big obvious missing features where players expected things to be in the game. There may not be enough tooltips or hotkeys. The translations may be of poor quality. The performance may suck for some players., and so on and so on…

Production Line was started over 3 years ago. about two years ago it was a good game I was very proud of. it got better and better during early access. it was released this year and I considered it to be a very good, polished, high quality game. It got extremely good reviews. I could easily have moved on, but I have not, and I’m still working on it every day. It is not good enough. It is very good, and has made a profit, and sold a lot of copies, but it is not good enough.

I’m on update 76 right now (started working on it today), which is based around changes to some charts and graphs that display data about the component import costs. This is a tiny part of a tiny part of the game, but I am aware that its a bit obscure and confusing and some players have said so. The games reviews are very positive and the vast, vast majority of players have no problem with those charts, or do not care, but some players think they suck, and dispassionately I agree. They need to be made better.

That wont be the last thing I improve or tweak. I’ll be working through my polish list for a long time. As I work more and more on the game, and finesse it more and more, the sales go UP not down (as is the curve with most indie games). I’m not awaiting the imminent demise of the games sales, but the absolute opposite. I’m 90% there and heading towards 100%. Quality is all that matters.

I know this isn’t an option for everyone because: experience & economics. Not everyone has 39 years of coding experience, not everyone has a financial cushion that allows them to spend a bit longer to make a game higher quality. I know this. I know the position I am in, very acutely. The reason for this blog post is not to criticize but inspire. I want people who are struggling as indie devs to do well, and I feel thats best achieved by pointing out the truth.

We all lie about ourselves, even to ourselves. I think I am much funnier and better looking than I really am. I also think I’m thinner than I am, and probably kid myself I have some hair. We also lie about stuff we do, and stuff we make. The problem is, when your own sense of self-worth and your own pride get in the way of seeing reality, you are doing nobody any favors. Your indie game is probably not good enough, and deep down, you know it.

Unstable income: indie development woes

There is a disparity between the information people outside a creative industry have, and the truth about working in that industry. This is because the views of people who are very successful in an industry get more coverage, both through conventional media (because reporting on what multi millionaires like Adele or Tom Cruise or Gabe Newell does gets more clicks) and organically through media like twitter, where we naturally follow ‘celebrities’ who are inevitable wealth and famous.

(I am as guilty as anyone. I follow Elon Musk and Brad Wardell and Mike Bithel on twitter. If you are a struggling indie who hasn’t had a hit game ever, I’m unlikely to follow you unless I know you personally…partly because I just *do not know who you are*.)

To compound the problem, there is the whole issue of ‘fake it till you make it’, where indies and other creative types project a false narrative of success in the hope that success will breed success. This is just playing to human nature, and is understandable as a marketing strategy, but its damaging in terms of giving the false impression to people who want the real facts.

And to add to all these factors (as if they were not enough), we have a natural human tendency to want to place emphasis on our successes and minimize our failures. I am much more likely to tell you about all those times I did a share deal and made money than admit just how many times it went badly, badly wrong… This is just how humans operate.

The reality is that there are a number of big downsides to the freelance/self-employed/start-your-own company life that probabl;y need re-emphasizing from time to time. Here are the big ones

Low income

You probably, on average, will not make much money as a game developer, writer, artists, actor or any other creative pursuit. Its just harsh economics. Lots of people want the jobs and few are available. by jobs I also mean sales, so lots of people want a hit indie game and there are only so many buyers. Simple market forces mean most people do badly. In this article in 2018, Mike Rose found that 82% of indie games didn’t make their creators the minimum wage. What makes you so sure you are in the top 18%?

Unstable Income

People often equate unstable income with ‘you earn $5k one month and $3k the next month. sheesh!’ but the reality can be way worse. Think more like this: You earn $32k one month, and then absolutely zero for a year. Or maybe two years. Can you be *that* disciplined with money to live like that? I’ve seen my own income double in one year, then halve the next year, and I’m a stable indie with 20 years experience and many shipped games.

A typical indie games far-from-stable earnings

Isolation

You may well work from home. Whole days may pass without you talking to anyone. You have no work ‘colleagues’ and no workplace chat or gossip. There are no social groups in the evening of people grabbing a quick drink or food after work. There are no workplace parties or works events or trips. You may do 95% of your socializing through a web browser. Not normal or healthy

Financial Planning

You will not have an employers pension, so should set one up. How do you do that? Can you get a mortgage? how do you prove earnings? Who gives you a loan when your income is so unreliable. How can you set up things like subscriptions, or direct debits for bills, or book holidays when you have no idea what you will earn. Even if you get a mortgage, how can you know if you can afford it?

Nobody understands your job

Meeting with friends in normal jobs will start to feel weird. Most of their work-chat is about how they hate their job, or colleagues, or boss. You cannot relate to this at all. They claim to be envious of your lifestyle, but have no idea what it is like. They do not understand why on earth you would work at the weekend, you do not understand why they have to rush back because they have a pre-set lunch *hour*. They don’t know what its like to pitch for work, or a publishing deal, you cant remember what performance reviews are like, or why flexi-time is so valued. They think you have made the wrong decision. You think they have no ambition.

The business facade

You are conscious of always having to represent your business side. You cant get drunk and tell people your job is pointless and the work boring. You are always thinking about your public image, and not wanting to upset potential customers, or investors. Every dumb or sensitive comment you make on twitter could lose you business, even wreck your career. Your views on social media are inseparable from the public face of your employer, which is you.

Nobody to blame

When everything goes wrong and nobody hires you or the game flops, or nobody buys your art, it is your fault. You cannot tell yourself, even subconsciously, that this is the fault of X in marketing or Y in sales, and how you did a good job. Ultimately there is nobody to pass the blame onto. You can come up with excuses and rationalizations but ultimately the whole company is you and there is nobody else to blame. Failure feels much more personal, and harder to shake off. Even when you are successful you worry about failing in the future.

Ultimately, its a choice that depends very much on your personality. Working for yourself in a creative field can be very rewarding, financially as well as personally, and i would DREAD to go be an employee again, but it really depends so much on your personality. I am very self-motivated, I don’t mind (within reason) the isolation, and I’m very risk tolerant, so it works for me.

Also do not forget that the reverse applies. I have personality characteristics that mean I don’t like working as a normal employee at all. I can be argumentative, arrogant, short-tempered, I hate being told what to do, I hate working in noisy places and hate commuting. I can be very moody, and not good at working with extroverted people… there are so many reasons for me to choose the lifestyle I have, despite its many shortcomings.

It is very easy for people who are successful in a field to forget the many downsides for those who are more typical. I probably vastly understate the effect that low income and unstable income has on people. If money worries can lead to stress and health problems, which leaks into relationship problems (which can lead to more stress)… then this can be all consuming. Sometimes these things compound. Trying to be extroverted and upbeat and SELL SELL SELL when inside you are worried about paying for food and that your partner is disappointed in your career choice…. cannot be easy.

My top tip: TALK to other people in similar fields, whether you are in the industry already and struggling, or considering leaving your job for this business. It can be very enlightening. No reading of blogs or twitter is as good as real world ‘pub-chat’ with people in the same position. Even just hearing other people agree with you about the negatives of the industry can be strangely re-assuring. Somehow us humans like to know that we are not suffering alone, even if we are still suffering.

Finally releasing : The Doors that go like this expansion for Production Line

Today is the day! At last someone has taken the time to think of the billionaires… We release an expansion for ‘Production Line’ today, which adds the following features…

Support for Gull wing doors like these:

And for Scissor-wing doors like these:

And also Butterfly-wing doors like these…

And not least a brand new body type called ‘supercar’. It looks like this:

This is the first DLC for Production Line, and it will be available direct from us at www.positech.co.uk/productionline/dlc.html as well as the humble store, GoG and Steam. its $4.99. I did get in touch with a bunch of youtubers and streamers and sent out some keys, but if you want to see exactly how it all works with my smiling face involved, you can check out this blog video I made about the expansion here:

I honestly have no idea if this DLC will be of interest to just a few super-car geeks or to everyone playing the game, so its a bit of a gamble, but I do like having a stupidly expensive car to build myself, and I definitely think it adds to the late game, and adds to the experience for people who want to build super-sprawling factories with some incredibly high-end options.

The DLC actually launches at 9.00AM PDT which is apparently 5.00PM where I am in the UK. here is the link to grab it or wishlist it: