Cliffski's Blog

I was ill. It started on the Friday at the end of GDC, and I still have a bit of a cough now. I wont catalog all the symptoms, but yikes… I was not a well or happy chap. Thats the last time I ever go to GDC without a biohazard suit and a large vat of hand sanitizer. Its a real pain, because normally I come back from GDC all motivated and keen, and excited to work on stuff, yet I ended up going virtually an entire week without writing any code, which I think is the longest non-holiday pause for me in 19 years…

Luckily I got some new artwork while I was away, and plugging that in (mostly animations of new characters) required very little concentration or health, so I was still able to release a patch a few days ago with some worthy updates. I’m not operating at 95% of my usual efficiency (although have another enforced day-off due to family commitments today….), and hope to be back in full bug-fix/balance/feature mode in a day or two.

Production Line continues to sell very nicely, and we have a lot of wishlists. I have finally taken the decision that the game price should go up to $19.95, probably at the weekend. This has been something I’ve put off a long time. I can see arguments both way, and I have certainly analysed the decision a lot. PL is not ‘finished’, but its pretty feature-rich, especially for a game currently selling at $17.99. I’ve mentioned price rises a few times in my videos and the last time I did it, literally nobody cautioned against it, so I think the time for a price rise is kind of overdue. Will it affect sales? TBH unless you are making >$100k/month from your game, its really hard to tell any changes from the statistical noise that accompanies all game sales.

In other news, I finally bought myself one of those big green-screen thingies, so I can have a slightly-more-professional look to my blog videos, and I also finally got to witness this amazing image:

Which is like some sort of promised land. I shopped around for an ISP and discovered the following:

1. My current (biz-focused and overpriced) ISP didn’t reply to me in 2 days, after we emailing and saying GIVE ME THIS NOW.
2. BT, who actually run the darned lines, had a pop-up box that just gave me a blank dialog with a close button when selecting my house (and yes…i tried 2 browsers), so I couldnt order anything.
3. Zen, who get good reviews and have great deals, wanted me to PHONE (yes phone) them to order, at which point I was put ina  queue. I enabled ring-back, but didn’t get one.
4. IDNet, who actually let me click buttons and order a fucking product. So I did.

So there you have it. We assume that in a free market, a careful comparison of customer service history, reputation, features and pricing is what determines success. In reality, just having a product that fucking works (in this case an order system) gets you the custom… I ordered 220Mbps down, 20Mbps up, because tempting though 30 up is…. its kinda nuts. I currently have 1Mbps up, so I think I’ll still detect a difference… No idea when they actually come to install it though. I get a new router delivered, then someone from BT is going to have to come drill holes in the wall…

 

Nearly at the end now… which is kinda cool, although I have 2 micro-events tomorrow I am looking forward to. Frankly five nights living out of a hotel on my own is more than enough for me.

Today has been pretty cool it started bad with me having to drenched on the short walk to get in a queue to buy a coffee because again… US hotels seem to be resistant to providing coffee machines. Are they part-owned by starbucks FFS? I then handled emails and social media stuff before I headed off for lunch with Jake (Grey Alien Games) and Tommy (Super Meat Boy), which was cool, and good fun, from that…it was off to ichiros cool micro-GDC thing to discuss the good and the bad of steam, and questions we had for them.

During the chat, prompted by ichiro very sensibly pointing out that its better to be positive than negative, I realized that many of the ‘toxic community’ problems that steam has can be solved by carrot, not stick. Sometimes, especially in early-access, players mention really good ideas, or give great feedback, or reply to other users tech support requests and solve problems for you.

Right now… I have no way to reward those players. Maybe we should take just 0.1% of steams cut, and covert that into ‘gems’ or whatever the best way to generate a steam ‘currency’ is, and allow developers to give that out on the forums? Nice steam guide you created there… here are 100 gems. Thanks for answering that users tech request… here are 5 gems. People who act like total asses, swear a lot, are rude or abusive… yeah they aren’t going to get any gems. Carrot, not stick.

Anyway… GDC 2018 has already been good, from my POV. I don’t feel ill, I’ve had some great times, some fun meetups with fellow devs, discussed some interesting industry stuff and learned some interesting industry news, and am confident it was worth my while in a business sense, as well as a sociable / personal sense.

I am looking forward to seeing my wife, my own bed, tea! my cat jack, and to get back into coding mode though.

 

So yeah… not feeling 100%, maybe its the dreaded GDC flu from so many handshakes and talking close to people in noisy bars. Maybe its just waking up tired and thirsty in a strange city. Hopefully I’ll shake it off.

Yesterday I didn’t go to a single GDC thing, and this is the final nail in the GDC conference coffin for me. The interesting stuff is the meetups, the parties, the lunches, the hanging-out and talking about games. Next year, if I come, I’m not getting a pass.

I went to a few events at a side-conference thing that I am rally keen on, where I told people my own experiences with advertising strategy, and then was in a cool discussion of sim game design, and artificial life. The AL one was especially interesting. There are  lot of cool, talented coders who are working on, and experimenting with interesting artificial life ideas, but translating them into games people want to buy is much harder. The trouble seems to be that the coder, and the CPU have all the fun, and the ‘player’ just gets a cool screensaver. Someone will crack this problem one day.

Its funny the extent to which the more game devs you know, the less you talk about game dev. It sounds weird, but listening to people talk about the house house they bought / are renovating, or their pets, or their holidays or whatever, becomes the standard thing after a few years. I’m sure some people for whom this is their first GDC and have been in the industry for just a year or two find it weird to overhear me and a bunch of dev veterans talking about solar panels, deer hunting or growing super-hot peppers.

In the evening I went to the humble party, traditionally the best party of the show, albeit one thats still a little too busy and loud for me:

A bigger venue, with more of a ‘video game event’ vibe than the Monday night thing. Everyone is here, and its great to catch up, although TBH I’m not envious of people who have anything ‘riding’ on this event. Imagine having to justify a flight, hotel and GDC pass on the basis of the value of business-contacts made in a loud, dark sweaty nightclub. It definitely CAN be done, I’m just glad I don’t feel like I need to do it any more. I’m old…

Today will be much more chilled for me, which suits me fine as its a day to recover, maybe even look around SF a little bit, who knows. Hopefully I’ll feel better later today.

GDC, after you have been a few years, certainly is a big change from normal indie day-do-day development. From being someone sat in a room mostly alone, mostly just typing, you end up in conversation pretty much all the time.  I chatted to developers on the plane, on the BART train from the airport to my hotel, and then all through the day and evening. Its more than a bit tiring.

My GDC adventure started with high stress. Having teased a fellow dev mercilessly about him ‘worrying about nothing’ that it *might* snow a bit the day he left, I woke up at 7AM to discover this:

at 7AM, where I live, the roads are unused, let alone not gritted. I basically half drove half slide and skidded the first 20 miles, getting out to help push stuck cars in heavy snow, and keeping one eye on the wrecked cars and vans that littered the roadside on the way to the airport. Its a small miracle I got to the airport both in time for my flight, and with no dents in my car.

I flew virgin, rather than British Airways. Their in-flight-entertainment and seats kinda sucked, but the layout was good. I think BA wins overall. I did not sleep at all, whereas I sometimes do with BA.

I’m staying right in the very heart of San Francisco, asked for a ‘quiet’ room rather than one that lets you hear the vintage trolleybus bells from the street. They are cool and touristy the first time, but no the eighth. The weather here is best described as ‘meh’, but at least I don’t need a scarf, hat and gloves like the UK:

Day 1 (Sunday) is basically just saying hello to fellow devs and putting off sleep. I order some ‘chips’ in a bar for $8 and get given crisps. Fuck that.

Monday is GDC proper, and likely the day where I am most likely to attend the actual show. I attended 2 talks, of the maybe 5% of the show that my cheapo indie-pass gives me access to. They were good, interesting talks, but if they were PWYW would I have paid $50 each for them? Nope. I need to stop wasting money on a pass…

If you do enough social media, even hiding your GDC pass makes you someone who will get recognized a lot, so there is a lot of admitting I am me, shaking hands and saying hello. I finally have got over the shock of realizing just *how many* game devs there are in the world. I long ago gave up on Tea in California, and am resigned to spending money in Starbucks on coffee all the time. Their monopoly position here makes steam look like amateurs.

The evening is nice, drinks with a bunch of devs, talking about identity politics, movies and TBH anything but games, then a quick hello at an indie meal, followed by a proper sit down meal and trading war stories and old-man stories with a bunch of industry veterans. Eventually, its time to uber to a party so loud I wonder what the point is. As always, everyone holds their events at the same place every year. Anything over polite restaurant volume makes an event pointless for me, and I need sleep anyway. I could uber back…but I know SF now, and I hit my 10k steps on the way back to my hotel.

US hotels provision of coffee machines is abysmal, so I have to physically leave my hotel and go to Starbucks to get a reasonably priced hot drink. Madness. I don’t need a TV in my room, I just need a fridge with milk in it and a coffee machine. Why is this so fucking hard? 10k steps means I can justify a donut, something I never eat back home. If I judge it just right, I wont actually put on any weight :D.

Jet lag is still my constant companion, waking at 6AM the next morning. Again…no hot beverage, I must leave the hotel room to fetch one like some sort of feral indie beast. Arggghh,

We lost our cat jadzia this week to kidney problems :( we had her 16 years. I mention this because something I notice about my website is that there is still a picture of her in the root folder of www.positech.co.uk at this link. This is the image of her from when we got her 16 years ago, when I already had that web address. Through about 5 different ISPs, several different web-hosts and plenty of website redesigns, that link is still live, mostly because I hate having 404s on my site. There is no technical reason to ever kill off a web link, we have redirection tech, its just laziness for when people redesign their sites.

In the same week our cat was put to sleep, my website domain expired with zero warning from my domain name registrar. Suddenly positech was unreachable, and was theoretically up for grabs. Cue very angry cliff on the phone, and in web-chat demanding to renew the domain immediately, no matter what that involves, for the longest time imaginable, no matter what that costs. You will now find positech.co.uk is mine until 2028. Bwahahahaha.

Anyway, the reason I mention these two things is that they are two symptoms of the ‘problem’ of having a long lived indie games business. First… what kind of muppet uses the root of their website to store an image of their cat? Don’t we have at least a flipping ‘images’ folder? What a dork, and yet it, and a bunch of other files are forever stuck there (yeah I could redirect but meh…) Secondly, and more relevantly, what the hell am I doing with a custom-coded (HTML) website rather than word-press anyway, and why for the love of all that is holy, is it sat on a dedicated server that is madly over-specced for it:

Of course the reason is…legacy. Virtual servers were a ‘bit dodgy’ back in the days when I first got a dedicated one. The inability to easily reboot the server if things went wrong was an issue. And I needed bandwidth, and a lot of it, because serving up thousands of copies of game demos that might be 100MB soon adds up, and because I was getting a lot of traffic to my site for my games, my forums, my blog, my GSB online stuff, and metrics & sales reporting, showmethegames.com, and so-on. Plus I was selling my own games, plus Big Pharma, and redshirt, and it looked like that may expand. I couldn’t trust all that to run on AWS in the early years of AWS.

And back then… youtube was not a big deal for game devs 9which is my my youtube channel is my name, not my company, and used to have silly videos of me shooting arrows at melons on it), and facebook for business wasn’t a thing either, and thus a much larger proportion of gamedev-related stuff about *my games* came to *my site*. Back then you HAD tto have a site, and it had to be FAST, because it was a vital part of your business. Thus…fuck wordpress, lets do hand-coded html, and lets use a CDN account with Amazon S3 etc etc..

These days would I bother? TBH, if I was starting out as a gamedev now… I would probably have a simple wordpress blog for my game, with a buy link to sell direct (always sell direct etc), but would probably make youtube my #1 route for talking about my games and communicating with customers. Maintaining your own internet forums is a CHORE, yet I have forums with 74,000 posts on, so scrapping them now would be nuts. This means I have to split my time interacting with the community between reddit/facebook/steam/youtube/my forums/my blog/twitter. I get *some* value from each of those, but TBH, its way too many. I would like to prune that at some point, but am not sure how. Either that, or get a proper, trained-up community manager and have them deal with it all (but people much prefer talking direct to the dev anyway).

This isn’t just a problem with websites and web-interaction though, it also happens with biz stuff, and  publishing. I have some games on itunes. TBH if you put a gun to my head and asked me which ones… I’m not 100% sure. I have some on macgamestore too, I even sell the odd game through outdated fastspring links. I’m now so busy I only settle up with my old mac-games partner at redmarblegames pretty much annually. I have contracts with almost everyone, deals with almost everyone, and some of them have been worth it, and many have not. Over the years… it thins out, and I dont release new games on platforms that bring in too few sales. I just wish I’d been more fussy from the start. I should cancel my YMLP account and my S3 account for starters.

My advice on avoiding all this mess? make decisions about new channels, new websites, new forms of interacting with people, very seriously. Don’t just try and muddle through like me. After 19 years it gets messy as hell.