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

Positech is funding a solar-powered borehole in cameroon!

Posted on January 22, 2026

Long time readers of this blog will know that in the past we have funded two schools being built in Cameroon through the charity ‘Building schools for Africa‘. To cut a long story sort, I wanted to do something charitable, that was efficient and effective, and frankly you get a real good ROI when you do something like this, rather than donate to a charity in a relatively rich country like my own. £15-20k spent on a UK school gets you not much, but it builds a whole school in Cameroon, so to me the choice is obvious. FWIW I have no connection to Cameroon, I’ve never been there, but its a poor country that could really do with some help.

I did actually do one local school thing here, We paid for solar panels to be put on the roof of a local primary school. If you are wondering what this solar obsession is all about, I started a solar-farm company and built one in the UK. Its a loooong story :D. Oh and we donated a bunch of money to War Child in the past too, which is a super worthy charity for refugees.

But anyway, we are doing it again! After a long gap in charity giving while I got stressed about the spiraling cost of the solar farm, I can finally do stuff like this again. I had contacted Building Schools For Africa a while ago saying if they have any more solar-powered borehole projects, I would love to fund one, and they recently got in touch with just that. They send you a big government study on the problems, the impact a borehole would have, a cost spreadsheet and feasibility report etc. In this case, I was sent the one for the school (which was paid for by another donor) at the location where they need a borehole and it made very depressing reading. The borehole will be in bagam, shown here:

If you read that report, you would NEVER complain about your school again. Its unlikely your school has insufficient textbooks, or a dirt floor that floods in the rainy season. Its unlikely that the roof leaks so badly that the (shared) schoolbooks get destroyed. Its very unlikely the lack of a door means stray animals wander in and do animal things in the classroom. And its super unlikely that all the kids arrive late, and tired because they have been sent miles before school to fetch water.

Luckily, a proper engineered borehole solves a lot of problems. Its mostly one of time. We take fresh, clean, drinkable water for granted, but we should not, because its not universal. If you have a long walk to fetch water every day, thats a huge economic impact. Less time to attend school, less time to work, and it has serious economic implications. Being able to access clean reliable drinking water right next to a school will be a fantastic thing!

The cost is about £20k. Here is some detail from the charity:

The project provides for a solar-powered pump, to take water from the borehole to a large storage tank and pipework to take it on to 3 stand taps at central locations in the community, as well as training in the maintenance of all aspects of the facility.  This project is expected to totally transform the community and allow it to thrive: it is also seen as a peace-building initiative in a part of Cameroon that has been struggling for the past ten years due to additional pressures caused by the anglophone crisis.

And from the feasibility report:

Due to the topography the environment and that of the school. We came up with the various considerations

The overhead storage tank can be constructed at the school where the borehole will be drilled. The water storage tank will have to be constructed high enough to overcome the steep nature of the environment to be able to supply water up to the market.

The borehole can be drilled at the market where it is higher than the surface of the school. The storage tank will be constructed just few meters above ground. With this height difference, with the help of gravity, water can easily flow down slope to the market, the priority consumers which is the school, the palace and nearby residents.

TBH I think ‘palace’ might be a mis-translation, as looking at the location, I do not see anything I would call a ‘palace’. Anyway, I am excited about the project, because I love solar power, and remote communities in Africa is EXACTLY the best use case for distributed solar generation. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing updates on the project. And of course solar powered means super-convenient, and no work for people collecting water. Plus I think its awesome that for a lot of those kids, they will start to associate electricity with solar power by default, which makes sense.

Anyway, this is my ‘feel-good’ project for the year!

Welcome to the new webserver!

Posted on January 9, 2026

This has taken a while. Much longer than I expected, and been difficult, but ultimately I think worthwhile. For a very very long time, positech’s website (and positech energy’s website) have been hosted in the USA. I think the server was in Dallas, Texas. But I’m not sure, nor did I care. The general assumption back in the 2000s was that most web traffic was from the USA, and to minimize page loading times, you should host your site in the USA, even if like me, you are personally in Europe.

But Lo! It came to pass that in 2025 and 2026 the USA got a new government that decided to treat my own country (the UK) like we are the enemy. I frankly got sick of reading comments from the likes of Trump and Musk that I lived under sharia law in a violent failed state. Especially given our gun crime rates are extremely low compared to the US, and that amazingly, the sharia law meme is total and utter made-up fantasy bullshit. Frankly, I got sick of being insulted by the leaders of a country I was regularly paying money to… and pretty much everyone I speak to here in the UK feels equally insulted and enraged.

I cannot change US foreign policy. I cannot change who the US public decided to vote in as their president (or effectively new King). But I do have choices as to how to spend my money, and given that its entirely up to me where I host my websites, I have decided to pick my own country (England!) as the best place. Frankly I do not *trust* any US web host any more. So I looked around and then found a web host called Krystal.

Krystal seem to have two selling points from my POV. One: They are in the UK (Woohoo!) and Two, all of their servers are one hundred percent powered by renewable energy. As anyone who has read my blog for a while will know, I like that! Granted, I am not exactly in desperate need to reduce my carbon emission, given that I built and own an entire solar power station, but if there are companies out there doing the ight thing regarding sourcing energy, I want to support them.

I have no idea where Krystal get their energy supply from, but in my fantasies, its coming from the wind farm right next to Trump’s scottish golf course.

I try to avoid being nakedly political on my blog. Thats not what its for but the ENTIRE reason for moving webhosts was to reduce my links in some small way, to the USA because of the current US govt, and I think it only fitting and fair to say so. The site currently has a bunch of DNS and domain name related problems, but I am sure they will get sorted out soon! Also I have some cool stuff to announce, once everything has finished moving and this blog is definitely working.

A calendar year of solar farm ownership

Posted on January 1, 2026

So yup, I somehow built a solar farm, and it was tricky, but now is the relatively easy bit, where I just have this huge capital asset sat on a hillside somewhere, and hopefully it makes some money? Lets look at what an actual real uninterrupted solar farm ownership year looks like. Which obviously means looking at the annual combined chart from the 10 Solis inverters:

I also have very similar data from the actual overpriced meter that measures the farm output. Thats normally lower (and is sadly the metric I get paid on), because there is some leakage of power in the transmission from inverter to to meter. However there was some data-outages in the inverter reporting during the year (since fixed with a better router), so some inverter data was lost, but caught by the Orsis meter, which is therefore a higher number! Here is that chart:

So in general the chart of output was pretty much as expected, as was the total output. There was a bit of a weird skew towards earlier in the year. March and April were weirdly high, and July and August weirdly low. Normally I would expect a perfect bell curve. BTW if you have home rooftop solar and think this chart looks weirdly smooth, be aware that we have obviously no shading, and the panels cover 4 acres, so any minor fluctuations do tend to cancel each other out. But anyway, lets talk business!

I do not have actual accounts for that period, but a quick rough check shows that the money paid to me in that 12 months by the energy company I sell to (Ovo) totalled about £146,000. That includes selling the REGO certificates, also to Ovo. That sounds quite nice until you deduct all the costs. So for example:

  • Energy import costs (to run the site) £6,000
  • Rent payment to landowner £6,200
  • Internet/Connectivity for meter £800
  • Accountancy for company £1,000
  • Repair costs for storm damage £8,000
  • Other minor costs £100
  • Maintenance (Annual) £9,300

So some quick sums show a whopping annual profit of £114,600. OMG amazeballs.

But hold on a minute… surely I need to depreciate a solar farm that has cost me about £1.6m to build. So over 25 years that becomes an annual depreciation of £64,000. so that leaves me with a profit of £50,600.

I would be very happy with that, but in truthy I need to set aside funds for two other events. One would be the failure of an inverter. They are not cheap, and replacement costs are non trivial, so lets assume this costs me £10k every year. Lets also assume there is some money set aside for some catastrophic event requiring panel replacements, or theft of cables etc, and put that at another £15k a year (minimum). Thats then a profit of £25,600 per year.

Also be aware that the output from the panels will very slowly degrade over time, so the revenue may actually fall, and if wholesale energy prices fell, they could fall further. But lets be optimistic and go with £25k a year in actual profit. That works out at a return on investment of about 1.56% a year. Now to be fair, everything needs to be inflation adjusted, as prices will rise, but so will costs, and therefore that 1.56% is a REAL return, not the same as interest on a bank account. So for example, right now my company bank account pays 4.25% but inflation is 3.5% so the ACTUAL rate of return is only 0.75% which means…

THIS GIVES ME A BETTER RETURN THAN A SAVINGS ACCOUNT

Which is a relief (that its not actually losing money), but still a little less than hoped for, But if you know me, you know I did this for the environment, and to do my bit in the fight against climate change, even if certain maniacs in the US are determined to actually do the opposite and kill us all. This was never a business decision, but a passion-project one. And who knows, energy prices could rise! And in terms of ‘the solar business’ I did a VERY BAD JOB of getting this built. That £1.6m could have been more like £1.3m if I was more aware of what I was doing. I am very sure that big solar farm developers, or just more experienced ones do a better job, have economies of scale, and get better returns.

I regret nothing. I won a solar farm and its awesome. I didn’t do a good job of getting it built, but I made it happen!

Eventually a simpler, more local website

Posted on December 17, 2025

My positech website has been online since 1999. Initially it was just a page for my first game (Asteroid Miner) and a picture of my first cat. Since then, a lot has happened, and I have moved web hosts more times than I can remember. I was sensible enough to realize early on that you needed a folder for each game, and to be organised as a developer website, not just a single game website, but where I really screwed up is when I started thinking it made sense to have a separate server account for each game, with its own logins, and domain name, so you could stop any of those sites bringing down the whole server, by having bandwidth and disk space quotas etc.

When you are renting a physical dedicated server, this stuff seems no big deal. It also seemed pretty simple to host my own blog (this was originally on blogspot) and my own forums. When I was selling a lot of games, publishing third party games, and generally trying to ‘scale’, this all seemed reasonable and made sense. A lot of my games had some form of back-end php, if only for stats reporting, so having different php versions possible for each account was also considered fairly sensible.

But frankly fuck all that

In 2025 my life is very different. I have 100% stopped publishing 3rd party games. It was way, way too stressful, and only one of those games (big pharma) was a big revenue generator. I also have not released a new serious game since Democracy 4, although I made a little space shooter (gratuitous space shooty game) about a year ago (see below). I am working on a really fab game, but its more of a labour of love.

More recently, for various reasons, my company became a ‘large company’ for tax purposes, which is kinda funny, because it happened due to stock-trading, not actually selling games. Something this makes very clear is that in the last few years, I’ve done better financially as a stock trader than as a game developer. Granted, the market has been very bullish, but even so it does put into perspective just how much work running a games company is, for comparatively bad returns and a lot of stress and complexity.

Also… while I was relaxing after shipping Democracy 4, I somehow built a power station:

Something I learned the hard way, is that owning an energy company is VERY complex and VERY stressful. Added to all of this, I am now aged 56 and am supposed to be paying more attention to my health and happiness. Anyway, all of these factors combine to make me want to have a simpler games business than I currently have, and also therefore a simpler website. A simpler website means its easy to just move it to a cheaper server, and it means its much simpler to maintain.

So today I started the process of dumping all the various ‘siteworx’ accounts into just one. I will actually end up with two anyway, because one will be Positech Games, and one Positech Energy, but thats still way simpler than it is now. That means one version of php, which will be the latest one, and if that breaks older games (relatively minor) online features then so be it. Big AAA publishers literally switch off servers for old games, which I have never done, and frankly 15 years after an indie game’s release is, if you ask me, pretty understandable.

FWIW my forums are NOT on my website, but hosted for $50 a month, which is kinda annoying because they are so old, so I might just abandon them entirely. I should probably just download it all as an archive just in case… I know there is an argument for keeping forums for SEO but… really? In 2025? 99% of traffic seems to come from store websites anyway. And $600 a year would buy a lot of ads in comparison with people stumbling upon 15 year old forum threads.

So yes, you might be thinking “dude, you clearly make $$$ from the stocks, just keep the same web host and forum hosting”, and I can see the logic there, but I really hate *clutter*, and I find anything I pay for out of inertia, or subscribe to, or manage to be a form of clutter. My dream business has no website, no social media, no accounts anywhere, no paperwork, just me reading, making decisions and occasionally clicking a mouse. I am the polar opposite of those aspirational CEO types who want 2 personal assistants, a busy office with 100 staff and wall-to-wall meetings and appointments :D. I don’t need a lot of staff to make me feel important.

And lastly, I want to move my website out of the USA. Frankly, as world events continue on their current path, I do not want to pay any more money into a country whose leaders routinely hurl abuse at my own. Completely cutting yourself off from the USA as a games company would be super hard, but a website can be anywhere. I sell a lot in Europe and Asia anyway, so there is no magic rule saying I should be hosting my site in Texas anyway. Plus its nuts to be paid in $, convert it to £ then pay a website bill in $ later anyway. So when I am ready and do make my move, I will move both positech websites to the UK.

Currently I overpay a lot. My site, including this blog, seems very happy on its current server: 2 cores, 6GB RAM, 120GB storage, and yet somehow $80 a month? Fuck that. I expect to pay less than half that…

Is indie game dev even viable as a business in 2025?

Posted on November 8, 2025

I do not recall much of the 2000 movie ‘Gladiator’, but I did like this bit:

[As the barbarian calls out his cry, his mangy band of barbarians emerge from the forest, shaking and waving their spears and shields, ready to fight.]

QUINTUS: People should know when they’re conquered.
MAXIMUS: Would you, Quintus? Would I?

And I think its pretty insightful. Here is another segment from a movie. In this case ‘Other People’s money’

You know, at one time, there must have been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw.

My point? That people are very very bad at working out when the industry they are in, whether its staying independent from the Roman Empire, or making ‘Buggy Whips’ is about to become unviable. The trouble with being in the games industry, is that the overwhelming majority of people doing it REALLY love video games. And if you have decided to risk everything by creating your OWN video game company with your own money, then that means you probably REALLY REALLY love video games, or at least the process of making them. And sadly, that means you probably lack the required perspective to evaluate how viable it is as a business.

But to outsiders, its often obvious. When a new cafe or restaurant is clearly doomed, and is in the wrong place, or has the misfortune to witness the opening of a starbucks next door, pretty much everyone walking past the place can go ‘yeah thats not going to last’, but the owners? its amazing how much hopium you can generate if the alternative is to see your dreams completely crushed.

Is indie video gaming in that situation now? Maybe. Its not clear. But it does not look good. True, there are an endless parade of indie games that make a bazillion dollars and become super huge. I’m sure the vampire survivors and balatro devs have a very healthy bank balance. But the percentage of indie game developers actually making a living? There is no real data on it, but anecdotally it looks pretty bad. And although its very common for EVERY indie dev to think that they are the chosen ones in that one percent that will be balatro, not an also-ran, its worth knowing the odds. I have always maintained that knowing how bad the odds are is not defeatism, its much needed data when you decide IF to attempt something, and how much effort will be required.

I recently saw mention of a game about running a medieval style tavern. It caught my interest because I have played that game. Its called Tavern Master. I played it a lot, and really enjoyed it. It was a good idea and well executed. But no, this was not that game. It was another game about running a tavern. Already that is bad news, because that means the market for tavern master is already split in half. Can the devs really get enough sales with TWO games about a medieval tavern? Behold…

958 results. This is, surely, absolutely insanely unviable. I do not recall tavern master even being a big indie hit. It did ok, sure, but not enough to explain so many competing games on steam. All of these games are commercial attempts, on steam, paying the $100 fee in hopes of taking some of Tavern Master’s audience. How many of them will be financially viable? 2? 3? surely not more than 10% of them. Surely not.

And note that 99% of this titles were shipped BEFORE AI art generation became a thing. How difficult is it to make a game about running a medieval tavern? Well when I started making games in 1997, it was very very hard. But then came Unity, and everything got way easier. Then comes the Unity Asset store and its easier still. Now we have AI art generation for 2D and 3D art, and its becoming almost laughably easy.

But Lo! You are true artiste, and capable of incredible game design feats of awesomeness, and the general public will SEE that, and they will chose your *one true quality tavern sim* over all the other tavern sims that are clearly low quality shovelware, or if you want to be trendy ‘slop’. So everything will be ok, and you will be drinking champagne in your sports car before Christmas, right?

No. Its incredibly, incredibly hard to get noticed in the entertainment industry. Its incredibly hard to get noticed in any industry, anywhere. The reason ‘When I leave school I’m going to be an influencer’ is such a rim-shot comedy line, is that we all know that discoverability is practically impossible without amazing luck, a huge PR budget or some magical X factor.

Oh and BTW, ‘tavern simulation game’ is pretty niche. Take a look at how many ‘roguelike deckbuilders’ are available. Its insane.

At this point, blogposts by me normally pivot into what I hope is some sort of insightful and helpful comment about how you can still make it work by doing X or just working REALLY hard. But I think its worth noting that this might no longer be the case. We might be looking at the end game here. We might be relegating indie game dev to the same zone as ‘fiction writer’, as a career which absolutely everyone knows is financial suicide.

Now sure, there are a lot of books written each year, and a LOT of writers, so clearly it works out ok in the end right? NO. The overwhelming majority (I’m guessing over 99%) of people who are writing fiction are either doing it in their spare time, or are financially supported by someone else. The REALLY scary stuff is that even published authors, with books in stores, are often in the same position. Competition is so intense, and the supply of writers so high, that even people with ‘successful’ books probably cannot make a proper living from it.

It gives me zero pleasure to point this out. Its awful. Why do lawyers and accountants earn a fortune for doing *so little work* (in my experience), whereas creative people work like crazy for fuck-all? I have no solution. But I also think its well worth reminding people to check the financial reality. Even if it means you should NOT ‘quit your job to go indie’ and accept that its perhaps too hard now to justify that risk. Maybe.

Lastly a reminder: I am NOT an example of some plucky dreamer who quit his job and took a bank loan to start a games company and strike it rich. I made games at the weekends and evenings, and quit my job once to do it, FAILED, had to go get a job in AAA studios for 5 years, and only quit a second time when my part time indie earnings matched my day-time salary. And at the time, my wife was working and we had no kids. I was very very conservative. Do not fall for the Hollywood dream stories!