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

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!

A solar farm after 6 months: Maintenance report

Posted on September 11, 2025

So…my site has actually been live for 11 months now, but there has been a bunch of stuff that needed fixing after initial energization, so the six monthly maintenance thing happened a bit later. If you are asking ‘does it really need maintenance every six months?’ the answer seems to be yes. I pushed back on this, as I thought it was overkill, but have been talked around. if I owned 10 solar farms, I’d totally let one have maintenance every year or 18 months to see if it was worth it, but with a single asset I likely shouldn’t risk it.

Anyway, I just got the first report. Its VERY long and detailed. Its a 90MB PDF file, if that helps contextualize it. Here are some highlights:

Firstly, google have updated their data and there is now a proper google maps image! They add little points on the image to tell me where stuff was spotted that might need fixing, or keeping an eye on:

In general the summary of the report is this: “The inspection of the site and inverters, and testing of the DC circuits, found generally positive results, although some minor issues were identified – details in the report.” – Which is very good news because frankly so much stuff stressed me out as it was built I really could do with a few long sustained periods of just simple revenue generation from it. I think I will be at least 68 years old before it breaks even, but as long as it eventually does, I’ll be ok with that. This was not a money making scheme for me.

The report has a huge number of photos, including some cool ones. Here are ones that might be interesting:

Checking for hotspots on some panels with a thermal camera:

Checking the DC cables going from strings to inverters still look ok:

You get before-and-after pictures showing that the fans on the inverters have been cleaned. I visited one hot day when the fans were really going for it. I could hear them from 30 feet away. Each inverter is 80-100kw output, so the fans are working pretty hard sometimes. I’m not sure these really need cleaning twice a year, but we have only had one winter so far. Maybe super stormy and muddy weather will be way worse.

There are pages and pages of testing data like this table, which makes sense if you are an electrician, but from my POV its just nice to have a historic benchmark for this stuff so if anything fails we can look back and see what went on:

You also get thermal pictures of all the isolating boxes for the inverters to check there is nothing scary going on inside them:

They also get taken apart and cleaned. I think that might be a bit overkill too. Its tricky. On the one hand, what do I know? on the other hand people who service stuff always have misaligned incentives with regards to what is ‘essential’. If I had a hundred million pounds, I’d buy my own solar farm installation and maintenance company and then I’d know…

There is a ton of other stuff but I will spare you thirty pages of before-and after pictures of plastic boxes that got cleaned, or the many pictures of slight patches of rust on the edges of some supporting frame struts. I guess its good evidence that it was done thoroughly, with a lot of time spent looking for problems. Rather annoying an inverter was left OFF for half a day by error during all this, which happened to be a fairly poor generation day anyway, but that was annoying…

In any case I’ve decided to stick with the same company for the medium term carrying out these checks. At some point we will have a full years of proper generation and I can look at stats and muse as to how well or badly things are doing. I *think* its performing about as expected, which is good enough for me. I just hope the price I can sell the power for does not collapse!