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

Category: business

The scary first day

Posted on November 3, 2016

Unless you didn’t already know, we released Political Animals yesterday around 5PM GMT, its been out less than a day, its a fun, surprisingly deep election strategy game, with a website here. here is the trailer.

Right then…so how was launch?

Game launches are always terrifying. You press the big LAUNCH button, then you sit and watch a spinny cursor hoping there won’t be an error, then you immediately alt-tab to the steam sales stats page and furiously bash the F5 Refresh key like a sex-crazed chimpanzee trying to get his hands on a hareem of supermodel lady chimpanzees. Ok, maybe that was a weird metaphor, but hey…animals.

Trust me, all game developers are obsessed with knowing how many copies they sold. Its not a greed or money thing, its a panic thing. Panic that you may have bombed. panic (in the days of steam spy) that everyone can see you have bombed. Panic that ex co-workers will feel smug that you made the wrong decision to walk out of that cushy office job, sleepwalking into the scary uncertain future of sitting at home in your underwear eating crisps and typing C++ at 4AM each night. Panic. Panic.

Panic.

There are a number of thresholds in getting obsessed with checking sales figures for a newly released game. here they are, in order of occurrence.

  • The fear that no copies will sell. That the sales figure will stay at zero forever, until your game is erased from history by a future maintenance script cleaning up ‘irrelevant unvisited store pages from the year 2016AD’ in the far future.
  • The fear that although some copies have sold, they are all friends and family.
  • The fear that although a bunch of copies have sold, there is no way its enough to cover the bank fees on translating that pitiful sum to your home currency.
  • The fear that although thats a good few thousand dollars, you spent way more than that making the game.
  • The fear that although you are about to break even, its still going to be obvious that you would have earned a better salary flipping burgers.
  • The fear that although thats actually not a bad salary at all, you have to pay corp tax, your own pension contributions yada yada, so its nothing to get excited about.
  • The fear that even though its now a fuckton of money, because you are a US citizen, its still not enough to afford decent healthcare.
  • The fear that although this has done very nicely thank-you, you know it was a one hit wonder and you will still be penniless in a few years eating the remains of donuts from trash cans and muttering ‘i was a game developer once’ at terrified pedestrians.

So yeah, the fear of sales figures never goes away. Try not to worry about it. Unless you are coding your game from Mogadishu and there are guns at your head unless you hit sales targets, it will all be ok. Anyone with the technical skills to make a video game isn’t going to starve to death, and having created a game that got released and people enjoyed is a wondrous thing you will never forget.

So I keep telling myself :D

pop

 

Steam Dev Days 2016

Posted on October 15, 2016

So…that was steam dev days 2016. What was it like? what did I found out? what do I think now its over…?
Firstly it was excellent. When valve get game developers together, they provide breakfast, some free hardware to take home, a happy hour with free drinks, free coffee, snacks, loads of booths to try VR games, loads of opportunities to talk to people from valve, and it costs you $100.
All I will say is….your move GDC, because paying GDC prices for the GDC experience is…less tempting.

There were some good talks and some….niche talks, but to be honest the appeal of these shows isn’t often the talks, but the bumping into other developers and just chatting. I met a bunch of people I’ve worked with for years but never physically met, and thats cool, and the general chatting and swapping of tips means I came away with some interesting business ideas.

Overall, dev days feels a lot more like a big party where everyone is a game developer, rather than a ‘corporate networking opportunity’ where people are constantly ‘pitching’ stuff and trying to impress each other. This is a good thing.

(Of course, what with it being legal there, I couldn’t resist the temptation of a fellow developer handing me some marijuana cookies, so maybe you should take everything I say with a pinch of salt. I did giggle quite a bit.)

Something that I reckon is missing from shows, not just SDD, is developer talks that are broad enough to be interesting to the whole audience. For example, in technical terms, a talk on “How to optimize your game” in general terms, would be great, or “How to balance a strategy game”, which broad lessons that appeal to 500 developers. I think talks tend towards the “How to improve subsurface scattering in a Unity FPS game on nvidia hardware” style, which is amazing if that happens to be exactly what you really need to know, but niche and tangential as fuck for the other 99% of attendees.

Its surprising that there is no crowd-sourcing of submitted talks for shows. I presume someone in charge reads applications and decides “Thats interesting to our audience” which is crazy as they have the email addresses of all the attendees, why not ask us?

Just an idea.

Right…how many complimentary m&ms can I guy eat in one sitting?

Announcing: Production Line

Posted on September 29, 2016

When you really look at things in terms of what people bought… I’ve made 3 games. Kudos (Trust me..it did well at the time), Democracy (ker-ching!) and Gratuitous Space Battles. I’ve also made spin-offs, sequels and side ventures such as Gratuitous Tank Battles, made some DLC, and published 2 released games (Redshirt and Big Pharma). But in terms of positech-owned IP, I’ve made 3 games of note. Hopefully this is number 4. its definitely the plan…

logo550

I never used to care about cars. Then I bought a nice hybrid one (Lexus) then I bought a stupidly flash electric one (Tesla). I started to realize cars had become interesting to geeks, not just petrol-heads. I then read a book by Henry Ford about the Model T, and how it was made, and his philosophy for business. I found it absolutely fascinating, not least because it is basically being copied to the letter by Elon Musk. The way production line efficiency transformed the way cars were made was fascinating. It also involved something that until recently was hugely out of fashion – vertical integration (essentially owning your own supply chain). When reading the book, I realized there was an opportunity for a new take on ‘production line’ games. Essentially, they are all about building more, building bigger. What I wanted to do was build more-or-less the same, but build it better, build it more efficiently, make the same product cheaper, make the production line better (which means breaking down the tasks and making it longer).

ss1

I took the idea pretty seriously. I even visited Detroit, specifically to get a tour of a modern car plant, and also visit the Henry Ford museum. Originally, my games was set in Fords era. At one point it was a side scroller, at another it was black-and-white and top down. Eventually it became color, and isometric, then got changed to the modern day. And I’ve been secretly working on it for ages.

ford

For me, the big changes here are that its an isometric game (never done one of those before, but already coded my own engine, seems ok so far), and that I’m planning on really open-development. Its not in alpha yet, let alone beta. Big parts of the game are not finished. Coder art is everywhere. None of the sounds are final. There is no music. Its buggy. There is only one type of car, and half the research-tree stuff isn’t done. No text is final. Its really early. Its not shipping in 2016, and likely not in Q1 or Q2 of 2017.

ss2

However…I’d like to get people playing it early, in a direct-with-the-developer prison-architect style early access way. I’ll blog about it more soon, and do videos. I’ll probably bore you to tears with the details. I have come full circle on the idea of early-access and would like to see how it works for me. I recently got addicted to factorio (Long after starting work on the game) and I admit I am attracted to making the game support BIG factories. (I’m a bit obsessed with the idea of Teslas gigafactory). I also like a lot of options, and huge research trees, so you should expect me to be putting that sort of stuff in, if people agree that they would like that in the game. We shall see…

Right now, I’m at the ‘I’m making a game about this topic. Do you like the idea’? stage. I’d love to know what you think. Does the topic suck? what would you like to see in the game? Would you grab an early-access copy? Comment below!. And if you are press, you will find that the website for the game has a presskit link. Plus we set up a facebook page already, so please go join that :D. Oh and yes, those are screenshots of the current build :D

Fun with investing

Posted on September 17, 2016

Soooo.. I’m a bit of a fan of financial management and planning. I know…I’m a veritable babe magnet. I basically enjoy financial decisions, or to put it in stock-market terms ‘gambling’. To this end, and partly because I used to work in the city on and around city trading floors (in IT), I’ve always dabbled on the stock market a bit.

Like most investors I am an absolute mess of jelly-like emotional irrationality. Unlike many I’m aware of it, and try to manage it. I *TRY* to sell losers early and let winners ride. believe me it is HARD, but I am getting better. In the last few years I’ve actually analyzed my performance more than usual, with proper spreadsheets and so-on. its amazing BTW how hard share trading sites make it to work out if you have LOST money overall, or what your annualized ROI is. Obviously a lot of people lose money and they don’t want their customers to notice.

I have an ISA and a dealing account, and also positech invests too. When I look at my snazzy spreadsheet it tells me that my annualized return (ie: calculate every day I have had with each penny in the account, get a total of day*pennies, then divide by 365 days, and look at the gain/loss) is…. *drumroll*

8.88%

Thats for my company account. My personal account does better at 9.88%. My other account is definitely lower, maybe even a loss, but it involved transfers of really old investments and I don’t have accurate data for it.

So is 8.88% pretty good? This is starting on 1st December 2014, so lets look at the relative performance of the FTSE and NASDAQ since then

FTSE: 0.451% (climbed from 6656 to 6710 over 656 days)

NASDAQ 6.1% (climbed from 4725 to 5244)

So whoohoo! I am the next warren buffet etc. Maybe…probably not. Firstly, thats far too short a time span. if we look at ten years the FTSE has grown 1.4% a year (still shit, but better than my short sample). At 20 years its actually less (0.76%). Clearly a simple FTSE tracker is fraught with issues, just check the chart:

ftse

So how am I beating it?

Well I’m picking a mix of funds, corporate bonds, individual shares and ETFs. My big winners (really big) so far are Tesla, Facebook & the robotics ETF (ROBG). These have done well. Also my funds, specifically Global Equity and Asian Income have done well. I also do ok with a Bangladesh pharma company (Beximo) , Intel, and national grid bonds. Obviously I have had disasters too. ITV was one, A Ukrainian iron mine was another, Devro (sausage casings) another, and I’m badly down on Go-Ahead group.

I probably check my shares once a day, trade maybe once a week to ten days. A rough breakdown of investment types within my shares:

allocation

 

So how does this compare with other potential investments? because I love spreading the risk, I have invested over the years in some other stuff. Publishing games, Peer-to-peer lending, renewable energy and simple flat-rate bank accounts and term-deposits. Here is my geeky analysis.

investment ROI Risk
Cash Deposits 0.25% Almost Zero
Fixed Term Deposits 2.0% Almost Zero
Share dealing 8.88% High
Renewable energy (20 year term) 7.70% Low
Peer-to-peer individuals 4.9% Medium
Peer-to-peer companies 6.7% Medium

Obviously there are other considerations. I can’t lock away my savings for 25 years, what if my games do badly and I need money next year? P2P and Renewable energy stuff locks me in long-term. the Fixed term deposits are shorter but not so good. Theoretically all my shares are immediately liquid, but maybe not at an ideal price. However, given an 8.88% return I’m prepared to accept that. Something that is immediately clear is that cash is for suckers. Business savings accounts are a complete joke.

Although I sometimes come across a bit Jordan belfont, I’m not really, meaning that a lot of my ‘business’ and ‘investment’ decisions are actually moral and personal ones. There was NO business case for Democracy 3:Africa (A game that broke even this week, meaning so far I have earned almost nothing, and will hopefully make 10% ROI on it in the long run). My motivation for P2P lending is partly to undercut the bastard banks and payday lenders. My motivation for renewable energy should be obvious. My share dealing is all either ethical funds or shares picked by me. No weapons, no tobacco, no oil companies or airlines.

But anyway…to bring it back to gaming, how does all this compare with investing all the money in games instead? I’m a publisher too right?

ROI on Democracy 3:  1,215% assuming no salary for me.

ROI on Democracy 3:Electioneering:  21.24% assuming no salary for me. -64% if assumed decent salary.

ROI on GSB2: 64% assuming no salary for me. Equiv income of $24/hour.

ROI on Democracy 3: Africa:  1.24%

So yeah…Kinda variable. Note that these are the stats I have to hand. Redshirt & Gratuitous Tank Battles did not set the world on fire, but made decent money, but the ROI is not really up there.

Putting it all together: Games *can* be a good investment, or a great way to set fire to a pile of cash. *it depends*. Looking outside gaming, either learn to stock and fund-pick carefully, or invest in a wind farm.

What really *is* networking anyway?

Posted on September 14, 2016

I was in the far-off legendary city of London for 2 days recently.

london

I had been invited by the clever people at UCL to take part in a half day workshop, plus evening ‘debate’ on the role of Video Games in Democracy. Naturally this is totally in my wheelhouse as they say in America, so it was something I could attend and not feel like I had no idea what I was talking about, which is always a blessing. One of the good things about attending an event like that, and being on a panel, is that people know who you are and others introduce you, and frankly thats half the work done when it comes to networking. This is pretty much why I give talks, and take part in panels, because I’m a lazy coward who is shy and scared of meeting people. Mostly.

Networking is nothing new, its not like it was invented by linkedin. In fact some would say it was way easier and better before linkedin. To an English country gentleman such as myself linkedin is kinda crass. ‘I’d like to invite you to my professional network on linkedin’ is way, way too obvious and blatant. it really obviously means ‘I am hoping you can further my career and make me money’. To my mind, Linkedin is to networking what Tinder is to relationships. I was young and single before tinders time, so maybe I have an old fashioned view of things, but when I was young, you met people in bars, or at friends houses, or at a gig, or wherever. You chatted to people about random stuff, got to know them in a roundabout kind of way, and if that led to a relationship, physical or otherwise…and thats just natural and normal and feels…human.

In the same way that Tinder and stuff like that (from what I can tell) is basically scrolling through a list of potential sexual partners and pressing buttons, Linkedin is exactly the same thing but with business partners, and it feels to me just as soulless. There are probably algorithms that take the whole swiping and saying ‘hi’ in an app out of the hands of real people, and probably algorithms that do exactly the same through a site like linkedin.

In short, tinder is outsourcing romance so you can fuck someone. Linkedin is outsourcing your personality so you can make money from someone.

linked

I don’t want to be added to anybodies professional network. I believe in free markets. You aren’t getting my business as an advertiser, or work for me as an artist because you have a database entry that reminds you the names of my cats or to make small talk about solar panels. That won’t work. In fact, its AWKWARD to work with people who you have a close personal relationship with. I actually do like a bit of a firewall between work and play. I never do business over the phone, I don’t need to ‘catch-up with’ or ‘have a courtesy call’ with anyone. Catching up and courtesy is for friends, not a business thing.

So networking is a minefield really. I’ve met some really nice people in this industry, some of whom probably are beneficial to my career, but its definitely a secondary thing. One of my favorite things about GDC/Dev days is meeting up with some really cool interesting people I’ve met in the industry. The VAST majority of them are in zero position to help my business or career. In fact technically most of them are technically competitors, but I don’t think like that. The truth is, many indies work alone, and being able to hang out in some sushi restaurant somewhere and chat with a whole bunch of people who know what you are talking about is just really refreshing.

So…yeah…networking. What is it really? should I do more? I have no idea. I’m going to steam dev days, and there are a bunch of cool people I’d like to bump into and chat with. Theoretically I should be working my way through a master plan or professional schmoozing that ends with me playing golf with Gabe Newell…but thats just kinda weird to me. There probably is a difference between schmoozing your way to the top and sleeping there, but they are in the same kinda zone in my mind.

So in conclusion if I say hi and suggest grabbing a coffee with you at some industry event, its because I’m being friendly. I’m almost certainly not doing networking. I’d feel silly. Also buying me a coffee won’t get your game published, sorry :D