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

Category: game design

Updates coming to Gratuitous Tank Battles

Posted on June 22, 2012

One day I’ll take a day off.  In fact, ideally, it would be in the caribbean. anyway…

I’ve been improving the graphics for the flamethrowers in GTB, which sucked. They look a lot better in video, but for now, here is a little image (click to enlarge)

As well as having a nicer effect, they also leave more obvious flame effects on burning troops, and also they set fire to any units like tanks etc as well, just briefly, which looks much better.

The other BIG news in GTB update land is a new feature which is something I hesitated to change, but I personally found frustrating, so I suspect a few players do too. In the current game, if you place infantry in a trench, maybe there are 12 free slots, so you get 12 infantry. If 11 of them get killed, you have to twiddle your thumbs and wait for the last one to die before you can put any more in that spot. Worse, you can’t actually deconstruct infantry. Sooo…

As of the next patch, you can drop infantry on top of existing ones in trenches/bunkers and they simply fill in any vacant slots. You can’t do it where there are no free slots, and you can happily mix and match infantry of different types, so you can have 8 infantry and 4 snipers in one trench, if it works out that way… I find this to be much better, and it just removes a tiny frustration in the game.

There are lots of other improvements coming in an imminent patch, I just thought I’d mention those two today :D

In other news, i stupidly ruined my 24″ iiyama monitor by pulling out the HDMI cable too hard. I pulled the whole socket out :(. I can’t cope with 1 monitor so immediately bought a second, but it’s 1900 x 1080 instead of 1200, which I preferred. Happily, iiyama will repair the old one for the cost of me posting it (£15.30) plus £15 inspection fee, £20 labour plus parts. (They ship it back free). A new HDMI socket can’t be more than £1, so we are maybe paying £51 for fixing a £150 monitor. The plus side to this is that a) it’s a 1200 res monitor which are rare now and also b) It means a perfectly good lump of metal, plastic and circuitry didn’t end up in landfill for the sake of a tiny broken piece of metal. I’d feel bad otherwise…

Dissecting my own design. The Gratuitous Tank Battles GUI

Posted on June 15, 2012

Nothing in life is perfect. Not even sheldon cooper. So it’s always worth taking a fresh look at stuff you have made and trying to tear it to piece and criticise the hell out of it. Fortunately, the internet is full of people, ‘professional’ or amateur who will tell you your game sucks, but often not in especially helpful ways, so I’m trying to tear my own game to shreds and find everything I can to criticise and improve. So I present to you my initial thoughts on everything that is rubbish about the GTB interface for battles (and obviously this acts as a todo list for the next patch…) Click the image below to enlarge

Let me know if you think of other stuff in the battle GUI (or any part of the game) that is unclear, confusing, or could be improved.

Frictionless Feedback

Posted on May 3, 2012

One thing that a lot of companies don’t get is the importance of frictionless feedback.
All companies perpetuate the myth that they want to hear from customers. They pretend to value their feedback, and want to hear from them, regardless whether or not the feedback is good or bad. In very few cases is this really true. I’m not referring to actually abusive or threatening feedback, which obviously just gets binned.

Negative, but non-abusive feedback is good stuff to have, and so is positive feedback obviously. Any developer who has sat down and watched a ‘lets-play’ video of their game, or better still, observed strangers playing their game for the first time in real-life, can tell you that NO amount of brainstorming, agonizing or debating over design features is as good as watching people play…

Sometimes, people think that the only feedback worth having is the long and analytical email or forum post dissecting the games design and deliberating it’s strengths and weakeness, alongside constructuive suggestions as to how to improve things. Obviously this feedback is awesome, and much appreciated but it is not the only form worth having, because it’s delivery method implies some self-selection on the part of the player.

In other words, only a certain subset of hardcore, analytical thoughtful and time-rich gamers will ever commit their thoughts to keyboard in such an effective and clear manner.
What you really need to capture is the gamers who can’t be bothered to spend more than 10 seconds giving you feedback on your game, but nevertheless are buyers/potential buyers and have a viewpoint. they are gamings 99% :D
To do this, you need to reduce any ‘friction’ involved in that process. Is it easy to get feedback from your customers. Here is how I try to make it easy.

1) you can email me at cliff@positech.co.uk, and I will read it. I acknowledge almost all feedback, and I read all of it. Even if it’s a one-line email “The mechs are overpowered”, it still gets filed away and noted.
2) You can post on my forums at www.positech.co.uk. This is probably my best source of feedback.
3) You can comment on blog posts here
4) You can direct-message or just quote @cliffski on twitter. I read all that too.
5) You can comment on the facebook page for the game.

Ideally, I’d make it even easier, but true anonymous frictionless feedback is just open to spam. I experimented with anonymous guest posting on forums, but it’s a spam headache unfortunately. I guess the best thing to do is just make it really clear that feedback is welcome, good or bad and you can email me your thoughts on the game, and they will get read. Indies are lucky because people actually believe us when we say you can email the lead designer, rather than a customer service person.

I always wish when I read a comment on my games on some foum, that the person typing it knew that they could just copy and paste that opinion and throw it at me by email, and it would have 100x the effect on getting the game changed and refined than a post on a foumr (although such posts are to be encouraged too, anything that gets people discussing your game is clearly a good thing)
Any game developer hiding their email address behind a captcha or sign-up account is just throwing away a free source of honest feedback. Don’t do it. get better spam filters. It can be done, how else can I constantly type cliff@positech.co.uk on my blog and get away with it? :D

Gratuitous Air Strikes

Posted on April 20, 2012

It’s taken me a while, but I have air strikes in the game, although they still need balancing. Here is a brief demo video:

Air strikes currently come in 2 flavours (although it’s all controllable by text files so modders should have fun). And are presented to the player just like a deployable unit from the deployment bar. I might have to fiddle with that a bit later, because currently they ignore divisions, which might annoy some people?

Air strikes last for a set duration and then drop fairly high damage blasts onto random 9and not-so-random) locations within the given radius over that time. Balancing them will be a pain, but currently my thinking is relatively low cost, high-impact and long recharge times, so that you use just 3 or four of them (max) during a battle.

The difficult bit, as ever, is the knowing you have balanced them right, but I’m sure people will let em know if I haven’t. This is probably the last pre-release added feature for the game, the rest will be mod support, bug fixing and minor tweaks and refinements.