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

Category: game design

Happy or unhappy gamers

Posted on April 20, 2011

Business innovation and quality thrives on feedback, and messages. Capitalism is basically just a system a signals from consumers to producers, to optimise production processes. Generally, capitalism works on the crude buy/don’t buy and price systems. If your pies taste crap, sales fall. If you still sell pies at £10 each, your pies kick-ass. etc…

The problem is, unless there is constant iteration of new products, or constant price tweaking, it’s tough to get decent feedback on products over short periods. The signal is binary, either buy, or don’t buy. Cancel, or renew.

Games, especially online-games have far better possibilities for sending signals back to their makers. They generally don’t bother, but they could do. Gratuitous Space Battles attempted this is a fairly crude way, with challenges. At the end of playign a challenge, you could choose to rank that challenge for both quality and difficulty. Other players, can sort challenges by those criteria, and hopefully the best challenges rise to the top. Obviously the idea was that new players of the game would choose a ‘fun’ challenge, rather than randomly ending up playing against a hardcore, spammy or even cheating fleet.

That’s not bad, but it could go much better. I know if someone rates a challenge as difficult, and high quality, but do I know if they really enjoyed it? Maybe the challenge was fun, but the games performance was bad, or they thought the enemy fleets ships looked crap, or there is something else that is suboptimal. Ideally, I’d be able to look at a dashboard right now, and see 100 people are playing GSB, 64 of them are loving it, 12 are frustrated, 7 are bored etc…

Games don’t ask for feedback, but they should do. Would you reply if they did? If, as the next battle was loading in Battlefield 3, it asked you to rate that last game, by 4 or 5 different criteria, would you do it? Would you do it if it happened as you went to quit the game? ( I suspect not). Would you do it if there was some sort of reward (extra XP or whatever…).

I think this is definitely worth an experiment, at some point. If everyone thought that GSB was awesome, but the challenge browser was crap, I’d like stats on that, not just relying on the self-selecting sample of forum posters. (I know… people filling out surveys self select too).

The aging gamer

Posted on March 31, 2011

There was a debate on a forum recently about ‘the lack of middle class games’, which attracted me, because I thought it would be a (possibly amusing) discussion of games aimed at middle-class, and indeed middle-aged people. In fact, it was about mid-tier games, inbetween indie and PC. Ho hum. I was expecting mortgage-repayment sims and puzzle games based around getting planning permission for a loft conversion…

I think there is little debate that the average age of gamers is rising. This should also be combined with the realisation that a lot of younger gamers don’t think games should cost any money (witness huge sprawl of F2P games. Such games are anything *but* free, but that’s a separate topic). These two factors are combining to suggest that there is a very large, and relatively lucrative market for gamers aimed at people in their 30s, even in their 40s, with disposable income.

Everyone seems to be falling over themselves to make games for the attention-deficit-got-no-money-angry internet kids generation, but in so many ways this seems like suicide. Lets look at reasons to consider our perfect gamer to be aged 30+, with a decent job, probably a mortgage, blah blah.

  • They have less time (work + family) so don’t expect a 60 hours+ RPG for their money.
  • They have more money.
  • They probably bank online, or worry more about viruses / the law etc than kids, so likely pirate games much less.
  • As people with jobs, they don’t resent paying other people for their work.
  • They have probably been gaming for years, and are fairly tech savvy, understand how to install and patch games etc.
  • They have played enough games to be honestly open to playing something new.
  • They remember crappy 1980s graphics, so won’t vomit if forced to play a game without bump mapping.


He didn’t get where he is today by playing World of Warcraft…

These all seem like good reasons to target these gamers. The thing is, what games do they want to play? I’m 41 (oh my god!!!) and if I’m honest, probably pretty darned middle class,. I have a nice house and car and listen to radio 4. The evidence here is pretty overwhelming.  Do I think gaming is targeted at me right now? Not really. Some games such as this and maybe this, seem open to targeting my demographic, but generally, if I want to play a game, I need to disengage the grown-up bits of my mind and think ‘lets blow stuff up! cool!, or similar.

As a middle ground, I think a lot could be done to mitigate the extent to which my demographic is turned off by games. I think playing a fantasy RPG is perfectly reasonable, but if all the female characters have breasts like barrage balloons, and everytime you kill someone a fire-hydrant of blood spurts out their neck, then this is not so much *cool* as it might be aged 14, but more *tragic* and ultimately embarrasing, once you reach the age where you worry about your pension plan.

Who out there is making a game aged at people in their 30s-40s? post a link in the comments if you think you are successfully targeting the older gamer.

Big Vision Games

Posted on February 22, 2011

A frequent piece of advice given to indie devs is to work on small games, and to concentrate on the gameplay and the balance, and then add some shininess later. This is pretty much good advice. It’s good to caution against biting off too much.

Increasingly though, I am finding myself making games where this advice just does not work. My games have become about a general ‘feel’ and ‘atmosphere’, and based on a lot of things all coming together to have a cumulative effect.

Gratuitous Space Battles obviously had some cool ideas mechanic-wise, but it also had a ‘feel’ of ‘epic space battles’. The problem with this, as a design aesthetic, is that it takes a year of coding and artwork and polishing and tweaking before you can say “yup, that’s an epic space battle alright”.

This is the problem I currently have with LB. The game is awesome in my head, and I have that big vision in there for how it should come across, but it doesn’t feel like it yet. Not vaguely. Mostly this is due to crappy coder art (for 95% of it). I’ve got another 2 weeks or so before I start getting more proper artwork for it. I have to admit, it’s tricky to stare at something that looks so messy and maintain the big vision for the game. The good news is, I know I can do it, because GSB turned out alright.

I am, however, developing enormous sympathy for people running a studio with 150 people working for 2 years on a game, telling themselves every day that “don’t worry, it will be awesome when it’s done”. Talk about stress…

Gratuitous Modding Awesomeness

Posted on February 17, 2011

Because there are only 24 hours in the day, and I sleep at least 7 of them, it means I can’t do everything or keep up with everything, so it sometimes takes a while for me to spot totally awesome GSB modding efforts like this:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5906

There is a community-run ship modding competition, basically, and some really cool designs have been submitted. People on the positech forums are voting for the best one, so feel free to go take a look.  There are loads of cool entries, I especially like this one:

I need to ensure LB has better support for modding. GSB is a bit flaky in that regard, in terms of having a lack of easy ways to turn mods on or off. At least it has separate mod folder support, so it’s not too bad.

In other news, I’ve picked my map-designer for the Galactic Conquest bonus maps and emailed them. I simply do not have the time to email everyone who applied, so I’m sorry to not get back to everyone, but there was a lot of really good entrants and it was very difficult to pick someone. I’ve never employed anyone to work on game design stuff before, but I need to start doing this if positech is to make the quality and size games that I want to make in future. I need to be dedicated to LB, and I hate to leave anything in GSB unfinished, so this is a step towards achieving that.

Thanks for everyone who expressed an interest in the idea.

Considering combat mechanics

Posted on February 6, 2011

I’m thinking out loud here.

New game (codename: LB, previously G4). Involves military units shooting at each other. One of the mechanics I quite like is heat, where you would have heat based weapons, like flamethrowers, or incendiary bombs. I like the idea of units being vulnerable to, or impervious to, heat as a weapon.

I also still want the idea of armor, and of shields. I like the amount of variety that gives, all before you worry about actual hitpoints and structural damage. What I am unsure about, is exactly how to put all this stuff together.

GSB had a terribly complex system hardly any casual players got their heads around, so I’d like to avoid that. Things I did like was:

  • Shields had to be taken down by different weapons to those that did major internal damage.
  • Concept of different payloads for each weapon, especially missiles.
  • Shields could be taken down, then would not come back.
  • Shields could recharge over time, but armor was finite, without external repair modules.

I had some overcomplex stuff, like individual shield modules being down, rather than the whole thing, of shield-disruptors and the uber-complex shield-reflection and penetration mechanics.

With the new game, I like the idea of overheating a unit until it explodes. You can optionally add heat-sinks, of course, and I could even have environmental factors, so in some scenarios, losing heat is harder than others. However, there are a number of mechanics I’m unsure about.

  • Firstly, Do I have a three tier system like before, where you have to down shields, then armor, then do internal damage?
  • Can heat based weapons just go straight through shields?
  • Do heat based weapons have any effect on armor? and can they go direct through armor? They need to be as good as other weapons…
  • If heat dissipates over time, and shields recharge, aren’t they just 2 flavors of the same mechanic? and if so, does that really matter?
  • Is it worth having dual mechanics? For example, energy-based weapons obviously damage shields, and then armor, but do they also generate some heat?

I want a system that has some depth, but I want it to be understandable to someone who grabs the game for 10 minutes to see what it’s like. Obviously I can ‘drip-feed’ stuff in, so maybe the demo level only has shields,armor  and energy weapons, and I could introduce heat-sinks and flamethrowers later.