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

Category: game design

Copyright and getting some perspective

Posted on December 6, 2010

Oh noes, a post about copyright! batten down the hatches etc…

The copyright debate is in deadlock, as ever, and the two sides are way too far apart.

There are maniacs out there that think you shouldnt be able to sing copyrighted songs at a birthday party. There are maniacs out there that think if you upload a youtube video of a child singing a pop song, it should be taken down. There are maniacs out there who think they can copyright generic terms and words that have been in use for decades or centuries and prevent others using them. There are people who think that the word ‘orange’ or ‘apple’ now belong to companies. Fuck that. There are people who think they can patent clicking a mouse, and even one batshit mental woman who thinks she owns the sun.

And all of these people should be thrown into a pit of tigers and then attacked with flamethrowers.

But…

Often the anti-copyright or ‘copyright reform’ side of the argument does itself no favours. Like many angry internet movements, they get so entwined with complete headcases who want to repeal copyright as an idea, that their whole argument becomes tainted.

Check out this game:

The guy making it got a DMCA takedown request from the owners of the Pacman IP. OH MY GOD! IT’S FASCISM AT WORK! Or maybe not… maybe he just ripped off pacman 100%, didn’t even have the creative juices to pick new colors for the ghosts, and he thinks *he* is the victim?

Now I know Namco don’t need the money, but the principle remains the same. The same copyright law that protects billionaires also protects indie developers like me, and everyone in between. And don’t forget, if you are IT literate and creative, the chances that your livelihood will directly or indirectly be earned from copyright are extremely high these days.

People rightfully get annoyed at some of the crazy DRM schemes and evil bastards that push copyright beyond its sensible uses, but people need to also get rightfully annoyed at the people who make any calls to reform copyright laughable. When people rip off a game, a movie, a tv show, a book or anything else to the point where you can’t tell the difference, the copyright reformers need to call them out on it. The same goes for certain torrent sites, and the ‘anonymous download’ servcies that are 99% copyrighted content.  Getting bundled in with people trying this stuff just makes the whole copyright-reform lobby look like trolls.

TV, and the public face of gaming

Posted on December 2, 2010

So there is a BBC TV prog on ‘addiction in gaming’ on the way. Oh JOY. Not that I do not think there is a case to answer, there definitely is. Games ARE designed to be addictive, just ask Zynga, or ask pretty much any game designer who has read widely both on game design, and neuroscience. (like me!). The problem is that traditionally, the mainstream media has handled issues in gaming so incredibly poorly, in such a slap-dash ‘who cares’ fashion, as to make any ‘research’ into the topic on  popular TV to be useless, laughable, insulting and frankly, piss-poor journalism.

Take a look at this image:

Now place your bets which is considered to be an image that represents ‘video games’ to a TV executive. It’s the angry, scary dude with a gun, obviously. Never mind the fact that happy clappy games like habbo hotel probably outsell the angry games with guns by a huge margin. Never mind the fact that gamers are actually interacting, often with other people, rather than passively absorbing the  predictable, mindless drivel of TV cooking programs and property shows. Never mind that the average gamer is no longer a 13 year old boy with poor exam results (Was that ever true?).

What’s more important is for gaming to be held up as something to be scared of. Why? Well here is the bitter, sad irony. Anyone in journalism worth their salt knows that fear SELLS. We are basically hardwired to be scared, to be hungry, and to want sex. Everything else is frankly an afterthought. Advertisers know this, and exploit it to death. Game designers are in kindergarten when it comes to manipulating their audience, take a look at adverts to see how it is really done.

And of course, taker a look at cheap journalism, of the ‘IMMIGRANTS CAUSE HOUSE PRICE FALLS‘ style, or more relevantly, the ‘GAMES ARE BAD’ sort we have got used to on TV.

Newspapers like the Daily Mail or News of the world vastly outsell stuff like new scientist, and it’s no surprise. We all know that a new scientist investigation into ‘does eating 5  a day make you healthy’ that concludes ‘it’s hard to say, it depends…’ won’t sell as well as a News of the world story that ‘FRUIT CAUSES AIDS!!!‘  What is really dissapointing is that the BBC doesn’t need to sell newspapers, or even subscriptions. It’s in the unique position of being able to say “This thing that we thought might be bad, turns out to be not bad”, and nobody would lose their job.

Pity they never do that, isn’t it?

Things I did wrong in GSB

Posted on November 30, 2010

GSB is a big success and sells well, and I love it. it’s my fave game, out of all the games I’ve made, but it still has problems, because I made some fundamental screwups, technical and otherwise. here is what I think I did wrong in no particular order

  • It doesn’t support netbook resolutions
  • There are a fixed number of ship sizes
  • The battles are not deterministic, preventing replays
  • There are no achievements
  • The tutorial is weak, and the learning curve too steep
  • The auto-update system is dumb regarding where the game is installed.
  • The online integration doesn’t include many features, like friends lists and user profiles, clan tags etc
  • It makes poor use of multi-core CPUs.
  • The player cannot customise the physical appearance of their units very much
  • Mod support is not quite as easy to use as it could be
  • The unit design tools (ship editor) used during development was laughably poor
  • The UI was not as gratuitous as it could have been, given the subject matter

Have I missed anything? Obviously if I ever did a similar game, I’d be keen to fix all of those issues.

Achievements

Posted on November 28, 2010

I just can’t make my mind up about in-game achievements. The pseudio-intellectual whiny part of me says ‘they are just like pavlovs dog being trained, don’t give in to that manipulative OCD crap’. The rest of me goes ‘Oh YES! I just scored 47 hits with the flamethrower whilst running backwards, that’s the ‘platinum running backwards with flamethrower achievement’ checked off.’ (High-fives all-round).

I completely see why people get into achievements, and I think I’m being a bit of a grumbly old git not having them in my games. The thing is, people always want ‘Steam’ achievements’, and that gives me slight issues because that means people buying the game direct are not going to get them. I am very much against that, as I like it when people buy games direct.

Tbh, it is LONG past the time when I should be working on game IV, and I am now working on game IV (in-between GSB bug fixes etc), so I won’t be re-visitng GSB any time soon to stick in steam achievements. However, with G4, I shall definitely investigate this. There will be achievements, and if I can find a way to toggle it so that they are steam-integrated (if steam accept my next game) for steam buyers, and hosted and run by my own system externally otherwise, then I shall be doing that.

Other stuff I’ll be defintiely aiming to put in mystical top-secret game IV will be online integration in the manner of the GSB campaign game / challenge system, which I think worked extremely well. This time around, there will be more attention spent on the UI for that sort of stuff, so it should be a smoother experience.

I should probably explain what G4 is at some point, but I’m going to wait until I have something to show, which will be a long time, even if it’s just concept art, or placeholder. I also tend to change my mind in design terms a LOT, so I don’t want to say “It’s an FPS set in napoleonic times where you play a kitten that can time travel!” until I’m sure it really is.

The Fighter Spam Issue

Posted on November 16, 2010

I have a slight problem with the balancing of the GSB campaign. The problem is that swarms of fighters are just *too good*. The main game prevents this because each battle has pilot limits. The campaign battles do not. It’s not a total game killer, because spatial anomalies act as ‘chokepoints’ preventing fighters roaming everywhere. It’s annoying though.

One solution is to increase the maintenance costs of fighters. The downside to this would be that it’s hard to explain to the player, doesn’t make *that* much sense and may not be effective enough.

Another is to make them more difficult to build, maybe using twice the resources per CR in a shipyard, thus making shipyards more efficient when building cruisers etc. This maybe just delays the inevitable, and is also hard to justify.

Another is to introduce the idea of needing carriers. This is tons of work and testing, plus it breaks the link with the main game, where they are not needed, and means the player will fight AI fleets designed by players operating under different rules.

Another is to introduce flight schools, and pilots as a new resource. This is adding even more complexity, although to be fair, I could make academies churn out pilots too, so its just a resource, not a new facility too…

Another is to add more anomalies that block fighters, or set hard limits of the number of fighters in a particular fleet or battle. That involves real chaos, as I’d have to handle it when merging fleets yada yada.

I can see whatever I do will involve lots of work won’t it :(