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

Category: gratuitous space battles

GSB patch error, and how to fix it

Posted on March 9, 2011

The auto-patching screwed up for GSB yesterday. It was a typo. Sorry!

Anyway, it’s fixed server-side, so you just need to re-grab the patch, here is how to do this:

Delete this file:

\my documents\my gamesgratuitous space battles\patches\GSBPatch156.exe

Delete this file:

\my documents\my gamesgratuitous space battles\web\up

Then re-run the game.

The symptoms for this bug are:

1) An error “The program cannot start due to a program incompatibility…” or similar

2) the downlaoded patch seen above is only 2k in size…

GSB update, new campaign maps, much easier

Posted on March 8, 2011

A few weeks ago I selected a new padawan to do some map design for Gratuitous Space Battles. His name was Carsten Lensch and you are all about to see his work. Today marks release day for version 1.56 of GSB, which has some major campaign updates. Here is what’s new:

Firstly (and most obviously) there are new maps. Instead of the one, static map in the original release of Galactic Conquest, there are now 4, all hand-designed, so they have interesting setups and chokepoints. They play quiet differently. If you have played the basic map a few times and think you have your big strategy all worked out, you will enjoy playing with the new ones.

Secondly, the campaign has been tweaked and adjusted heavily on the play-balance side to make it tons easier. If the game was unplayably hard for you before (even on the lowest of the 3 difficulty settings) you should definitely give the new version a try. Of course, you can still switch to high difficulty if you now find it a tad easy :D

Thirdly, a whole bunch of crash bugs and minor bugs have been tracked down and fixed. Anyone who found that the game would occasionally freeze at the end of a turn should find that squashed, there are some performance boosts and some rare crashes to desktop are fixed. Plus, all you people who had a problem clicking the buttons at the very top of the deployment screen should find that fixed too, plus the flickering of the titlebar now and then. HURRAH.

This update is all free, but for technical geeky reasons it can’t be entirely done as a new auto-patch. The game will get auto-patched to version 1.56, but to get the new campaign maps you need to either re-download the campaign installer, or run this patch:

Galactic Conquest Patch

Make sure you install it, like everything to the same folder as GSB, ignore any messages saying the folder exists, it should do :D. My next game will handle all this sort of stuff much better, it’s my #1 tech support issue (people installing the game in the wrong place).

Have fun!

Website Experiment #2

Posted on February 20, 2011

Here is another 2 variations on my GSB homepage.

New version

Old Version

The new version has some extra content at the bottom, I measured how much of a boost that gave to the percentage of people grabbing the demo. It is a small, but noticeable difference.

GWO says its within error margins, but over 10 days it’s consistantly outperformed, so I consider it worth switching to. Say GSB earns $50,000 over a year, 2.28% improvement is $1,140, for changing some html. Now you see why I do this stuff :D Imagine how much a change to amazons home page must earn them…

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.

Game designer job. (yes really)

Posted on February 16, 2011

I’m not actually offering someone a *job*, job. It’s not a permanent thing. I’m looking for a contractor, just for a week. Even if I *did* have the work (and money) for a permanent employee, I wouldn’t do it. The UK insists on burdening employers with so much paperwork and bureaucracy it’s literally better to just not bother and stay a one-man business. Bah etc…

Anyway…

See Gratuitous Space Battles?

See the campaign add on Galactic Conquest?

That campaign add-on has only ONE map. It’s fixed, every time, and people would prefer it to to have variety. Hence I want to have another 3 maps made that are different, and let the player choose from them. This will require some coding by me, which isn’t a lot, but it would involve a fair amount of editing, play testing and balancing, and I don’t have the time to do it.

This is where my new padawan will come in.

Basically I want someone to take the GSB campaign, and come up with 3 new maps, all new planet names, all new facility locations and anomaly locations, and a new network of connecting hyperspace doodahs. There is a debug editor, of sorts, built into the game (I’d get a debug copy to them) which is flaky as hell, because my tools suck, but I used it myself so it can’t be too bad.

I’m thinking it’s probably a full time job for a week. I’m thinking it’s worth $1,000. I know full time lead designers don’t work for that, but this is more of a junior designer/tester thing anyway. Don’t shout at me, I’m only a frail humble indie :D

This is who I need:

  • Someone who speaks and types very good English. Language barriers can be hell.
  • Someone over 18.  This sounds horribly cruel, but it’s purely because if you are under 18, there are probably all kinds of horrific laws about employing a minor, and I don’t want angry parents suing me. Sorry about this…
  • A very keen gamer, likely someone who has played GSB and likes it, and plays a lot of strategy games. You will definitely have to be very familiar with how the game plays, and be reasonably good at it before starting to do this.
  • Someone who has a free week coming up very soon (Feb/March, really). I don’t want to leave it longer than that. I doubt it’s doable in evenings and weekends, but you can try and convince me otherwise.
  • Someone professional , with a good eye for detail, organised and capable. I’m pretty sure I could talk people into doing this for free, I’m paying hard earned cash because I want a top notch job done that I can happily put my name to.

If this applies to you, please email me at cliff@positech.co.uk, with details about you. Any references or CV style stuff would be welcome, but not essential. if you are a game design student at some college or university, then maybe this is a good opportunity to wangle it into the course. If you are an unemployed game designer with pro experience, this is ideal for you. Don’t forget you can work from home, and 90% of the time you will just be fighting space battles, and checking it’s fun. There are worse jobs out there, trust me. Plus it looks good on CVs.

I’ll pay the full amount by paypal or bank transfer on completion. You can trust me, I’ve been around decades, and employed dozens of people in similar ways. I always pay! There will be a contract/NDA to sign, naturally.

If you know anyone suitable, please tweet this to them, or whatever you hip kids do these days.

BTW this will be a free update, not new DLC.