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

Category: gratuitous space battles

Patch 1.48 for Gratuitous Space Battles

Posted on November 7, 2010

Is now live. Expect your copy to autoupdate over the next 24 hours. Changes:

version 1.48
1) Performance: Major rewrite of tons of areas to reduce memory usage and squash lots of small memory leaks.
2) Bug fix: Tractor beam turrets are no longer drawn when a ship should appear cloaked.
3) Bug Fix: Limpet launchers and Plasmas are now fired from the correct position when placed in multiple-hardpoint slots.
4) Bug Fix: Fixed a few minor miscalculations that meant ship damage  looked (purely visually) like it was being repaired faster than it actually was, especially when cloaked.
5) Bug Fix: When you leave the ship design screen, any open module stat comparison windows are now closed.
6) Some playbalance tweaks
7) Bug Fix: Imperial fighters with tiny engine glows (also a nomad  fighter) now no longer get drawn when the parent ship is docked at a carrier.

The balance stuff:

nomads:
Awazem loses its cost boost, gets 8% armour boost
Duwasir loses its armour boost, gets 10% speed boost
Majali reduces speed penalty from 22% to 12%
Abbadi gets an 8% armour boost
Nomadic dogfight laser damage increased to 8
Nomadic beam laser power usage reduced to 13

general:
guidance scrambler beam weight increased to 147
EMP Shield ecm strength increased from 66 to 82
All frigate armour maxdamageabsorbable increased by 20%
EMP Missile launchers, (both types) missile speed 25% faster. fireinterval reduced 10%, ecm strength increased 10%
Decoy missile launcher weight reduced to 70

order:
Limpet launcher limpetweight increased to 8.2, cost reduced to 110

Campaign news to come soon. I needed to get this patch out there and live first.

Ad stats, and why people make DLC.

Posted on November 4, 2010

Sooo. I managed to keep my grubby paws from editing my ad campaigns for 30 seconds. I blogged a few days ago about how I took the top 25 sites for ROI (return-on-investment) and confined the Gratuitous Space Battles ad campaign to just them. Here is the results.

Over almost 6 days the impressions for the banners totalled 678,000. The clicks were 3,636 and the average cost per click was a whopping £0.10 (roughly $0.16). That cost me £366.94. Over the same period the income from gratuitous space battles sales was a total of $1,095.71, or roughly £684.

So in a crude sense, I spent 366 and got 684 back. In theory, a pretty good deal. However, I would have got some of those sales anyway, through word-of-mouth, and through reviews and so on. Plus some of them are people buying expansion packs for already bought copies. On the other hand, some of the visitors would have bought the game from impulse or steam or elsewhere, so I get that money too. Plus a bunch of them may buy the game in a week, or even in six months. It’s hard to tell.

If you look at it as £318 for 6 days, that’s nothing very exciting at all. Thankfully I have other games on sale, otherwise I’d be scared :D.

For comparison, I looked at the month of september too. $9,203 sales.  £2,532 ads (roughly $4,051) . That is heavily skewed by the release of the Nomads expansion pack. On the surface, my recent 6 day ad-driven experiment was a ROI of 186% and september gave me a ROI of 227%.

So one of two things has happened. Either the new ‘let google pick them’ strategy is not as effective as I thought it would be, or in fact adverts are just not in any way as good at generating income as new expansion packs. I think it’s probably the latter. Don’t forget that the expansion packs will continue to sell for a few more months, and also generate extra income from sites like impulse and steam (if they actually add the nomads :D).

I know some people hate games that keep releasing DLC, but programmers have to eat, and if I’m honest, the smart thing to do (from a business POV) is to keep doing them. I don’t think I will though, I think the campaign is the last one.

Out of interest, has anyone here ever seen a GSB ad? where did you see it?

Lots going on

Posted on October 14, 2010

There is a lot of stuff happening right now. Mac GSB on steam is imminent. I have released a bundle of the DLC for GSB getting all 4 packs for $9.99, which you can get here:

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/dlcbundle.html

(That bundle might not last forever, so be quick)

I am working on campaign stuff, which is going well. I also fixed a GSB bug where limpet launchers and plasma torpedoes launched from the wrong place in multi-hardpoint slots. How did I not spot that one before eh?

In the news I notice this insanity:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11531677

Frankly, if your business model relies on preventing your competitors from advertising, then your product must suck. The best way to beat your rivals out-advertising you is to have a better product, better service, or even to spend a bit mroe on ads or make better ones. Reaching for the lawyers is a cynical, desperate and ultimately doomed move. Interflora don’t own a patent on the idea of selling flowers. If I owned shares in interflora I’d dump all of them immediately.

Campaign stuff, summary, holiday…

Posted on October 2, 2010

Right then. I’ve been a bit quiet lately, mainly because I’ve been doing some non-positech stuff (which I’ll blog about after my holiday) and I’ve been wading through campaign bugs, features and balancing. There is much to be done still on the campaign, but it is definitely playable. It’s now a matter of bug fixing.

I’m going on holiday to Ireland for 8 days. Don’t try and break into my house, an ex-commando will be house sitting for me. (and feeding the cats). Here’s a positech summary of all things as they stand now:

  • Mac GSB will be on steam soon. They have some minor techy things they need to do first. It might happen while I’m away.
  • The Nomads should be on steam soon too. I don’t have a date yet.
  • The memory consumption of GSB will be coming down with the next patch. That patch also makes some minor balance changes. It may co-incide with the campaign alpha, or it may happen sooner. I’m currently unconvinced that it can ever be low enough to make an ipad port truly viable, but who knows.

I’m not that far off the point wher I can release more campaign details and screenshots. I really like the campaign game, it gives an added dimension of excitement and worry to the actual battles, when you know that those 2 cruisers you lost are the only cruisers defending a key shipyard facility. It also leads to lots of ‘bloody hell!’ moments, when you warp into a system and see a huge wall of Swarm cruisers, when you had designed your fleet to fight against the tribe etc…

I’ll be away from email and my forums for a while, so if someone has tech support issues, they will have to wait for 8 days. Sorry!

Where does the memory go?

Posted on September 28, 2010

I haven’t been working on memory optimisations in GSB for a few days, in fact I’ve done nothing but work on features and bug fixes and other stuff for the campaign game. The game is getting better, and looks nicer now, but there is tons to do, a whole host of niggling little things, and some vital balancing and optimising still to do.

But as I work, I keep thinking back to my attempts to optimise the memory footprint of GSB. I wrote an overriden new and delete, to track all my memory (I never use malloc or free). I have spreadsheets showing all the allocations. However, it seems that the memory I allocate is just a trivial percentage of the RAM the game seems to use if you look at it with windows task manager or the windows performance monitor. Of course, there are about 36 different measurements of memory, such as ‘private bytes’ and ‘peak working set’, And nowhere is there a definitive answer on which one to use. However, even using the lowest one, there is still at least 50% of memory unaccounted for. At one point, I checked my stats were not reporting MB as KB, it was that bad.

Sadly, it’s hard to optimise when you can’t see the wastage. I suspect a big chunk of it is particles, but the maths don’t support that. It could be directx making system memory copies of video texture buffers and sound files, but would that be inside the GSB.exe memory footprint? Who knows!

In other news

1) The ecofan really works. In fact it is awesome.

2) Chopping wood from 3 year seasoned timber is trivial next to 10 month felled holly, which is like cutting neutronium with a spork.

3) The UK has a major apple glut. We have some apple trees in the garden and so many apples we literallty can’t walk in the garden for the fallen ones. I actually knocked on neighbours doors to hand them carrier bags full of apples today, just to get rid of a few hundred. It’s insane. We are eating as many as we can, and making apple cakes galore.