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

Website video. No thanks

Ok, so lots of people have broadband now. Yipeee. But just because I have decent bandwidth, doesn’t mean that video is always preferable to text. A lot of the time when I’m surfing, someone else is watching TV or having a conversation. I’m sat there reading the web, just like I’d read a book. Someone might even be asleep, (human or cat). In other words, in a lot of these situations sound is not desirable.

Plus I read quickly, very very quickly, and videeo rarely keeps up with the speed I want information. Because of this, again, video is inferior to text for me in the case of spoken word information.

I find TV weather reports unwatchable. minute after minute of some gormless fool waving his/her arms around and trying to ‘engage’ with the audience. Get over yourselves, you are there to tell me two things, the temperature and the chance of rain. Everything else is filler. Weather reports should be capped at 12 seconds.

Online video is obviously a great thing, but ONLY when it’s better than text. Would this blog post be better if it was a video of me sat there reading it? I doubt it, but I just wish a lot more web sites realised this. Thats my complaint of the day :D

Inauguration discount

Uk indie developer Positech games are celebrating the inauguration of the first Black president of the USA with a special offer for one day only. A special celebration edition of the political strategy game ‘Democracy 2’ is on sale today for just $9.95 instead of the usual $24.95. This edition has the same gameplay as usual, but the political quotes in the game all come from Barack Obama, and his image is featured in the menu screens for the game.
A special web page has been set up just for today for people to download a demo of this version and buy it here:
http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy2…ter_obama.html

dugg:

http://digg.com/pc_games/Indie_Strategy_game_less_than_half_price_on_inauguration_day

2008 for Positech Games

I’ll be away for a few days over new year so will not be blogging. So this is the last opportunity to sum up what happened in Positech Land during 2008.

What I did:

  • I finished and released Kudos 2. Arguably my most polished game to date, although due to the US elections, Democracy 2 is currently outselling it slightly.
  • I finally changed my game engine to support DirectX9. This was long overdue.
  • I wrote a blog post that catapulted me onto the radio, slashdot, digg, kotaku and lots of other places, and got me briefly known as the ‘pirate-sympathising game developer’, which is a bit of a miscast role, but it proved to be a fantastic way to get real honest feedback about my games, and also my website from people who hadn’t heard of me. Also got me my first ever check for writing for a newspaper.
  • I Switched to a dedicated linux server mainly to prevent the piracy article traffic killing my website. It’s MUCH more expensive :(
  • I met up with some fellow indie game developers in Birmingham, got extremely drunk, and then met some of them again in much more local Woking. Finally met people like ‘grey alien’ ‘princec’ ‘papillion’ and the pickford brothers all of which I’d previously chatted to only online.
  • I redesigned the positech website, and made it look tons better than it used to. Short of throwing money at a web designer, I’m not sure what else I should do to it right now.
  • I seriously considered emigrating, because the UK sucks, and the cost of living here sucks. I’m still thinking about it.
  • I changed the blog address to be cliffski.com

What I failed to do:

  • Make lots more money. The profit for 2008 was a bit below 2007. 2007 was a bumper year thanks to some good sales of the original Kudos, and the fact that Kudos: Rock Legend didn’t take that long to make. I still make a reasonable amount of money for one guy programming games, so I’m not complaining.
  • Make the obscure top-secret game. I have this game idea I keep talking about. It’s either doomed, or awesome. I just don’t know yet. In any case, it’s been put back again. maybe a full year while I do this space thing.
  • Hire anyone. I’m still one guy working in a spare bedroom. I’ve employed contractors from time to time to do art and sound and music, but it’s still just me designing and coding. I have thought a lot about how to expand the business, but still haven’t made any concrete steps towards doing it.

All in all, 2008 was a pretty good year. Kudos 2 was fun to make, and I’ve kept the business afloat despite the casual games ‘boom’ narrowing to just remakes of about 3 different games, and the global financial meltdown.

Bottom line is, I’m still here, still making indie games for the PC, not shabby console ports based on movie tie-ins, and there are free demos, mod-support and no DRM.

Happy new year everyone.

Guitar Vs Piano Vs C++

I haven’t played the guitar for ages, and just picked it up and hammered out a few notes. I find doing so very frustrating these days. Years ago, I could easily practice up to 12 hours a day, but the guitar is like weight lifting, you need to keep doing it to stay up to a certain standard, a little each day (or a lot).

The thing that I find most frustrating is the lack of precision. I used to spend hours playing through the simplest scales, making sure each note was perfect, that there was no handling noise or slurs, and that every note sounded clearly and precisely. It’s important to practice really slowly and cleanly with a metronome if you want to play fast, because the slightest imperfection when you speed stuff up and it just sounds like a mush.

Life is much easier on the piano. you can’t accidentally apply some vibrato or a bend, and it’s very hard to actually miss a note as there is no bending involved. You don’t need two hands synchronised to play a single note.

But C++ is right up the other end. The code is either correct and works, or it doesn’t. Better still, I can step through the code and even step backwards through a frame render and see exactly what I did, when and how it went wrong. There is no fuzziness, ambiguity or degrees of perfection. The code works or it does not work. Its binary, not analogue.

Somehow, I’ve become inteolerant of analog stuff where you can screw up ‘a bit’. I find it frustarting and I’m never happy with what I’ve done. Years of playing thr guitar and working with wood have probably taken their toll on my ability to perform analogue tasks. Binary FTW!