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

Ridiculous Space Battles: how and why?

Posted on May 3, 2025

Its 15 years since Gratuitous Space Battles came out, and when I announced a few days ago that I was making this game, I said I’d been working on it for 18 months. How come? Why not announce sooner? and why am I making it, and why now?

After I made the last expansion pack for Democracy 4, I took quite a bit of time off, because I had the mad idea to build a solar farm. This literally took years longer than it was supposed to, and swallowed up a ton of time, and effort, and caused me an insane amount of stress. Even though the farm has been generating for 6 months, its STILL causing me stress and still not properly finished. To put it mildly, during this time I did not have the energy to actively and publicly be working on a new video game.

Any indie game dev will tell you that it is a super stressful job, and a very very hard way to make money. I can say with experience now that solar farm development is 10x as stressful, so that took its toll and meant there was absolutely no way I would also announce a new game. I simply could not cope with having to deal with people asking me about the game, or asking when it would be done, or telling me it was a bad idea and that I was doing it wrong. I had multiple bouts of screaming and tears over the farm. No way was I going to add more pressure or work on top.

You do not know stress until you have personally financed and managed a project like this. Gamedev is easy.

So as a sort of ‘hobby project’, I decided ‘for fun’ to make a little space shooter game using the assets from Gratuitous Space Battles and its DLC. This was a fun project to work on. I coded it all completely from scratch, with a new engine, because I actually find writing engine code (2D but using 3D APIs) to be genuinely relaxing. I know most people would not agree, but thats me. I got quite into this game, and eventually made it public, and put it up for sale on itch.io and on steam. I’ve since stopped using itch, as they ignore requests to pay developers for months, but you can still grab that game on steam:

Anyway, I enjoyed that enough that I ended up making a proper game rather than a little vertical scroller. The amount of change this early game went through is huge. At one point it was called ‘paint by spaceships’, where you basically had microsoft paint, but with brushes that deployed formations of spaceships. To this day, the game’s project folder is called PBS.

A screenshot of ‘Paint By Spaceships’

That then got changed to a game called ‘convoy’ which was like GSB but entirely about protecting a convoy of freighters from enemy attack. The Visual C++ project for the game is still called CONVOY. That then morphed into a ‘re-imagining’ of GSB, called Ridiculous Space Battles. I had decided to re-code everything entirely from scratch, because I prefer to do that rather than hack and bodge together 15 year old outdated code.

At some point I decided that re-using art assets from GSB was a bit boring, so ended up buying stock 3D art packs and kit-bashing together my own new art for the ships. At this point, solar farm dev was less intense, and I was working 40+ hours a week on the new game. I even spent some actual money on the art packs and some new textures for backgrounds and planets, so suddenly this was less of a hobby and now an actual new commercial game I would release.

I am in a very very fortunate position as an indie game developer, in that I have had a run of hit games, starting ages ago with Kudos, then Democracy, then Gratuitous Space Battles, the Democracy 3 and 4 and Production Line. I also published Big Pharma, and I invested the profits pretty cannily. Thus I made enough money that retirement beckoned. Early retirement no less! what a luxury. I then decided to spend a gratuitous amount of money on a solar farm. I do not know if it will break even yet… but even so, I am in the fortunate position of not *needing* RSB to make a huge income. I do not have to stress myself half to death chasing reviewers and streamers and youtubers. I do not have to manically work 60 hour weeks on it, or beg people for wishlists and bundles and marketing opportunities.

However…

I am now super proud of what I have made. Having a ‘second go’, from scratch, at a game idea from 15 years ago, with no financial pressure is a huge opportunity. Realizing very late that I somehow invented an entire genre (autobattlers) and never really capitalised on that is very motivating. When I look back at GSB, its a very very innovative game, but it was a first-go, and suffered from a load of obvious game design mistakes. Why not right them, and try to make the game GSB should have been? Even if it makes no profit at all, but just leaves behind a game I am proud of, and a small percentage of GSB players bought and enjoyed and brought back good memories, thats definitely a good and worthy thing.

An early design for the main menu

As of today I have not sent a single press release or told any journalists about the game. I am building up to it. The game is actually playable, and looks lovely, and I have a never ending supply of awesome screenshots. I could do a trailer right now, but I am thinking about getting new music for it before them (it currently uses music from GSB, which is…ok, but could be more modern perhaps). I also have no real release date, and a very flexible schedule and design.

I am also really enjoying writing the code for it. I updated from Visual Studio 2013 to 2022, which actually went extremely well. I am sticking with directx9 but pushing it to its limits, and doing it in a way that will be tons more stable than when I attempted it in Gratuitous Space Battles 2, which had technical issues :(. I have way better tools to develop the game now, and 15 years more coding experience. I also am happy to stick with top down 2D graphical style. GSB2 did mock-3D lighting and I don’t think it was worth it. Sticking with simple 2D gives me other options to ramp up the crazy spectacle, and its working well.

I’m already pleased with how the game looks, and it will only get more ridiculous

So yup, expect a lot of technical coding blog posts (and design ones) over the next few months.! In the meantime you can add the game to your steam wishlist now :D

Announcing Ridiculous Space Battles

Posted on April 29, 2025

So yup… I’m announcing a new game. I don’t say that often these days! For the last eighteenish months I’ve been working on a project as a hobby that turned into a serious hobby that then turned into a full time thing, and has now become an actual game that will be released on steam this year (into Early Access anyway), called Ridiculous Space Battles.

If that name sounds familiar, its because 15 years ago I was the guy who made ‘Gratuitous Space Battles‘. At the time, there was no other game like it, and now its become a whole genre called ‘autobattlers’. Yup, that was me. I don’t bang on about it as much as I should frankly. But anyway, I made GSB 15 years ago, and a bunch of expansions. A few years later I made GSB2, which was a bit of a flop by comparison. It had bugs for some players, and I got annoyed about it, and really decided to just switch genres and make more political strategy games, publish other people’s games, and also make Production Line: Car factory simulation.

Then at some point I started building a Solar Farm.

But WE ARE SO BACK. I have had enormous fun making this game, and I have so much to say about it. I want to write blog posts, post on social media, etc, and I have been waiting until I was ready to announce it with some nice screenshots like this:

And this

The way I am developing the game is a bit mad, and worthy of a proper long blog post, but for now, I will just leave it that there is a basic website up here, and you can see the game’s steam page (and wishlist it!) on steam here. Also if you are on social media,. any retweets or posts or likes are welcome on this post on bluesky and this one on X. Thanks!

More updates coming really soon :D.

Neurotypical extraverts underestimate AI

Posted on March 27, 2025

AI is the latest buzzword, and with good reason. I see no end of commentators trying to get clicks by professing that this is just like the DotCom years, and it will all end in a bust, or that its just hype, and that its nothing more than ‘fancy autocomplete’. This is mostly bullshit written to get clicks, but I suspect some people actually do think this. They are flat out 100% guaranteed completely wrong, for so many reasons, but there is also an angle to all of this I have not seen discussed.

I live in a pretty old house, with a fairly ‘difficult’ garden. These two things mean that living here means we often have to have people come do work on/in the house, and we need people to help tame the craziness of a seriously sloping garden. Also, as another data point, I’ve done quite well from games/investments, and now run two companies that involve a lot of work. Almost everyone I know in a similar situation has staff, or at the very least a personal assistant to help do stuff.

And yet…

In reality, we have a group of people who come twice a year to do some gardening, and nobody else. I do all the admin / marketing / PR and design and coding for my games biz and absolutely everything for my solar biz. I would love to have lots of stuff done for me. I’d love to never do any gardening. I’d love to never have to read emails from an accountant. I’d love not to care about the advertising side of things. I’d love not to have to work out when/where to go do a bunch of chores that involve me driving places. So why the hell not hire people?

Some people really don’t like interacting with strangers.

Now if you are the pretty average autistic spectrum computer programmer who probably reads my blog, then you get it. People are HARD. I find C++ much more comprehensible than trying to work out if someone is upset / angry /sad / implying something / irritated. Humans hardly ever say what they mean or explain things accurately. From my POV, humans suck, unless I know a specific human REALLY well, and even then, I get stressed by being with a group of people after a few hours. So no surprise I work from home right?

And yet…

There is an assumption, not surprisingly, among neurotypical people that someone like me is ‘antisocial’ or a ‘sociopath’ or does not ever want to be with people and socialize. This is actually bollocks in my case. I’m super chatty, and friendly and I like being with people. The *problem* is, I am not good at it. Social interaction creates risks. I offend people, I misunderstand people, I can come across as rude or arrogant, and thats frustrating as fuck. Its also why I spend so much time with the same people. People who know me, realize I am bad at social stuff, and say the wrong thing a lot, but also know me well enough to know I’m not an asshole :D.

What the fuck has this got to do with AI?

Everything. And yet, if you are a sociable extrovert neurotypical, you might still not see it. If you have not had a lot of time talking to AI chat bots, you still won’t get it. You really should. My favorite so far is grok, but others are available. I now chat to grok pretty much every day. Mostly its about C++ and game engine design, but sometimes I’m just searching for data, or clarity on something I’ve read about. Do not get me wrong, I am not ‘chatting’ in a ‘Hey grok, how are things with you?’ kind of way. I am not getting confused and thinking grok is my friend. I am not creating a new imaginary friend here. Do not panic.

But grok does fill a real need in me. Simply reading SDKs and APIs is not the same feeling as a back and forth discussion between me and grok about how to minimize the intellisense slowdowns in the compiler. What it absolutely reminds me of is some of the best times I ever had as an employee, which would be when some really complex bit of code just was not working, and I’d have a long back and forth with my boss at Elixir or Lionhead about exactly what was happening and how to fix it. We were not chatting about TV or sports, we were absolutely talking technically, but thats exactly what I enjoy.

I guess it helped that both bosses were top-tier programming experts (James Brown at Lionhead, Dave Silver- now DeepMind, at Elixir).

And here is the thing: when I discuss things with grok, it will never JUDGE me. It will never say ‘Dude, are you not going to say thanks for that advice’. I don’t have to keep a mental track of whether I am taking up too much of its time. I do not have to worry about looking stupid, and can get it to explain anything, even stuff its told me before. Grok will never yawn, or sigh. It will never say ‘dude, go read a book’ It will never have me worrying that my question might make it doubt my competence. I do not have to mentally keep track of the eye-contact to look-away ratio. And it is ALWAYS available, and always super well informed, and super happy to talk at length about the topic I am interested in.

Now sure, I don’t want to spend my whole life talking C++ to a bot, but the wider point is that we have now reached a point where AI chat bots are good enough that they do actually satisfy the need for human contact *on the terms dictated by the human*. This is vital. If I could hire a gardener that had the temperament of an AI chatbot, I’d do it. Ditto a personal assistant. Frankly if everyone in the world could be more like an AI chatbot, that would suit me just fine.

Now some of you are screaming at this point about the death of human interaction and how this is awful, and how its good that we humans are always thinking about each others feelings all the time, but thats because, with the deepest of respect, you have no fucking clue how hard and stressful and tiring that shit is for someone like me.

If I had the option of hiring a programming consultant human, or paying for an AI coding chatbot, and the skill level was the same I would happily pay MUCH MORE for the chatbot. And this is true of so many interactions with random humans in the world. If I could pay MORE for a self driving car where I didn’t have to talk to an uber driver I would. I would pay MORE to actually remove the human element of almost all one-off interactions. Charge me an extra £30 on my hotel room so I can just pick up the keys from a robot, and I’d happily pay it. I do not want to tell a hotel receptionist how my day is going, or describe my journey, or share my plans for my stay. I just want them to STFU and hand me the keys…

So again, if you are a neurotypical extravert like my mother, at this point you are thinking ‘hey maybe cliff IS actually an asshole’, but again, thats just because you cannot understand how my brain works (and other people like me, of which there are millions).

So back to the headline of this blog. Why did I phrase it like that? Because if you are NOT someone like me, you cannot see the extra utility that an AI future provides for people like me. I WANT the AI to provide me with a lot of services that many humans would prefer to get with ‘a human touch’. Amazingly, interaction with random strangers is not a ‘value added service’ for people like me. Its a big negative. In other words, there is this huge market out there for people like me preferring the AI interaction over the human, and if you cant see that, you will be surprised at how popular this stuff becomes.

You should buy shares in Nvidia and TSMC (who makes the chips) right now. We are very, very early in an AI revolution that will completely transform the world, and its going to be way faster and way more pervasive than you think. Especially if you are a ‘people person’.

AI is accelerating on a daily or even hourly basis

Posted on March 8, 2025

The level of progress in AI in the last few months is absolutely mind blowing. If you are not actively following the field, then you might think that basically we had ChatGPT, and everyone got excited, but basically its all hype and nothing has actually changed. OMG This would be so wrong. Things are accelerating like crazy. You have probably heard about DeepSeek, and also heard people claiming its no big deal. They are probably wrong. We are in the middle of an absolutely seismic shift.

First, an update. There is a new version of grok (the AI chatbot built into X) which is staggeringly good at code. I’ve been talking to grok on a daily basis about the code for my next game. Its helped me optimize some functions, and taught me some new tricks. It even takes optimizations it suggests, and uses my own code (which I give it snippets of) to teach me how I should apply the recommendations it has. I have genuinely learned more new stuff about C++ in the last month than the previous 20 years, and I’ve been coding since 1981.

One big ‘wtf’ moment came yesterday. I was thrilled that having asked grok about some slow code, it managed to help me redesign the high level algorithm for my particle system to make it run 36% faster. But when I gave it a function to speed up, this bit blew me away. I gave it zero context, but just pasted a function and said ‘optimize this’. It did a phenomenal job, but without even mention it, it altered one line of my code:

const float bottom = sp.Y + halfw; // Fixed: bottom should be +halfw, not -halfw

It silently found a bug, and fixed it (perfectly) without even needing any context. It looked at the surrounding code, and the variable names, and deduced correctly that I had copy/pasted a sign wrong. WTF?

Grok is superb at C++, and I ask it regularly for help in speeding up existing code, or ask it if a proposed algorithmic change will make sense, work, or be a faster or improved approach. Its absolutely superb. I cannot now imagine coding without grok, or a similar code-focused LLM to assist me. I code faster, write better code, and am more productive. Programmers who refuse to use AI are going to be in work another year at most. Maybe less than six months. And junior coders? very unlikely to get promoted or another job. Your employer is probably looking to get rid of you. The senior coder can now do 2x the work. Why pay for a junior too?

If you want a great example of how to use AI, ask it to code a website for you. Its excellent. I redid the layout and formatting code for my energy company website in seconds with grok. I simply said ‘make this look better’. The idea of ever bothering to hire someone to write HTML/CSS now seems laughable. My next game will need php, I anticipate writing it will be 5x faster using grok. Every company that develops websites is probably looking to shed 50-75% of their staff. If all you do all day is look at website mockups and write CSS/HTML you are now probably unemployable.

Do you want more examples?

Ask an AI chatbot to put together a travel schedule for a holiday for you, tailored to your likes and dislikes and budget etc. Its already better than any high end travel-agency. Goodbye everyone in charge of bespoke holiday planning. Are you thinking of buying a car or a TV? ask grok to build you a table with a cross-product analysis of the top 10 options with a focus on the attributes that matter to you. It takes seconds, and its amazing. If grok went from $5 a month to $50 a month, I’d pay it without question, right now.

Have you tried sesame? Do you think AI voices seem un-natural? not any more: https://www.sesame.com/research/crossing_the_uncanny_valley_of_voice

Imagine in 3-6 months we see voice generation even better than that powered with even better and more knowledgeable chatbots. We now have a super-informed, constantly available technical expert in many fields available through a trivial voice interface that can replace researchers in many fields, analysts, travel agents, call center staff, web developers and programmers. The number of jobs about to disappear are definitely in the millions, probably the tens of millions, even assuming zero progress after this year. And we are not even truly getting started yet.

Country Estimated Call Center Employees (2025)
United States 3,100,000
China 1,800,000
Japan 600,000
Germany 450,000
India 2,200,000

Obviously I didn’t google that list, I got grok to research it, format it, and tell me how to add it to wordpress. But yup, lets assume 90% of those jobs are toast within a year, so at least 8 million jobs gone, to be replaced by datacenters. You might think this will be politically difficult, but no. Its simply impossible for your economy to compete without this tech. Not only can AI voice assistants replace your call center staff for a tiny proportion of the cost, they will never get angry, emotional, stressed, or confused. They can even respond in any language or accent, or with any ’emotion’ you might want. They will never forget to upsell and they can stay talking to customers longer, because the cost per call will be trivial.

Pretty much any junior knowledge worker job is about to go. There are rooms full of well paid middle class employees doing research into businesses to provide analysis for stock market professionals. They all just lost their job. Every one of them. Grok can already do this better, and manus can build you a customised dashboard to analyze any financial instrument by any criteria imaginable: https://manus.im/share/5z6bnP67LtUjsti8YaIlJq?replay=1

If AI soon cracks self-driving cars (and we may be close) then lets fire every taxi and truck driver on the planet too. Thats going to be a phenomenal shock. Sort out some humanoid robots to unpack a truck and hand over parcels and the postal; servcies and delivery drivers are all gone too. Iminent? nope, but within 5 years? I think so.

Politicians are focused so much on geopolitical issues surrounding the middle east, russia/ukraine and numerous other issues that almost none of them are even giving the topic of AI powered economic growth and the resulting combination of a boom AND mass unemployment and thought. This is absolutely insane.

We are currently all standing at a crossroads. As individuals, societies and economies, we are about to race in one direction or another. Those who adopt AI, harness it, and benefit from its financial implications are going to be staggeringly wealthy. Those who stand there like a rabbit in headlights as everything changes will be unemployed AND unemployable. Whole economies are about to crumble, and others are about to race ahead. Its going to be a future where the top 5% of knowledge workers and tech companies will race ahead, and the bottom 9% gets obliterated. Countries that invest in AI will thrive. Others will become client-states, or stagger into barely-managed decline.

Nobody knows for sure, but I suspect China is about to do VERY WELL. Its very focused on AI, and tech, and chips, and higher education. So is South Korea. Japan could go either way. Taiwan is poised to do very well. The big questions are Europe and the USA. Right now… my best guess is the US suffers severe shocks. Its about to get humiliated in tech by China, and will speedrun the layoffs of middle-class knowledge workers while the government does nothing to cushion the shock. Europe? it could go either way, although I fear we may miss out too.

But as individuals? what do we do? I would suggest you buy shares in Nvidia and TSMC. At the very least try and own a chunk of the future, even if its a small chunk. Good Luck.

Another solar generation payment AND double home battery!

Posted on February 15, 2025

A few days ago I got the latest invoice/statement showing how much I was paid for the solar farm, generation in January. The grand total is…

£3,716 + VAT

For those from other countries, VAT is basically sales tax. I get paid the VAT by the people buying my energy (OVO) and then I have to pay it to the government each quarter. Its all quite tedious. Interestingly, the VAT is 20%, which is different to the rate for home power purchasing. Its irrelevant anyway, because I basically just earn interest on it for 3 months before I give it to the government, so I tend to just ignore it in any calculations. Any interest earned will be in my awful cater-allen company account which has an interest rate that is comically low. UK business banking is one giant rip-off.

Anyway, lets dig into that payment a bit more because to break it down. The full details are as follows:

Electricity output:£2,540
DUoS Benefit:£667
DUoS Costs:£-13
Transmission Loss Passthrough£28
Distribution Loss Passthrough£511
Admin Fees£-24
Before VAT£3,716
VAT£743
Total for January:£4,459

Its a complex mess isn’t it? Also it has not included REGOs yet, because I am STILL going back and forth over the minutiae of my application with ofgem. I kid myself this latest batch of questions they have will be the last and that I will finally get them. Plus the ofgem REGO website is about to be completely re-implemented, and I have ZERO faith that they will not just ‘accidentally’ delete my application so far in the inevitable chaos.

Frankly the whole system should take a tenth of the people and the time, but here we are :(

Worryingly, I have no idea how precisely the four entries under ‘electricity output’ get calculated. I assume this is fixed based on where my site is on the distribution (DNO) and transmission (National Grid) system, but I am not sure. My power is almost certainly just used very locally, so I probably don’t use the transmission network at all (hence the £28 rebate?). I likely use very little of the distribution network either, hence the £511. My best guess is that if I was an offshore windfarm 100 miles from the nearest town, that Distribution loss would be actually negative?

The DUoS stuff is a complete minefield of complexity. Best explanation from grok as to how DUoS can be a benefit to me:

Triad Avoidance: By generating during peak demand periods, you help reduce transmission network charges (TNUoS), which benefits suppliers and can result in payments or incentives for you.
Avoided DUoS Costs: If your generation offsets local demand, it reduces the DUoS charges that suppliers would otherwise pay, potentially increasing the value of your electricity in Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs).

Triad avoidance? Hold on, was that not a sci fi kids TV show? How are the triads an issue? Or is it Japanese mafia? Whats going on? Its actually even more complex:

Triads are the three half-hour periods of highest electricity demand on the transmission network each year, typically occurring between November and February.

You will be thrilled to know that my ‘Triad avoidance benefit’ for January was £0, which is why it was not included. Confused yet? You should be. I am, and I literally own an energy company. Anyway, out of interest the DUoS benefit in January was 17.9% of my total(pre-VAT) payment. I just checked December’s statement and it was 16.69%, so its not even fixed. Are they really calculating the flows in and out of each part of the distribution network on a daily basis and adding up how much ‘my’ power used it? Interesting…

In other news we finally got our second home battery installed! we now have 19kwh of home storage. In winter this does not make a vast amount of difference, because our 9.5kwh one already covered mots of our peak usage, so we could load-shift to off peak (the car charges off peak anyway). However in summer this means that on those crazy days where we generate 20kwh of power we can store all of it, even if we are away or not using any power that day.

The last summer we did actually end up with *too much* power, and had to fiddle with car charging to avoid exporting it to the grid (which we do not get a marginal export fee for, as we are on the old feed in tariff). Also we did it because I like the idea of being as resilient as possible.

We also managed to get a cable running from the battery upstairs to the living room and a new double socket installed there, amusingly next to a triple socket, so it looks like we are addicted to power sockets :D. Anyway, those two sockets are the ONLY ones that will work in a power-cut. We couldn’t power the whole house because our inverter is only 3kw, and this was the next best thing.

Its not exactly off-grid living, but being able to charge laptops and phones in a power-cut, or with an extension lead, still run the router and TV and a coffee machine will be nice :D. We paid £3,900 to have the second battery installed and the sockets fitted.