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

Gratuitous & Big Pharma Development Blog Videos.

So I thought I’d put together a video showing what I’ve been doing on gratuitous space battles 2 since the Eurogamer show. I’ve also been recovering, and doing under-the-hood engine stuff and bug fixing. Enjoy… (& share/tweet post to websites etc :D)

And on the topic of developer videos.. check out the big pharma dev blog video below…

Confused about SSL and HTTPS (but not baking)

So apparently you get extra brownie points from google’s ranking now if you have an SSL certificate. I know more about cake-baking than SSL. (Always minimize time between mixing and putting it in the oven kids). I bought an SSL cert for positech.co.uk, and apparently my host installed it, but I don’t really know what is going on. They told me my IP changed as a result, but for what?  just web? FTP? cpanel? who knows…

What it now means is that this address is valid:

https://www.positech.co.uk

Whereas this still isn’t:

https://www.cliffski.com/ and of course none of my other domains are either, by positech is the most popular one anyway. You are probably at it right now.

Which is fine, and the positech address gives lots of nice green ‘this site is trustworthy(ish) reports in chrome and IE, and even very slightly in firefox:

ssl

So that’s just lovely, but  does it mean I should add a redirect in htaccess to redirect all http://www.positech.co.uk traffic to https://www.positech.co.uk? Is that what people do?

I know NOTHING. But I do know that if something makes my site more desirable to traffic for $50 a year I’m doing it :D

Show Me The Games updated, needs games!

So, my little side project (not so little any more…) showmethegames has been converted to wordpress. You probably can’t tell, it looks exactly the same, but what this means is…

  • submitting a new game (still done by me) is much easier
  • Submitting an article (done by dan) is TONS easier
  • It has comments!
  • It has endless-scrolling!

All of these are GOOD THINGS. For those new to this blog, SMTG is my indie-promoting site that acts as a database of cool, high quality indie games you can buy direct from the developer. You can get almost all of them from Steam or GoG too, but we like competition, so we support multiple payment options for gamers.

What I need is… MORE GAMES. The requirements are pretty simple:

  • Game must be high quality. Something that actually sells. If it’s not going to sell 100 copies, it’s probably just your first game, and thats *fine*, but not what the site is aimed at.
  • Game must be available from you, thew developer, through any payment system (Humble widget, BMTMicro, PayPal, fast-spring) in some format, not a portal-exclusive.
  • It must be finished and on sale, not a kickstarter, early access game. And currently not a F2P game, sorry :D
  • PC only.

If your game fits all those criteria and it isn’t already on there, email cliff AT positech dot co dot uk with this…

  • Game Title
  • Game Description (about 100 words)
  • Game Genre
  • 445pixel width screenshot of the game in jpg format, the best one you have to summarize how the game plays
  • A single ‘feature image’ of dimensions 740px by 356 in jpg format
  • A website URL
  • A demo URL, if available.
  • A purchase URL
  • A contact email (not published)

And I’ll add it. What’s in it for me? NOTHING. I just like supporting indie games. What does it cost you? NOTHING. How much traffic will it generate? err…some, but it will be veyr targeted and high quality.

If you are looking for something else to read now, go read dans summary of adventure games on the site.

GSB2 at EGX

I’m too tired and busy to blog properly right now, so enjoy this video of me talking instead. I’ve clearly lost my voice at this point in the day :D

JOURNALISTS..COME TO US…COME TO US….

Ok, this is my last day of peace and quiet amongst the fields and the cows and the sheep and the gentle tweeting of birds and clip-clop of horses. The next five days are one of BANG BANG BOOF-BOOF_WAH-WAH-ARGGGH. Or as most of it’s inhabitants refer to it ‘London’.

See what I did there? I subverted the conversational expectation for comedic effect. I’m wasted in games. Anyway…

Positech Games will be at the Eurogamer show, the big loud games Expo in Earls Court where gamers pay money to see early builds of games that developers have paid money to show to them. There is a discrepancy here somewhere…. Anyway, we have TWO yes count them TWO games at the show. On is the game we developed ourselves, called
Gratuitous Space Battles 2 and it looks like this:

gsbs

The other is developed by a third party developer and we are publishing it. It’s a strategy/tycoon/sim game called ‘Big Pharma‘ and it looks like this:

bp1

Both games are on the show floor playable by press and public alike. GSB is not quite alpha. Big Pharma is very early, but both are worth your time to check out. Me and Tim (BP designer) will be there all four days. You do *not* need an appointment to come play the game or interview us, or ask us questions or anything like that. We will be there, just come say hello. You don’t have to be someone amazingly super-famous like Alec Meer to ask us for an interview, we will talk to anyone, even if you just have a blog with a dozen readers or a youtube channel with 10 subscribers. It must be ten though, none of you 9-subscriber losers.

We are not frightening or intimidating, we are like tigers, we are probably more scared of you than you are of us. We sit in dark rooms all day hitting keyboards, this is scary scary time.

egx2

Please come along, get a free badges or two and a free leaflet. Ours are glossy!