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

Detached retina problem

Posted on June 11, 2014

So it seems I am getting some negative reviews of Democracy 3 on the ipad because it doesn’t scale up the text for retina displays.

Firstly… hats off to apple for getting people to bandy about their ‘retina’ buzzword for high pixel density. Secondly… I always hated the idea of higher pixel density for the ipad. I have an ipad2, it looks VERY GOOD to me. I really can’t see how doubling the resolution would be worth doing, apart from the fact that it quadruples the amount of work the already fairly poor GPU has to do… but then what would I know?

So in an effort to improve feedback from app store review writing types, we are doing a patch for the game that effectively doubles the resolution of the text in the game.

Hopefully we might actually get some reviews then from people who like the game (over 1,000 copies sold in 72 hours so someone likes it), rather than the usual 1 star reviews, including one from someone who complains the game isn’t in Spanish? Well tough! it’s not in Farsi or Japanese either! do you review every non-Spanish game with 1 star FFS? If you bought the game and would rate it well, please take the trivial time to rate it on the app store, it takes less time than it diud to read this blog post and I do really appreciate it!

The only problem other than the complaints about retina are that the itunes sales figures update periodically, randomly, and I have no idea if sales today are good or bad, which makes planning marketing hard. BMT micro tell me INSTANTLY whenever I sell a copy. maybe if apple one day have BMTMicro’s money they will have as good a reporting system. We can only hope and pray!

I probably shouldn’t slag apple off, as I’d love them to feature the game, but fuck it, I’m indie, I can say what I like :D. I’ve been back in the UK too long, my old moaning and cynicism is returning. Must go back to the USA…

 

Democracy 3 is now on something called an ‘ipad’, whatever that is :D

Posted on June 8, 2014

Yay! At long last, you can now control an ENTIRE COUNTRY through your finger tips, whilst idly sitting on a sun lounger on the beach! (glare-permitting of course). That’s because the worlds favorite neural-network powered turn based strategy game about politics is now available on the ipad! Check out this incredibly exciting screenshot of the store:

appstore

Here is a list of the locations you can buy the ipad version of the game:

1) The apple app store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/democracy-3/id882525717?ls=1&mt=8

That’s it.

I have to admit, I am rather pleased with the way the game translates to a small tablet, it works pretty well. It doesn’t have a sprawling GUI like the PC version does on bigger monitors, but I think that is made up for by the convenience of touch controls and the ‘take-it-anywhere’ nature of the ipad. I hope it will do well. Annoyingly apples sales reports seem to lag by two days so I have no idea if anyone bought it yet.

I’ve priced it at a BARGAIN price of $9.99. This is cheaper than on PC, but then its fixed resolution, no mod support etc, so I suspect it’s reasonable. I really don’t care about anyone on the app store complaining about the price. You can basically fuck off and die in a fire if you think the game is overpriced. That’s the official developer & publisher position BTW. People who think $10 is overpriced for a game should go play angry birds of flappy birds, or similar fare and stop whining :D.

I hope it does well, partly because I like money, but mostly because ever since I bought an ipad, it’s sat and gathered dust, with far too few decent involved strategy games for the platform. If D3 does well, I’ll tell everyone so they can see it as a viable platform for more ‘serious’ strategy gaming. That would be a *good thing*.

Please help me spread the word. I am totally new to iOS gaming, so if you run a HUGE website dedicated to iOS games and haven’t got a review copy, email me at cliff AT positech dot co dot uk.

 

Friday Cat Blog

Posted on June 6, 2014

Long overdue some cat pictures.

Jadzia:

SAM_3343

Jack:

SAM_3341

GSB module design principles, a crowdsourcing experiment

Posted on June 3, 2014

A lot of GSB players are very hardcore. they have strong opinions on the cost/range ratios of beam lasers, and why wouldn’t they? this stuff seriously affects gameplay. This is why I’ve been asking their opinions on all manner of topics as I design the modules for Gratuitous Space Battles 2. I started a discussion on the old GSB forums here:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=9690&start=15

But in addition I thought I’d throw up the actual design doc for the modules here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t3geRZ5goyFsRkFibBNTqRW7fNiTuxijjnmhTnZQVgo/edit?usp=sharing

So anyone can read it, and add comments ()but can’t edit the actual doc). Hopefully this draws in some really creative ideas and shoots down any stupid decisions I try to make. I’m also working on the spreadsheet of actual raw module data, which is the way I’ll be working (as opposed to the individual ini files of GSB 1), as this allows a much simpler way to balance costs and power requirements of modules, maybe involving actual equations to ensure stuff is balanced (yikes!).

GSB 1 had a LOT of modules when you take into account extra content from expansion packs. I’m hoping to make all of that content included in the base game for GSB2, without any DLC required, so all the old faves like the decoy projector and the smart bomb will be in there. There are also some wacky new ideas, Combat tractor beams (like the cultures ‘effectors’), remote propulsion projection, fuel tanks for fighters, and so on. This kind of spreadsheet-work makes a change from my recent few days of crunching away on optimizing the asteroid rendering for the engine. I’ve got it faster now, but not as fast as I’d like, and the multi-threading is a *bit* better, but still not making that much use of extra cores yet…

The inconvenient truth about indie game sales revenue

Posted on May 29, 2014

Did you know that 95% of the money an indie game makes comes from when that game is on sale and highly discounted? Some pundits put this at more like 97%, although I do hear that other people claim it be 98%, which is nonsense because we all know that 99% is the real figure right? After all, we’ve all seen those exciting steam charts with those big spikes haven’t we? And sales are just GREAT, people on twitter and other social media go bananas over them. they have mini-games and memes. Everybody knows that the way to make money is to put a game on sale! sale! sale! not just 95% off, how about 99% off…etc.

SaleSign

Exciting stuff, which is slightly undermined by it being dead wrong. Like most slightly autistic numbers geeks, I can’t help but crunch the data. Lets look at Democracy 2 sales on a large online portal.

The game was priced at $19.95.  Clearly this is total madness for an iconic, old, 2D strategy game, so presumably nobody bought it full price?

Actually 52% of it’s money came from full-price sales. And that’s a low-ball figure because there was a launch discount (which I don’t even do any more). I suspect it could have been higher. This was an old game, already sold for years from my site, so the real hardcore fans already bought it, yet 52% of new customers grabbed it at full price.

At 25% off, 15.5% off the income was generated

At 50% off (bargain!!!) 17% of total income was generated

at 75% off (amazing!!!!!!) 14% was generated

I see those big exciting spikes in sales reports as much as the next person, but it terms out we humans SUCK at making sense of charts like that. We also get lured by the thought of lots of players, rather than actual income.

Another thought worth considering is that at price X, you sell copies to everyone who would be happy to pay X or more. So what that means is that when a game is 75% off, a fair chunk of those buyers might have bought at full price. They aren’t going to donate the other 75% of the money later. Maybe only a few of them are in that position, but you need four sales for each of them to match the revenue…

Sales make money. Sales are good, they allow you to sell to people on the fence, or with less cash. I’m not knocking sales. But when your entire marketing strategy is based around discounts and sales and shoveling your game out as cheap as you can go, you have to ask yourself if you actually ever checked that strategy was working.