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

Exchange rates…from hells heart I stab at thee…

Posted on May 26, 2014

That might be Shakespeare, not sure, I think it’s from the wrath of khan. Anyway…

Because I’ve been an indie developer for a thousand years, right from back when isildur cut the wrong from saurons hand, I have learned a few lessons, one of them being ‘exchange rate conversion is a bitch’. Because I live in the old world paradise of England, and the global games market is based ‘across the pond’ in the USA, I tend to get paid in dollars. That used to seem ok, because you just converted it to £ and there you go. And yet…. it turns out the exchange rate banks use for this is filed under the ‘exchange rate for dumbass schmucks that have no clue’ folder.

You can get a better rate through dedicated exchange rate companies, which is annoying because it means transferring to them, and then back again to a different account, and in any case beyond a certain minimum amount, you can get a better rate anyway, if you call the bank and ask for it.

So my first step was to set up a dollar bank account, which was an epic tale that makes wagners ‘ring’ cycle look like an episode of antiques roadshow, but I digress…

ach1Now I have a dollar account, and have actually persuaded almost everyone I deal with to pay into it, using dollars (except apple, fuck you apple…), I progress to the next level…

ach2Which is great. Now all I have to do is pick the right moment for the exchange rate, when the pound is really weak against the dollar (so I get lots of pounds). I started looking to pick my moment around October…

chart

Well bugger… It looks like my timing isn’t exactly awesome. My economist head tells me that a booming house market and recovering economy means that speculators suspect UK interest rates will rise before the US, hence people piling into pounds and making them expensive. Grrrr. It’s basically moved from 1.6 to 1.7, so roughly 6% of my earnings over the last 8 months have evaporated in exchange rates. That sounds worse than it is, because the default exchange-rate losses from a normal bank account are *so bad* I would probably be losing 3-4% on them anyway.

Plus it’s not all doom and gloom, the last week or two has shown it sliding back in the ‘right’ direction. I just hope it slides a bit further before I have to start eating the carpet or convert some dollars… If only the UK economy would implode and us be plunged into economic letdown here, things might improve from my POV. Or as Garak put it…

“How thoughtless of me not to consider the effects the destruction of my home world would have on your business; These must be trying times for you, be brave.”

 

 

Gratuitous Space Battles 2 planet image update

Posted on May 25, 2014

Nothing is final until the fat spaceship explodes, but there are some screens showing some test GSB2 battles with new planet imagery. I am going to need to knock up a level editor which lets me adjust all the planet sizes/parallax etc, so I can do something more creative than just slap any old planet with any old nebula, star and background… But I definitely like the ‘big battle over the planet in the background’ thing. Feedback is most welcome. (click to enlarge)

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One of the things I’m not sure about is the extent to which I let the planets zoom in when you zoom in the camera. There are two possible methods, the ‘treat the planet as an object an infinite distance and don’t scale it’ approach, and the ‘it’s just another object in the scene so zoom in’ approach. I frankly don’t care which is more accurate. Nothing about GSB2 is accurate, it’s just aiming to look l33t. I keep changing my mind as to how to set up the camera regarding planets.

Election day… and democracy is for sale (and on sale… geddit?)

Posted on May 22, 2014

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Well you wouldn’t expect an event like the European elections to go buy without some big promotional democracy-related thing from me would you? Here in my local polling station the queues were…well… nonexistent. I think we were the second people to vote in the village. So I hereby predict low turnouts, and lots of election staff finishing their crosswords and Sudoku during the day. The election works on proportional representation, which we as a country recently voted against in a referendum (doh!) so I suspect lots of people are boycotting the election because they don’t like the fairness of the system. yes that must be it…

Anyway.. DEMOCRACY 3 is 50% off today. YES 50% off!. You can buy it from steam here:

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Or from my wonderful personal website **here**, which also gets you a steam key (and I get more money! yay!). Please tell everyone, tweet about it, blog about it, express your happiness for this event in interpretive jazz dance on street corners. Perhaps this is a good topic for you to write a song about, or maybe a play or some poetry? Hasn’t the whole ‘democracy 3 at 50% off story got the makings of a decent TV miniseries?

In all seriousness, all retweets and pimpage is much appreciated. We poor struggling starving indies need your help. I’ll have to eat jacks cat biscuits if you don’t buy a copy, and that will make him angry. You wouldn’t like him when he is angry…

Jack will starve unless you buy cliffs games...
Jack will starve unless you buy cliffs games…

For those not aware, Democracy 3 is a political strategy game where YOU yes YOU are the president or prime minister of a real country, and get to make decisions on tax rates, laws, government spending and so on. It’s got great reviews. There are also some let’s plays scattered over the interwebs. like this one:

I’ve sold over twenty licenses to schools who use it to indoctrinate and confuse small children. Not convinced? It uses a NEURAL NETWORK, which sounds really impressive and cool, and thus must make the game better. Plus it was made by a developer who actually PAYS TAX, unlike many other corporations. Support your honest developers! especially the carbon-neutral ones!. You know you want to! Why are you still reading this when you could be using Democracy 3 to fund a space program, pay for food stamps or give blatant tax cuts for foreign investors?

I *may* have had too much caffeine.

Democracy 3 extremism promotion tactics

Posted on May 18, 2014

So I recently released democracy 3 extremism, complete with it’s lovely trailer…

And how is it doing? Well it’s going ok. It isn’t selling as well as social engineering, but that is to be expected, as it’s the second DLC and these things always have declining sales as you do more. It’s also very early days, and so far it’s been 100% only for sale at full price, which is obviously to be expected as it’s only a few days into being on sale.

Anyway, my stats (which are partial, not complete) show me that my current profit from the DLC is $3,901. It’s probably higher than that, as I haven’t updated it today. The reason that profit is quite low is I’ve been channeling a big big chunk of the income from it back into promotion. My facebook ad which looks like this:

d3_extremism_facebook

Is currently being shown at $600 a day, and has chalked up 1,291 clicks to the web page so far, at $0.49 a click. That doesn’t include the visits to the facebook page, the extra facebook likes and of course anyone with anti-tracking or noscript turned on. $0.49 is a lot, but I am targeting men of a certain age (sorry ladies, but you just do not buy this game, according to my stats), with an interest in certain games, in certain countries, so it should be very targeted. My target demographic on facebook is 2,600,000, which I reckon is quite small, having shown the ad to 171,000 of them so far (6%). I’m running the ad for a few more days, so should hit about 25% of that demographic, but I may supplement it with another reddit ad placement too. (I’ve already spent $2,450 on reddit ads).

The result of this has also pushed sales of the base game. Extremism released on 13th may. if I look at Democracy 3 steam sales from 13-17th and compare to the previous week in the same days, the difference is a boost of 134%. This is something I should definitely take into account when calculating if the expansion is a success or not. This also means I have greater freedom to re-invest in the game. I’ve already propelled Democracy 3 into the top 50 strategy games on steam again. Might another $2k on ads push me up a few more places? and might that be self-sustaining? It might be worth basically spending the whole DLC profit in PR in order to promote base game sales (which in turn may eventually lead to more DLC sales).

Of course it’s all guesswork, and tbh marketing and business is just a game I enjoy playing. I did start playing GalCiv III alpha, but its very very alpha (no space battles yet!) So I might just sit on that for a bit.