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

Capitalizing on the portal effect

Posted on February 23, 2014

My website looks more like a games portal than many indie developer sites. the reason for this is simple, I have more games. Depending on your screen resolution, you currently see images of GSB, GTB, Democracy 3, Redshirt and Kudos 2 on the front page. This is a huge advantage for an indie. It basically means I have five times the chances to capture a gamers interest if I can get them to my site. If you have ONE game, and you run an ad, or have some PR that drives traffic, you need to be 100% sure that visitor is interested. Sometimes they don’t like the look of your game, and they leave. In my case, if they see that big GSB image and think ‘meh’, they might be attracted to Redshirt, or to Democracy 3. That makes the site less leaky, and that’s awesome.

This is why it makes sense for indie like me to fund a game like Redshirt. I’m also hoping to fund another game. It basically doubles my output, and means each year Ideally I get two new games up there. This means halving my leakiness, and potentially doubling the return-per-click on any marketing efforts. My stats show me a lot of people bought redshirt after visiting my site direct from the main menu of Democracy 3. And vice versa. This is awesome. It’s also another reason why Steam is a billion-dollar success.

I tried to do a free thing for indies to get the same effect. It’s here. it didn’t take off. Indies are very interested in ‘someone else’ doing stuff like this, but by definition, we are indies, we like to work alone. This is a pity, but it means it’s even more important for me to continue building my own mini-portal of positech-published games. I reckon I need a game a year to stay even, as older games will eventually lose their appeal.

The maths of this are very interesting. Even assuming the ‘I was here for X but bought Y’ effect only works in 25% of cases, then previously me bidding $0.30 for a click means I can suddenly bid $0.37 instead, if I have one extra game. If I have 4 games, then I can double my bid. That’s a huge bonus. It also explains why, if you have a single niche indie game, and advertising isn’t making an ROI for you, that you may lose faith in it. Each year my PR budget goes up and up, and each year the stock of games it’s selling goes up. they are clearly related.

So I’ve just dusted off the trusty old Google adwords campaign for my site which I experimented with years ago, and will try again. Not for any specific game, but for GSB,D3 and Redshirt combined. I suspect it will do well.

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Gratuitous Space Battles 2 Lighting

Posted on February 19, 2014

Sooo… I’ve been experimenting with lighting of spaceships for GSB 2. If you played the original game you might be aware that although it often looked pretty l33t, it also had a tendency to look a little ‘flat’. The lighting was always the same (apart from the odd ‘global’ shader effect, and it could certainly have had more depth. This is one of the things I wanted to address when re-doing the game. The original game just had simple sprites for ship hulls, and the new version is tons more complex and lets me do lots of magic. Basically, I combine sprites for the ships with normal maps, and specular maps and lightmaps, and use a shedload of different shaders and render targets to do all kinds of compositing voodoo. So here I present some early screenshots showing me monkeying around with the options I now have. It’s a GSB 1 ship (as a test) and it looks like ti has another one stuck to the front of it. This is a test of something else (secret!) but it shows how one ship can now cast a shadow on another (Not correctly positioned yet, but easily fixed…)

So here is a screenshot showing the bloom effect everywhere: (click to enlarge)

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Here is one with the bloom effect turned down but the 3D bumpiness up a bit:

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Here I turned down the exterior lighting, and may have moved the lighting direction too:

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Now I’ve gone full-on moody lighting and likely moved the light again:

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Now I’m in real ‘dark-battle lit only by the light of our warp engines mood:

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You really need to see it all big screen (and moving!) to see the full effect of it all. And you also need to compare it to the original flat looking default-shaded sprites in GSB 1 to imagine the final effect with all the battle raging around it. I’m quite pleased with it so far, although there are loads of things that need improving and tweaking, and no doubt needs more optimizing. It’s a start though!

 

Build Management Hell

Posted on February 17, 2014

This is part of indie life nobody warns you about. In your mind, you create a game, test it, upload it, then sit in front of windows showing the sales figures and the bug reports. That’s what happens right?

Not quite. The modern indie game, even one that is a pure-desktop (not mobile/tablet) experience can end up with a scary amount of build-management. If you are really organized and clever (clearly I’m not) you can manage it without too much stress. If you don’t plan ahead, you end up like me.

Democracy 3 has, primarily it’s ‘direct sales’ build on PC. This is the ‘master build’. It then has a separate build for steam, which is uploaded through valves tools. That’s 2 builds. Then there is a build for GoG without steams API in it. Then there is the build for the humble store. And also there is the secure copy uploaded for reviewers. That’s five builds. That’s no problem. Then each of those has a mac and a linux build. Ouch, that’s 15 builds now. This is a pain, but doable. Then it gets translated into French and German. Ok, that means 45 builds now. Yeah, 45 builds.

No big deal right? But don’t forget each one is about 40-50MB in size. That’s 2 gigabytes. No big deal? Try uploading that with 45k/s upload speed out here amongst the sheep. You can see why I don’t get to play any online games around ‘democracy 3 patch days’. Also, you can see just how infuriating it is when you find a bug that needs patching. 20 minutes debugging,  an hour fixing and checking, 12 hours uploading.

And because I’m so dumb, all of those builds are entirely separate, even though 95% of the files are shared across them all. Learn from my mistakes, get your build process sorted out beforehand!

OMG I am an entrepreneur

Posted on February 11, 2014

I’m only half-joking, but I’ve only recently realized this. I know that the french have no word for it, but it seems I do! The thing is, the whole ‘being an entrepreneur’ thing creeps up on you. I know that people often describe themselves as entrepreneurs, especially in silicon valley, but I have a stricter definition that most, along these lines:

To be a true entrepreneur you need to have actually started a company that has made a profit. you need to have more than one successful product, and you also need to have managed a product where the work is done by other people.

The reason I say that, is there are a lot of people who are really talented, and very successful, and that comes from their ability in that specific skill, not specifically skill at running a business per-se. In other words, you can be an awesome artist, and do well from it, despite being a pretty poor businessperson. That’s not a criticism, in any way, it just gets rolled into being an entrepreneur, which at least in my mind means something else.

The reason I say this, is redshirt. I didn’t design the game, do the art, write the code or any of that sort of thing. Mitu did. I was the publisher, so I made strategic decisions and invested money, in the hope that I’d get that money back and make a return on my investment. That’s how entrepreneurs work, and how they can invest in your coffee shop* without knowing the first thing about making coffee. They probably need to know good coffee from bad coffee, but more importantly they need to understand business/marketing/finance and the most important thing of all: picking the right people and the right business model.

The reason I’m suddenly happy that I’ve had a success at this, is that it’s one of those very intangible skills that I like to challenge myself with. It’s the same reason I trade on the stock market. Judging my my recent performance there, I’m not so good at that :D. Both stock-picking and entrepreneurship are things that NOBODY KNOWS how to do. Studies have shown monkeys picking peanuts can do as good a job as many pension fund managers. There is no mathematical formula for beating the stock market or investing in a business. None. Some people get lucky for a long time, but there is no absolute formula. It’s a combination of research, a lot of gut feeling and a lot of analysis.

In other words it’s a game!, and I unlocked an achievement. Woot. Wheres my little steam badge?

*I drank coffe 20 minutes ago, and this is the reason this pops into my head. That is exactly how advertising works, subconsciously but incredibly powerfully.