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

Adding better curves to the Democracy 3 equations

Posted on September 14, 2013

Happily there seem to be very few actual bugs or crashes in the Democracy 3 beta. I  have already fixed the only 2 actual crashes I know about, pending the first patch, which I am aiming to release for PC tomorrow or Monday, with Linux/Mac to follow. Sales seem really good, and people seem happy, which is all excellent news.

What surprised me is how many people say it’s too easy. Nooo!!!! I didn’t think so, but you can’t argue with peoples savegames. Plus, there are a number of anomalies. parents making up 100% of the population, and 100% being retired too. Ooops, clearly that isn’t part of the plan D. I have a big long list of tweaks and adjustments already implemented for me to test today/tomorrow, but I also have some subtler changes to make…

Democracy 3 is essentially a huge web of interconnected things (‘neurons’ in code…) and each of those connections i governed by an equation, and an input/output throttle. The equation is where most of the magic happens. For example, with State Schools, the effect on education is “0.07+(0.3*x). Which essentially means a linear effect from +7% to +37% on education, in line with education spending. Obviously this is a bit simplistic, as well as making for less interesting decisions. Gamers have mentioned (and I agree) that too many policies are Min/Maxed, in that the actual slider is rarely set sensibly somewhere in the middle. It’s the linear nature of that equation that causes this. Ideally, the first few dollars spent on education should have the most effect, trailing off until you are eventually just throwing money needlessly at an already over-funded program.

The chart below shows my proposed solution:

graph

The red line represents the original equation, the green line is the new one, which is 0.03*(x^0.6)+0.07.  This is not possible in Democracy 2 because it couldn’t process that many variables in an equation, but luckily I added this capability as part of the re-write of the code for D3, so this sort of thing is now possible. I think this is a step forwards, and something I need to look at replacing a lot of the linear equations with. Does this make sense?

Democracy 3 available NOW for pre-order+beta access

Posted on September 12, 2013

Yeah, I know it took a while, but it’s here at last. Democracy 3 can be in your hands RIGHT THIS MINUTE!

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You can pre-order from my site now, and you get access to the beta immediately. This is, I hope, A pretty polished beta. It’s feature complete, it’s nice and shiny. It’s optimised. there may be bugs or balance issues, but I’m aware of none for the PC version, and only 2 or 3 minor visual anomalies in the mac & linux builds. For the first time ever I have a multi-platform simultaneous game release. Oh yeah.
Buying the game now gets you download links (DRM-free of course) for all 3 platforms, plus a steam key, which right now is useless, but will let you activate the game on steam when it’s released finally.
let me know what you think here, or in the forums at http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=36 or I will be answering questions about the game on reddit at http://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/1m8mne/democracy_3_the_political_strategy_game_now/

Obviously anything you can do to help me get the word out about this game is much appreciated. I look forward to being accused of an evil capitalist or a naive communist in equal measure. It was an artist decision to make the capitalist guy the largest one in that image, and ditto about there being more women than men :D

Some marketing thoughts

Posted on September 10, 2013

I’ve been reading this book:

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Which is a bit old, but kinda interesting. I’ve always been impressed by the guy’s marmite theory of middle east peace. Anyway, part of the reason for this was for me to challenge my own thinking, and led to be scrawling all kinds of stuff over that big blackboard in my office. I was trying to re-evaluate all kinds of stuff. In some ways, F2P is the absolute perfect example of lateral thinking. It’s a totally different way of running a games business, as is pay what you want and kickstarter. All massively successful. Sadly, I did not reach a similar epiphany. However, it does open my mind.

I recently, out of curiosity, found myself adding up the total development cost (excluding my time) of Democracy 3. I then compared it to my proposed marketing budget for the game, and got a figure of 33.96%. In other words, for every dollar I spent on artwork/music/other stuff for the game, I was planning on spending $0.33 promoting it. This is lower than games like Call of Duty, where historically the marketing budget has dwarfed the mere development cost, but I can’t bring myself to do that :D.

However, with my lateral thinking-expanded mind, it occurred to me that this wasn’t a sensible way to analyze the optimum marketing spend anyway. In the back of my mind, if I’m thinking about what would be a suitable ROI, and looking at my costs, that’s probably the wrong metric. If I assume (conservatively) that D3 sells as well as D2, shouldn’t I really be looking at the marketing budget as a percentage of the projected revenue? not the costs? If so, then that 33% figure shrinks dramatically. As a result, what in my mind I can consider a reasonable marketing budget rises dramatically, because if I’m being rational, and I was happy to spend 33% I still should be, but of the larger (revenue) figure.

Now I know what you are thinking. In a perfect world the marketing budget expands infinitely as long as the ROI on each marketing dollar spent is positive, but that’s in a theoretical world with perfect information. If I spend $100 today, I might not see the ROI for six months, so do I halt my spending entirely tomorrow? Obviously you have to guess what’s going to happen and budget accordingly.

I find analyzing and managing this stuff fascinating, but am not aware of any games built around it. Gratuitous Marketing Battles here we come!

 

Learn from the veterans

Posted on September 5, 2013

I was watching a video of a talk by an indie game dev recently, where they outlined all of the huge mistakes they made with their first indie game. They were very clever, very capable programmers with a huge amount of mainstream industry experience, and this was their first indie game. They made pretty much every mistake in the book. They picked a vastly complex and huge project without testing the code gameplay first, they aimed it at consoles instead of the (much easier, open market) PC, they took YEARS to make it, got burned out, kept re-designing it…

All the stuff that old and grizzled indie devs like me keep telling people not to do. Why do new indies do this? My theories:

  1. They thought they were not NEW to this. They confused being part of a AAA team to being a sole coder/designer/artist/businessperson in an indie team. In other words, they thought they had experience in something they did not.
  2. They were arrogant, and thought they were better than the devs such advice is aimed at. This isn’t as critical as it sounds. I’m pretty arrogant too. Most people who think they can design whole worlds to entertain others are arrogant. It’s important to at least *know* you have this trait, so you can check it now and then.
  3. They were stuck in AAA development habits. In their experience, games take years, they take big teams, they are done for console, they are done with crunch. Why would it occur to them to work any other way?
  4. They think people only buy AAA games, so they aim to compete with the games they are used to working on. Not true. Just ask notch :D

I don’t think anyone can change all this. Those reasons all seem pretty *real* to me. I fumbled and made mistakes and screwed up as a new indie dev myself. The good news was I did that as a hobby, with a secure job, and I never spent years on a game to learn that lesson. I probably shouldn’t expect anyone to take a more considered approach to seeking advice than I did (although to be fair there were VERY few indies back then. these days we are swamped with experienced devs offering advice).

Still… It does make me cringe when I see first-time indies outlining their 3D MMO ideas on the day they quit their jobs. Don’t do that :D