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

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

Self-destructive behavior? or practical PR management?

Posted on August 31, 2013

I was replying to an email about democracy 3 today, when ti occurred to me to suggest the person who wrote to me ‘like’ the facebook page for democracy 3. For those interested, you can find the page here: https://www.facebook.com/democracygame. As of the time of writing, it has 540 likes. This is not a lot. On the other hand I could have sent him to the very sparsely populated Democracy 3 forum at my site, which is at http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=35. It currently has 139 posts.

I’ve been musing over whether or not that sort of decision makes sense. This is the kind of thing I lie awake worrying about :D

Pros:

  1. Almost everyone has a facebook account. he can visit the page and click ‘like’ and that boosts the popularity of the game in the eyes of others. it’s simple and easy. He is MUCH more likely to do this that join my forums. In other words, this is less likely to be a waste of time.
  2. Facebook is always up to date and has no security flaws or requires any technical maintenance on my part. It also has features that forums do not have, and everyone knows how to use it. People are more familiar with facebook ‘likes’ and posts than they are forums.
  3. Facebook is viral. If this guy ‘likes’ democracy 3, then that gives me indirect marketing to all his friends who saw that like. Even those who have never heard of the game. In other words, facebook likes ‘leak’ out into the rest of the world for free. Forum posts stay where they are.

Cons:

  1. I control my forums and my server. I have total freedom to do what I like there. I cannot have my forum ‘banned’, or have the terms and conditions change underneath me. I can also populate that forum page with banners linking to my main site, and promote my games there with greater freedom than I can within a facebook page
  2. I’d just be making the facebook page more popular and my own forum less so. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy if I start defining facebook as the place to go, which could kill off my own forum.
  3. People on my forums can be ‘marketed’ to for free by me. People on facebook, even those on my facebook page, will only see my posts if I pay facebook enough. Essentially, I’m building up their network for free, and then paying them for permission to talk to the same people I sent there in the first place. This is stupid in the long term.

The game is not even in beta yet (although it will be soon, I’ve even made the buy button for it!). So the traffic on both is limited. I need to get these decisions right NOW, not dither about them. The trouble is, I tend to dither and not make firm commitments.

Does the virality of facebook trump the ownership of developer forums? I’m suspecting that it may do, although that is horribly short-term thinking. ARGHHHHH.