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

Announcing positech’s next game will be….

Posted on January 17, 2013

This…

Yup, a sequel to democracy 2, my political strategy game. Let me talk briefly about why and how…

Firstly, democracy is a game I am very proud of. I think it’s my most original and innovative design, in terms of both mechanics and GUI. I don’t think any other game I’ve made has been so ‘out of the blue’ as Democracy. I also find it very interesting (although incredibly difficult) to work on. basically it’s a custom-build neural network with a cunning GUI on top of it. I’m also a bit of a political geek, with views that range all over the spectrum, so I enjoy the analysis and research involved in working on the game.

The original, and D2 are good solid games, but they are long in the tooth now, and are starting to seriously show their age, despite D2 selling scarily well still, and also now on steam. If it was just a matter of the game being old in years, I’d happily leave it, as I have several other games I want to be making right now as well, but there are other good reasons to revisit the series such as…

  • The game is technically old. It runs at a fixed 1024×768 resolution. Clearly that sucks. There are also numerous other GUI areas that need more flexibility and polish.
  • The game’s modding support could be much improved, as could it’s tutorial
  • The game had no good system within its simulation to reflect the private sector with regards to social services such as health care, schools and pensions, and tended to require state provision in those areas. This is a shortfall which skews the game more than I would like into a specific political direction
  • The game has been left behind slightly by political events. Climate change is a bigger deal now, fears of gangsta rap less so… plus the whole ‘finance your government debt through money printing or the bond market’ and credit ratings could all be reflected in a modern version of the game.

I’m coding Democracy 3 95% from scratch, although the basic GUI layout be very very similar (although much polished). The game is up and running already (I’ve worked on it on and off for a while now), but there is nothing exciting to see yet.  Ship date is sometime this year, it’s done when it’s done etc. Stay tuned…

 

Gaming cost per hour

Posted on January 13, 2013

I was curious, and none of the sites tracking this sort of thing could easily provide me with the stats per game, so I looked up what I’d paid for a few steam games and how much effectively I’d paid ‘per hour’ to enjoy them. here are some I checked…

Battlefield Bad Company 2 & vietnam add on £0.15 / hour
Dishonored £2.30 / hour
Hearts of iron 3 £1.87 / hour.
Sim City 4 Deluxe £0.14 / hour
Defense grid £0.43 / hour
Skyrim £5.86 / hour
Tropico 4 £0.62 / hour
Wargame:European Escalation £30.00 / hour

#It;s very interesting doing this, as it immediately shows me how impulse purchases at full price with no demo, based on a video are always my nemesis. Wargame:EE was a nightmare for me, whereas Battlefield BC2 is a huge gain. In fact, that figure is way lower if you discount the vietnam DLC. In that case, it’s a clear example of the company getting more from me in DLC (at full price) than the base game, something the stats show I’m clearly very happy to do (they clearly earned it). Something else that becomes clear is that this doesn’t really match my enjoyment of the game that much. Hearts of iron 3 clocked up a fair few hours, but did I really enjoy it as much as dishonored? I’d say definitely not. Another way to look at this is to say that, for example I’m happy to in general pay £1 an hour for quality gaming entertainment. By that measure the costs should have been:

Battlefield Bad Company 2 & vietnam add on worth £107
Dishonored worth £13
Hearts of iron 3 worth £8
Sim City 4 Deluxe worth £17
Defense grid Worth £4
Skyrim worth £4
Tropico 4 worth £10
Wargame:European Escalation worth £1

of course this assumes I have as much fun with each game, which isn’t entirely true.  Even so, who would have thought I could justify spending 100 times as much on one game as I did on another, but that has to be the rational conclusion. Maybe those F2P whales are more rational than I assume?

Gratuitous Space Battles: The outcasts is released!

Posted on January 11, 2013

Yup, you noticed I’d gone quiet about the new Gratuitous Space Battles expansion? Well it’s always like that in the days leading up to a release, while a bunch of admin stuff gets done. But lo! The latest expansion pack for my scarily popular space strategy game is now on sale. Here is the official launch trailer (also in HD, view on youtube to see in all it’s glory):

The website for the new DLC can be found here:

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/outcasts.html

With this new race, I went with the idea of a cybernetic race who had been shunned and thrown out for their practice of biological/mechanical integration. I was thinking about all kinds of stuff, partly the tales from Star Trek:DS9 of ‘the founders’ being exiled and chased from worlds by ‘solids’, also partly the many different versions of the backstory of Doctor Who’s cybermen, and also the race of ‘krikkit’ in the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, who seem like ncie people deep down, they just can’t cope with the thought of other species. My vision for the outcasts is that they are nice people at heart, they just suffer from a major persecution complex over the whole ‘cybernetic’ thing, and are determined to wipe out every non cybernetic life-form so they don’t have to feel awkward any more.

Who knows how many intergalactic wars could be solved just by some therapy eh?

Anyway, the new race comes with a few new goodies for people to play with, I suspect people will really enjoy the multi-point tractor beam and the decoy projection module, and no doubt GSB’s extensive modding community will pull the expansion to pieces, see how it ticks and start producing weird hybrid alien ships and new modules over the next few weeks. I hope so anyway. I’m also very pleased with the visual design of the ships for this race.

here are the obligatory buy links.

buy buy

Please help if you can by tweeting or facebook posting, or forum-commenting on the new race. It’s all much appreciated. For those of the social-inclined there is a Gratuitous Space Battles facebook page here.

Deep Space Corruption

Posted on January 8, 2013

Soooo… there I am innocently watching an episode of star trek:deep space nine (I think it was called rapture), and ok, I’d had a single glass of wine…but…

There is this scene where kassidy yates, ex maquis supporter, and recently released from a six month prison sentence as a result, comes back to visit the station commander Captain Sisko, who is the ‘hero’ of the episode. She says she has nowhere to stay and he says ‘you can have your old quarters back, they are just as you left them. I have some pull with the station commander’.

What the hell?

sisko

So much for a wonderful utopian post-scarcity federation future. Why are the bajorans trusting these mobsters? One might reasonably assume that ideally the allocation of sleeping quarters on the most strategically (and quite possibly economically) important star bases in the galaxy would be taken very seriously, and allocated on a basis of need. But oh no. The station commander has reserved a suite for his ex-girlfriend and convicted terrorist.

Now replace ‘sisko’ with ‘berlusconi’ and ask how acceptable this sort of thing is. What next? the captain hosting bunga-bunga parties in the holosuites?

Something is rotten in the state of Bajor.

Saving and Loading

Posted on January 3, 2013

How I envy developers working on arcade games, or anything that has a very simple game ‘state’ that can be easily saved and loaded with no grief. For the game I am currently working on (announcement later this month), it’s a bit of a pain, because the actual game ‘state’ is horrendously involved, and every single byte of it has to be loaded and saved perfectly. The problem is mainly due to my tendency to code systems that have a huge number of objects that all have pointers to each other, in complex and arcane ways.

In theory, stitching everything back together after a load is fairly easy, but in practice, it’s a bit of a pain, and the REAL pain is to know that it has all worked perfectly. if 99% of the pointers are right, and 1 isn’t, then I have a horrible dangling bug somewhere…

My current process for preventing this is to have the game completely save out it’s state and load it’s state back in every turn (it’s a turn based game). At the moment, due to arcane debugging issues this is horribly slow, but eventually will be super fast. At least doing it this way means that during development I’ll spot any save/load inconsistencies really quickly.

I’m aching to get on with some GUI stuff to make it look nice, but I’ve learned the hard way that I have to put that off until the foundations work better. Better to have it stable now, rather than fix it later.