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

The pre-holiday crush

Posted on December 19, 2012

Wow there is a lot going on. Redshirt, the game I’m publishing but developed by a different company, is heading onwards, with some final art in place here and there (hurrah!) I am working today on the trailer for the ‘outcasts’ expansion for Gratuitous Space Battles, and also grabbing the opportunity now and then to work on my next game.

Between all this, somehow I really badly hurt my shoulder, not by doing anything manly like archery or log-splitting (I am SO outdoorsy, I am), but by painting a ceiling. How annoying.

For a while i had a single sentence written in huge letters on the chalkboard behind my office chair which said

ONE THING AT A TIME

Because that makes a HUGE difference to my productivity and it’s a lesson I keep forgetting. I have taken to using google calendar to set aside some days to work on some projects, and try heavily not to be distracted by other stuff, which rarely works. Normally, I wouldn’t be too bothered, it’s nearly Christmas! there are presents to wrap and mince pies to eat etc, but my calendar AFTER Christmas looks like I’m in charge of the Olympics, or some-such, with a huge crush of things all about to hit my desk all at once. I need to get ahead of myself a bit now so I don’t get crushed then.

As a result of all this, I have not been gaming as much as I would like. I’ve totally changed my Battlefield 3 strategy to be playing only in Rush games, rather than conquest. I also eagerly await the opportunity to buy the aftermath DLC, despite me not owning the ‘premium’ membership, which I’m not really a big fan of. Oh, and the next two days are likely to be interrupted by flooring guys coming in and replacing the attic floor, which isn’t likely to result in long periods of uninterrupted programming.

Arggghhhh.

Stock Market Fun

Posted on December 13, 2012

As a hobby, i invest some money on the UK stock market. My interest comes from when I used to work up there for datastream/ICV. Plus it’s a strategy game with spreadsheets, why wouldn’t I love it?

I recently managed to offload a share I’d been sitting on for ages: Renishaw. (RSW). I bought in July 2011 and sold this morning for an (eventual) 11% profit. Not bad, but I’m clearly not warren buffet. Possibly my best ever investment was Autonomy, which I held for a month then sold for a 47% profit. Oh yeah! I also did very well out of admiral (ADM) at 36% and ARM at 7%, 6% then 7% again (bought and sold 3 times). In some ways my most mediocre trade was Aggrekko at 0.4% but that was over 5 hours, so I’m not complaining :D. I can’t be too smug about admiral, as I’m currently holding them at a huge loss and twiddling thumbs hoping to get it back some time… I’m also annoyed at Domino printing, at to some extent Dunelm, which has been a multi-month ‘quick-trade’ opportunity gone wrong :D

Any other share dealers here? Anyone play for fun with one of the virtual sites that lets you practice?  What are your tips / strategies? I’m always wary of losing too much to fees so try to own a few shares at high amounts rather than spreading too thin.

ironically easy to ‘game’ tax breaks

Posted on December 11, 2012

Just reading here:

http://www.develop-online.net/news/42752/Revealed-The-video-games-cultural-test

And considering how it would apply to my game Democracy 2…

Up to 4 points depending on the percentage of the video game that is set in the following locations

ok…how? how are we allocating percentages? What if there are 4 missions, and 1 is the tutorial mission which is 1/10th the size of the others? is that 25% of the setting? or less? How do we decide how big a level is anyway? by size? What if one level is a huge 16km square empty room with a union jack and the word ‘tax breaks’ written on the floor, and an arrow pointing to the door to the next level. does that count?

set in the United Kingdom or another EEA state

when? Now? how about during medieval times? or how about in the year 3000, with jet packs and robots and laser guns?

if there are more than three characters depicted in the video game, 4 points if two or three of the three lead characters are from the United Kingdom or another EEA state or from an undetermined location

What? I hardly know where to begin. If someone has an American accent but we don’t say where he is from, can we say he is from the UK? What if the game is set in an alternate history where Nazis have occupied London, are the Nazis from the UK? no? what about the Normans? how long ago must a culture have conquered the UK for it’s descendants to qualify? What is the definition of ‘lead’ characters? What if (like Democracy 2) the game has no characters, but has profile pictures of typical citizens? How do we decide which of them are lead? What if the game contains sentient robots, are they characters?

up to 4 points depending on the percentage of the original dialogue that is recorded in the English language or in a recognised regional or minority language as follows

What if the entire recorded dialogue for the game is one sentence, a strong American accent saying ‘tax breaks’. American accent, but English language. Do I still get my points there? If I was planning on zero recorded dialog, can i include some just to get the points? How vital is it that the player hears the dialogue? can it be bound to a cheat code? or only played over the end game credits?

It also doesn’t say if I’m allowed to be lead designer, programmer, composer and scriptwriter all by myself and get points for all of them.

This is a mess, as you would expect. Bureaucrats should no more be evaluating video games than they should be picking hit pop songs. This nonsense is entirely due to silly EU laws which conveniently forget the fact that the majority of video games are mad in countries where their laws do not apply. Absolutely bonkers.

Also, I haven’t even touched on engine development. What if you work on code that is enhancing the engine you will use for your next game. Is that work covered? What about time spent giving interviews? is that time covered?

Totally unworkable.

Goodbye fender…

Posted on December 8, 2012

Many years ago I had long hair, a leather jacket and even leather trousers and a bullet belt. Oh yes. I was a rock-n-roll wild child geetar-hero wannabee. I was even in a few bands, and played maybe 100 gigs around the south of England with them. I still have fond memories of kebab places in chelmsford (great times man…great times…), sleeping on the beach in cornwall, and one gig somewhere where the local biker gang was ‘security’ for the gig. It was all very rolling stones, only with less money and longer guitar solos.

Me (on left) and dave hobbs, in the band ‘blazon’ playing at some pub in hastings. “HELLO CLEVELAND!”

Anyway, today marks the end of an era of sorts, because I threw my old fender amp in a skip at a recycling center. It was a bit crackly and unreliable, and not really worth anything, and it’s fine because I got a lovely new modern fender amp last Christmas anyway, so it was redundant. Still… that trusty little box followed me around the UK and belted out many a sweep-picked arpeggio, I can tell you. It was kinda sad to throw it out, but then you can’t lug around all your childhood possessions your whole life. That’s living in the past, and I tend to think of my boat building self, my guitar-playing self and my suit-wearing IT consultant self as like my previous hosts, in DS9 speak, and you can never go back. I’ve still got the trusty ibanez guitar though, the one with the cool monkeygrip handle :D.

Dave Hobbs, me, Stu Clark and Mark ‘it’s not a perm’ Susans. I think we were ‘power metal’? posing before one of our many gigs at Tiverton, in Devon.

It’s a sign of age when your youthful exuberance was captured on celluloid, not binary.

Gratuitous Space Battles version 1.61 is live

Posted on December 7, 2012

…for direct bought copies, and will be updating on steam soon (as soon as I find the right instructions for it…doh!). Copies auto-update over the next 24 hours.

What are the changes? well…

version 1.61
1) Bug Fix: Drag selecting now launches ship inspector for the first selected ship, not the first ship in the fleet…ooops.
2) New feature: Support for the cruiser decoy projector module.
3) Bug Fix: AI now works differently, and less stupidly when assessing which target to move towards.
4) New feature: pulse-glow effect now supports two new variables ‘min alpha’ and ‘max alpha’
5) Support for new two-stage missiles.
6) Bug fix: Ensuring that regardless of framerate or missile speed, missiles that would hit, will actually hit.
7) Support for new multi-point tractor beams.
8) Improved design of load-ship dialog in the design screen so it scales to fill the available space and shows (and can sort by) hull name too.
9) Support for modding plasma torpedoes to use style CUSTOM and plasma_texture = “texture.dds” for custom effects
10) Support for weapons firing from cloaked ships using the “fire_while_cloaked=1” setting
11) Reverted the Area-of-effect code so it only happens on hits, not misses, as requested.
12) Added support for modded music.
13) Fixed obscure timing issue where when at 4x speed and a low FPS, theoretically some very-rapid fire weapons may have been ‘dropping’ shots. Game now supports multiple shots per frame.
14) Removed now redundant ‘internet news’ dialog.
15) Stats summary screen now closes properly when exiting the stats screen without closing it.
16) restricted race field for modules now supports comma-separated list for multiple races (for modders)
17) races can now be locked out of all vanilla tech (for modders)
18) hulls can now be hidden from the player (for modders)

So there is a lot of mod support stuff and preparatory stuff for the upcoming ‘outcasts’ race expansion. Plus the big things are the better design loader dialog, and the changes to AI, area-of-effect weapons and a bit of a rapid-fire timing bug problem.

I suspect all of today will be GSB/Outcasts related, probably the weekend too…