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

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…

Hmmm…big todo list

Posted on December 4, 2012

So… most of this week is probably going to be spent doing early preparatory code on the mystery ‘new’ game, which I plan to talk about in January, although don’t expect nice screenshots until at least march. The reason for that is all the intervening stuff, not least Christmas and it’s traditional disruption, and some tedious decorating to do, but I’m also going to to visit friends in Australia. Yes Australia.

I am not a big fan of long haul flights, 90% because of environmental concerns, 10% because I find them horrid. Words were had, discussions took place, much grumbling was done… But close friend of mine is out there for a few years, I should go visit at least once. Added to this I am going to GDC in March in the US for the first time ever. Not a good year for my carbon footprint :(

So in between all this there is the final testing and polishing and release of GSB 1.61 followed soon after (I hope) by the groovy ‘Outcasts’ Expansion pack for the game. Then there will be a lot of playing RedShirt, and moaning about tooltips, knowing me. And of course at some stage it’s release and promotion. (Yay!). I also plan to do some website improving stuff around February too.

Which means proper work on the next game will probably be Feb-March-April-May, assuming that the behind-the-scenes stuff I’m currently doing is finished by the end of this year. Realistically that game will dominate most of 2013 in terms of polishing, releasing and promoting, which means if I had an urge to make GSB 2, that would be end 2013/2014. Who can predict that far ahead?

Outcasts Update

Posted on November 30, 2012

For those not following closely I am working on a new expansion pack for Gratuitous Space Battles. I was working on something else…but then i got seduced by the idea of more spaceships. I’ll return to the ‘other thing’ soon, I promise!

The new race is called the outcasts, and they are cybernetic types with a chip on their shoulder about biology. Think ‘the founders’ from DS9 but with a hatred of biologicals rather than solids.  In terms of visual design, they like their ships to be saucer shaped, with some exposed pipework and no shortage of engines or big glowy regions:

In terms of race design, I’m giving them a slight tendency towards faster ships (speed bonuses a plenty!) and concentrating on making better frigates for them. Currently my special ‘race-specific’ modules are as follows:

  1. Cruiser Decoy projector (see video here): This is a way that cruisers can project a fake cruiser hologram in front of them to lure enemy weapons away from the real fleet. bwahahahaha.
  2. Frigate 2-stage missiles (see video here): These start off slow, then accelerate (like a javelin missile) to make them hard to shoot down.
  3. Frigate multi-point tractor beam: These puppies can grab up to three different targets (probably fighters) at once. Oh yes.
  4. Frigate Pulse Gun: A new fast-firing laser-salvo gun that acts like a souped up ion cannon.
  5. Frigate Sniper Laser: Super-long-range frigate beam laser that allows them to snipe at the enemy from the safety of the main battle line for the first time.
  6. Solar Power Collector: A special frigate power generator module that beats all the others. Possibly frees up an extra slot for crew./shields/armor.

I may add other stuff, or make a few more radical changes during testing. I’ve also commissioned some awesome new music for the expansion from sean vella. This will make the outcasts the first new race to get their own special music recorded. Plus there are some stunning new nebula backdrops I got an artist to render for the new missions. For some reason, I’m really getting into this expansion pack :D There is no release date yet. I need to test and test and then release a patch to the main game to support them before I even consider releasing them. I can’t tell yet if it will be pre or post-christmas. Join in the discussion on the forums.

In other news, I just spent another fortune (well…£200) on insulation*. It’s COOOOOLLLLDDDDD here, and I’m determined to finish insulating that attic one day. I’ve shivered enough. Actually it’s not a problem if you are a normal person without an obsession with not using the oil-fired radiators like me. I’m a log-fire kind of guy.

*we have to use ‘breathable’ insulation in this old house, which makes the stuff much more expensive than normal.