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

Musing on iterative creative perfection

Posted on September 7, 2012

The film ‘wanted‘ was on TV here again recently. I’ve seen it maybe 4 times now, and although it has lots of men shooting guns, for once it’s a film like that I really like, mostly because the actual gun bits are irrelevant. It’s a film about breaking out of a rut, in a job/relationship/life you hate, and becoming someone important and doing something you believe in. No wonder I love it.

For me, the highlight of the film is the last 10 seconds or so. To sum up, it’s a scene of the hero shooting the bad guy with a sniper rifle, but it’s SO much more than that.

I have no idea how the scene was written but I imagine it went like this. First, the writer decides that the hero shoots the bad guy (after distracting him) with a sniper rifle. Hurrah, a happy ending. Job done Ship the movie. It’s cool.

But then in re-examining it, the idea occurs to shoot the scene backwards, so we follow the bullet back to the gun. ++cool. Then, later, the idea occurs to do this in slow-mo with a voice talking over it. ++cool. Then the next day, thinking about the scene again, the idea for the decoy to be marked in post-it notes. ++… Then the idea for the bullet to go through the donut, then for it go through the drinks can, then for it to be a multi-part bullet, then for the sniper rifle to be huge. Then… the coup de grace, for the hero to break the fourth wall and deliver the last line to the audience. Genius.

You could have written the final scene in 2 minutes. To make it as good as it is probably took a LOT of passes. A lot of attempts to improve it. A lot of effort, a lot of time. I’ve never been confident enough to go to those kinds of lengths with my games. I think I probably should do.

(yeah I know that photo is from a different scene, couldn’t find the one I wanted :D)

Greenlight and the $100 fee

Posted on September 5, 2012

It amazes me that valve have got grief for requiring indie devs to pay a $100 fee to list a game on greenlight. I agree with their stance 100% and here is why:

1) They had a crap-submissions and spam problem. This solves it immediately. Nobody will pay $100 to submit half life 3 or a joke app. That instantly raises the attractiveness of the greenlight site to both gamers and legit developers.

2) The money goes to charity, they clearly aren’t doing this for commercial gain.

3) This asks whether the developers are actually serious about getting some sales of their game. Games with clearly zero sales potential, or half-assed efforts, or games that are of extremely low quality will no longer clutter up the system.

I’ll be honest with you, a huge chunk of indie games suck. The vast vast majority of every indie developers first games suck. My first game pretty much sucked. In fact it took me about five or six games before I made anything I can honestly say should even be considered for sale on steam.

One of the big criticisms I’m hearing is that indie developers do not have $100. I really doubt that. We are always told that indie developers are passionate, hard working, keen, driven, motivated gaming enthusiasts who love what they do. And yet they can’t find $100 to make that dream come true?
Lets assume you are a penniless indie developer that used entirely open source software to make your game, used free artwork, did all the work yourself, and you still have a commercial quality game that will sit alongside braid, frozen synapse and gratuitous space battles. But somehow you don’t have $100, and no way of getting it… really?
I’d sell something. I’d sell my mobile phone, I’d sell my TV. If I had to, I’d sell my flipping sofa. If I really thought my game would be popular on steam and sell well. Or I’d get a loan for $100. Or set up a kickstarter for it, or I’d take casual work on a building site for a week, or whatever else I could.
If it was $1,000 or $10,0000, I’d agree it’s a tough payment to get together for some indies. But $100? Really?

Too many ideas

Posted on September 4, 2012

I had, I thought, pretty much decided what game I was going to do after I release my expansion pack for Gratuitous Tank Battles. it’s the third idea I had for a new game. And then, there I was watching a TV show which is (in some ways) relevant to one of my other ideas, and I was musing over doing that one instead, and then lo! believe it or not, a TV ad appears which reminded me of the other idea.
Nightmare.
One idea is a sequel. One is very marketable to geeks and gamers. One is a bit obscure and a bit indulgent, and very hard to explain or market to gamers.
None of them have any competition whatsoever.

It does amaze me the way so many people make really formulaic clone games. There are a whole lot of ideas that haven’t been used yet, and life is much easier from a marketing POV when there are not obvious competing games.

(Yes i refer to GTB as tower defense, but play it for 10 minutes and you will see how radically different it plays from other TD games. I probably make a mistake using the TD term to market the game…)

Patch 1.016 for Gratuitous Tank Battles

Posted on August 31, 2012

…has been released. let there be much rejoicing. The game auto-updates once a day, so you don’t need to do anything. Lets take a look at the list of changes!

1) Fixed bug where you could invite a friend with no name.
2) Added the hull size and size type to the hull picker dialog on the unit design
 screen.
3) Holding down G as you drag props on the level editor now snaps them to a grid
4) Support for new 'starting year' for scenarios and equipment to set a battle
 before lasers and mechs etc.
5) Re-balanced the missile modules (slower rate of fire).
6) Re-balanced the ambulance/command/repair/supply trucks to have less hitpoints.
7) The units on the unit customisation screen now render shadows.
8) Changed targeting calculation so the fastest speed of firing and target unit
 is used, not just the target unit.
9) Battles now start with the map focused upon one of the entry points for
 attacking units.
10) Different vehicle targeting systems now have different weights.
11) Unit Design screen now filters modules to only show modules that the
 current unit has a slot to deploy.
12) Various AI balance changes.

The big items are probably the re-balancing and the change to the unit design screen (11), which I think is much better. Here is a screenshot of that screen if you selected an ambulance hull with the old version:

And now with the new version:

Much simpler huh? I don’t know why I had not done this earlier, but in any case, the screen now only shows modules that the current selected hull has a slot for, which hopefully makes that screen seem a lot less daunting for people who buy GTB thinking it’s just tower defense and think WTF? when they get to that screen. This was a screw-up on my part, because generally I feel that a good design rule is never to clutter the players view with information that they definitely don’t need right now.

There are a lot of under-the-hood changes to AI and other code affecting battles which is all a bit arcane to explain, but basically the AI should be a bit more sensible now, the various weapons and modules are more balanced, (in my humble opinion) and things should be a lot more playable in general. I don’t consider this patch to be the ‘last word’ on GTB. People who bought GSB know I love to improve and finesse a game long after release. I actually have a GSB patch (a kinda scary one) sat there daring me to release it, even all these thousands of years later.

I’ve also patched the demo for the game. I just uploaded the new steam demo, and I’ll be bunging the direct-downloaded version up on my site soon.