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

Another Gratuitous Tank Battles patch!

Posted on July 24, 2012

So… I’ve released version 1.014 of GTB. It has some under-the-hood changes nobody will notice (yet) but also this:

1) Added hint to make divisions if you have lots of units and have not created any yet.
2) Changed the way unit icons are created so they make more sense for long-barrelled guns.
3) Added new option to allow the game to auto-manage and update divisions for each type of unit.
4) Fixed bug where if you didn't restart the game, you kept unlocking the same unit.
5) Added support for colorblind mode.

The big change there is 3). I wish I’d thought of this originally, but like all my games, they evolve and improve in response to player feedback. The game will now automanage and keep up-to-date a separate division for infantry, vehicles, buildings and support structures/vehicles, and you can swap between them as before using tab or alt+tab.

because I’ve added this *now*, it’s not the default, and you need to go into the division manager and turn it on. if I was more organised, I’d be tracking that as a stat. The trouble is,  you get a lot of people buying games cheap in a sale who play 2 levels, then never return, which is bad for all kinds of reasons (it encourages designing purely for the casual gamer, for one), so ideally I’d be tracking people who play 10+ missions, and then analyzing what percentage of them even use divisions, and how many of them enable auto-management. My stats tracking sucks, yet again. I’ll get it right in my 99th game, I promise!

4) was also an embarrasing bug that I wanted to fix, and is the main reason I suddenly rushed this update out without much fanfare.

In other news, I’ve been working on some future stuff (early days yet) and also re-uploading a bunch of ‘signed’ exes to keep the paranoid gremlins at Norton Internet Security happy (god knows why).

The steam sale was pretty good, but not wallet-burstingly so. We do live in strange times. As a game designer, I’d prefer less, high-margin sales than a whole slew of people grabbing GTB for cheap and hardly playing it. I’m definitely from the hardcore gaming school, rather than the ‘angry-birds’ school of gaming, and I hate to see gaming change to the point where everyone owns hundreds of games, but has played hardly any of them. That’s not a market working properly, it’s like a weird mind game.

It’s amazingly sunny right now in the UK. I know because my solar power readout tells me. Obviously I’ve never gone outdoors. That would be mad.

Colorblind Mode Support

Posted on July 21, 2012

I’m working on adding this as an option for Gratuitous Tank Battles.  If you are red-green colorblind can you let me know if this looks better?

Frustrating case woes.

Posted on July 18, 2012

I have a nice made-to-measure desk that has a fake-drawers cupboard to put a PC base unit in. Hurrah. The problem is my PC case is maybe 1cm too tall to go in the cupboard. Words can’t express how annoyed I was the day I realised that.

For the last few months, since getting the desk I’ve just soldiered on with the PC underneath it, but the noise of the thing is starting to bug me now. It’s not deafening, but it is annoying, especially once you start to notice it. Also, the noise is loud enough during playing games that I really need headphones on, or to blast out the games music, it’s *that* distracting.

I’ve experimented with various fixes but none work, and I really have a few unsatisfcatory options right now.

1) Buy a new case and transfer all the components. Make sure the case fits! The downside here is hassle. I have limited recent experience of transferring entire PC innards, and am not 100% confident on the whole ‘connecting front panel lights and sockets to the motherboard front. There is always the non-zero chance of frying the board, or having a case with 1 single wire that is not long enough, or a single motherboard socket not lining up with the case. That would just bug me big time. I used to be a PC hardware engineer, and have seen things go wrong to often. This PC is absolutely system critical to me.

2) Buy a new PC. Obviously this is overkill, as my new PC was bought in October 2010, it’s a quad core intel i7 2.80 GHZ 8gig RAM Radeon 5770. Not a dud, and able to play modern games. Next year is definitely upgrade year, but not yet. That would be a silly expense

3) train myself to just deal with it. This is cheap!

4) stuff the empty PC drive bays with acoustic foam and try other wooly solutions to prevent the noise being too bad. for the sake of £30ish, this might be worth it.

Anyone have some better ideas? Anyone used that acoustic foam stuff? I considered building a wooden box around the PC. Is that madness?

Independence & control Vs productivity

Posted on July 13, 2012

There is a tension as an indie dev between these forces.

if I rely entirely on middleware and someone else’s engine (Unity + EZ-GUI + some sound stuff + whatever) I can be extremely productive. I don’t waste any time wondering about correct vertex buffer creation flags or optimising sprite rendering, i can just work on the game.

But then when there is a bug in EZ-GUI or a feature missing from Unity, I am totally screwed. Suddenly I’m coding what they support, not what I want to create.

Similarly in business, if I rely entirely on steam for my sales, I don’t waste any time worrying about website design, visitor numbers, bounce-rates, chargebacks or coupon/discount processing, no worries about web server stability, demo download speeds, CDNs and other fluff. I can just work on the game.

But then when steam turn down a game, say they don’t have a slot for a promotion, or change a royalty rate, or screw up a payment (this has NEVER happened to me with steam), then suddenly I am screwed. I become entirely financially dependent on another company, and in that case the term ‘indie’ becomes somewhat shaky.

It’s a constant war between which is more important, and the answer depends on your circumstances, your skills and your attitude, not to mention your free time and team size.

As a lone indie, obviously I have pursued the totally insane route of complete independence in all areas. Even energy independence. Ahahahaha!!! I code my own engine for GSB and GTB, and all my games. I use 3rd party sound libraries just because I frankly find sound coding dull, but everything else is pure me. It’s a big concession to even resort to using phpbb and wordpress, I can tell you…

But something has to give. I am possibly taking on too much and maybe not doing the best job of everything. I need to give way in some direction. Shockingly, and maybe surprisingly, I find myself thinking of giving way more on the business side than the technical side. The thought of abandoning direct sales is madness, but the thought of obsessing less about them, and spending less time on trying to eek out every last bit of direct sales profitability certainly appeals. It also appeals regarding PR. GTB *may* be the last game I handle my own PR for exclusively. (pls don’t email me offering to be my PR guy. The best PR people are already known to me, and frankly if you’re not, then you possibly aren’t that good… :D)

I think I need to spend more time on design, and less on code and less on business. The code side is slimmed back easily by just picking less insanely complex projects for a bit. I also need to spend more time actually relaxing and maybe even enjoying life. A close relative of mine is unwell, and it makes me realise how important it is to enjoy life while you can. I may even manage to sneak in a trip to a nice sunny beach soon.

The only *wrong* decision for me at this point would be to bumble along as I am. I think cracks are starting to show.

The carbon friendly indie :D

Posted on July 8, 2012

So it’s a year to the day since solar power got installed at positech towers. how much power has been generated?

1,331 kwh.

The panels are installed, not on the roof, but in the drive opposite my office, which is cool because I can just about see them from my desk, over the monitors. There has been a lot of talk about feed in tariffs etc, so I might as well do the math myself.

The install cost was £10,608 according to my old blog post

1,331 units at 43p/unit FIT is £572.33. assume 50% export at 3p/unit gives another £20. Also, I saved buying 1,331 units at 12.5p/unit from the power company, saving another £166. This gives total income of about £758

However, the FIT rose to 45p at some point along that, and the 3p/unit is rising too, so it’s a bit more than that. The FIT is locked for 25 years (index-linked) so the rate cuts don’t affect early adoptors.

At installation, the projected income was £1,029 for output of 1,845, so basically it didn’t generate the estimated power. why? Pretty simply, it’s a combination of shading in early mornings and early evenings through most of the off-peak, combined with amazingly poor sun in the last few weeks. June/July should be bumper months for solar, but the cloudy rainy days have been incredibly bad lately.

A combination of some tree pruning which has reduced (fairly recently) the shading, and presumably a more usual summer next year should mean for a much better return. I didn’t really do it for the money, I am a green-energy geek, but it’s good to know it makes some sort of economic sense. Energy prices are likely to recover their stratospheric climb after the current recession, which will also boost the economic case. Output would be much higher if the panels were roof mounted (and the installation cost would have been much lower).

Anyway, given that the energy my office consumes is certainly not 1,331 units a year, I’m pretty sure I could make a grand claim that positech is carbon-neutral, and do so with a straight face. Pity about the way everything else in modern life, travel especially, consumes so much energy. I gave up eating beef 3 years ago partly because of its appalling environmental footprint, so I’m claiming some extra points there too. (I don’t miss it at all, lamb rocks!).

Anyway, that’s enough tree hugging for one blog post. I intend to have a sudden outpouring of GSB related bloggage soon.