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

The maths of unskippable piracy warnings

Posted on June 20, 2012

I bought a new blu-ray movie DVD and sat through three long, boring unskippable anti-piracy notices at the start of the movie.

Lets assume every person who watches DVDs / Blurays puts up with a similar inconvenience approximately once a week on average

Assume a total therefore of twenty seconds of time wasted per week, per viewer. 52 weeks a year is 17 minutes of wasted time per year, per consumer.

Assume 200 million US consumers + 200 million more from Europe, Japan, Australia etc, as a conservative figure.

That’s 56 million hours wasted per year by people watching this stuff. (6,392 man years)

at an average wage of say $16 an hour (src: http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=773)

that means pointless unskippable copyright notices cost the global economy $896,000,000 a year, enough to create maybe 18,000 decent paying full time jobs.

Looked at another way, the lost time equates to (assuming average life expectancy of  78.1 yearts according to google) the lives of 81 people.

I hate piracy, but I hate stupidity too. And unskippable piracy warnings are not only stupid, they are wasting the best part of a billion dollars a year.

Pass it on… :D

Dissecting my own design. The Gratuitous Tank Battles GUI

Posted on June 15, 2012

Nothing in life is perfect. Not even sheldon cooper. So it’s always worth taking a fresh look at stuff you have made and trying to tear it to piece and criticise the hell out of it. Fortunately, the internet is full of people, ‘professional’ or amateur who will tell you your game sucks, but often not in especially helpful ways, so I’m trying to tear my own game to shreds and find everything I can to criticise and improve. So I present to you my initial thoughts on everything that is rubbish about the GTB interface for battles (and obviously this acts as a todo list for the next patch…) Click the image below to enlarge

Let me know if you think of other stuff in the battle GUI (or any part of the game) that is unclear, confusing, or could be improved.

Gratuitous Tank Battles gets a minor update…

Posted on June 14, 2012

To 1.012. Here is the full changelist:

version 1.012
=============
1) Support for new detail textures in closeup
2) Tanks now take corners smoothly
3) Graphics detail slider now adjusts lengths of tank tracks.
4) Fixed bug where weapons that had an already selected target could still fire at it when it was within minimum range.
5) Fixed Steam achievement bug
6) Possible fix for steam-integration slowdown on certain setups.
7) Support for detecting modded content in online challenges.

I’m still working on the game, obviously. I’ll be analyzing what balance changes need making, and hopefully tweaking a few other minor things that bug me. Textures that don’t tile well, particle effects that could be better, and so on.

The only outstanding bugs I’m aware of relate to steam integration, and hopefully I’m narrowing in on suqashing them for everyone.

I’ve been looking a bit at the steam in-game purchasing for stuff like expansion packs (if there will be any) but it looks a bit complex for a one-man band like me to implement.

I think I’m bumping up against the limits of what a one-man company can do, and may have to choose my battles more wisely in terms of where I compete. I have a new version of GSB ipad sat in front of me waiting for testing, plus some redshirt stuff to check up on, and of course there is always showmethegames.

How I found time for archery yesterday is a mystery :D

Gratuitous Demo Battles

Posted on June 12, 2012

So if you have been on the fence so far you now have no excuses soldier! Go grab the Gratuitous Tank Battles Demo from here
Tell your friends!