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

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!

The entrepreneur/cautious war inside my head

Posted on June 7, 2012

Ok, I admit it, I wanted an excuse to type war inside my head. But there really is one.

There is half of me that looks at the games industry, and Positech, and Gratuitous Tank Battles, and reads books on how big big companies (google, amazon etc) got where they are, and thinks:

“We are literally INSANE if we aren’t taking at the very least a third of our profits and throwing them madly into expanding the business by way of advertising spending, promotional activities (conference appearances and promo stands etc), stuff like T-shirts and posters and hiring a proper PR agent to grow the public awareness of the company,

The other half of me thinks:

“Those ads are not converting at a rate that makes any economic sense. It’s money burned. Plus this partnership with X or Y is not as profitable as if I did it myself, plus I can do all my own PR, plus we live in turbulent economic times. If we have $X in the bank, we should definitely leave it there, as an insurance policy against having a really bad year. better safe than sorry”.

It’s a constant battle, which means that my google adwords budget can swing madly from £150 a day (first half of brain is victorious) to zero (second half is winning).

My pet theory is that a lot of entrepreneurs I admire (Jeff Bezos, Duncan Bannatyne) just don’t have the second part of the brain at all. They see no downside, no need for caution, no possibility of failure, and never consider the companies money to be for anything other than growing the company.

Maybe that last sentence is the true key. is positech’s income mine? In a legal and practical sense, it is. But should I stop thinking that it is, and think of it as positech’s? Maybe if I did, I’d be free-er with promotional stuff, and spending in general. I could tell you amusing, fairly embarrassing tales of the stuff I’ve done on my own (badly) because I was too cautious to pay what amounts to quite small amounts of money to get other people to do it.

I may experiment with the idea of thinking that positech and me are different things. Ommmmmmmmmmm……

Gratuitous Space Battles is a modding juggernaut (and I’m slow to catch on)

Posted on June 2, 2012

Well this is embarrasing in a way…

I am a big fan of supporting modding. I love the mods people make. Mods are why PC gaming is the best kind. Some of the ebst games out there started as mods, and many games exist purely on the backs of some incredible mods. I recall that when I was a firm Call of Duty 2 addict, we NEVER played the boring standard maps…

I made GSB as mod-friendly as I knew how (back then). I tried to nurture the mod scene as much as I could, then I needed to make a new game and pay the bills, and GTB became 100% of my life. It took me over big time (and still is…).

But today, for a spot of relaxing, I checked in on the GSB modding forum…

Holy cow…

There is a single mod with a 108 page forum thread about it. Just ONE mod. It has extra ship hulls, extra ship TYPES in some ways, it has new background art, new weapons types, sounds, it has a back-story, it has it’s own flipping music, it has it’s own flipping Trailer!


They have done stuff with the numbers to enable you to build corvettes, to build dreadnoughts, to include cargo modules (cunningly with negative costs… see what they did there?) to include anti-matter detonating power plants.

This mod is big :D It’s called Praetorian Industries. It isn’t perfect, there are some slightly amusing typos in the trailer (did I mention the trailer?), so maybe it’s done by a non-native English speaker, and I did get one occasional crash bug, possibly due to a texture missing? But who cares?

I find it incredibly inspiring that such a mod exists, and that  people have put so much effort into extending and enlarging the experience you can get from GSB. If you are a GSB player who hasn’t looked at the mod scene, go check it out, it basically lives around the GSB forums here, as far as I know. But what would I know?

I’ll be reading up on the mods a bit more over this weekend. This really makes me smile.