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

Unsure trade-offs in game design

Posted on March 7, 2012

Here’s a thought.

Good games are ones where we make unsure trade-offs. Most games are either about reflexes or decisions. Decisions are more common in the kind of games I make, such as strategy and sim games. I think the two basic approaches to strategy/sim games are plate-spinning and trade offs.

Plate-spinning is where tons of stuff is happening at once and you are trying to stay on top of everything and keep everything from falling apart. Democracy 2 is very big on this aspect of design.

Trade-offs are much more common. Even games that are conventionally reflex ones, such as First person Shooters have a lot of trade-offs. You choose to be a medic, trading ammunition capacity for the ability to heal. You choose to be a scout, trading everything for the ability to move fast. Choosing to have more of X, means less of Y.

Where this system goes wrong in games, is where it is too clear, too obvious, too analytical, to decide exactly what the trade-off is. In other words, the number are a bit too explicit. If I *know* the details of every variable in the trade-off, then it simply becomes a matter of Vulcan logic. It’s when there is a suitable amount of fuzziness around the numbers, that the trade-off becomes one filled with uncertainty, anticipation, risk and excitement. You *think* the best choice is to risk building a new factory in the city, trading off increased pollution against lower unemployment…but you can’t really be *sure* that the numbers will go your way…

To me… that makes for a fun game. I don’t always need to know the numbers. Sometimes, just a hunch makes for more fun.

Pricing for gratuitous tank battles

Posted on March 2, 2012

I am not sure what the right price for gratuitous tank battles should be, even this close to release, so I’m going to dump my brain here, to help me think.

Gratuitous Space Battles was $22.95 on release, and as I recall a bit cheaper in beta/pre-order ($19.95 I think).

There is a lot of downward pressure on games pricing. people expect to get indie games for less than the price of a large coffee, which is silly, and frankly, a bit of an insult.

It’s a few years since GSB. There has been inflation since, about 5% in the UK. My bills sure keep going up.

GTB is a MUCH more fully-featured game than GSB was at launch, or even is now. GTB has achievements, a built-in editor, multiple game modes, better visuals, and more content. It is also more polished in every respect.

Nobody knew what to make of GSB, so it was a bit of a risk for many buyers. People know roughly what to expect from a positech strategy game now, so maybe they are less scared of parting with ‘large pizza + some beer’ music for one of my games.

None of this brings me to any specific conclusion, but I can say without any doubt that anyone who thinks it will be *less* than $19.95 is being optimistic :D GTB is a HUGE game. It’s taken quite a few people a hell of a long time to make. I guess I better decide soon…

One thing is certain: even if the game is $0.01 people will shout at me for being worse than hitler and call me stupid for getting the price *wrong*. Bah.

Top secret project is….. Redshirt!

Posted on February 29, 2012

For quite a while, I’ve had a little side-project that I’ve never talked about. The reason for that is basically that we were waiting until we had any final artwork at all, before revealing it. The side-project is a new life-sim game called ‘Redshirt’. It’s a bit of a departure for me, because I am not the coder or designer (although I do chip in the odd idea). The game is being developed by fellow UK indie -> Tiniest Shark.

Positech Games is  effectively the publisher of the game, although I hate that term because it implies evil bean-counting and not caring about the game. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get over it.

So what is redshirt????

Check the website, and also check facebook.


Well you know in all those sci-fi series there is always some crewmember in the background, with no dialogue, who nobody knows his/her name, who always gets shot in the first 15 minutes, and tends to wear a red shirt…. Well that’s YOU. It’s a game where you are not Luke Skywalker, you are the guy who fixes the drinks machine in Luke’s quarters on hoth. You are the guy who fixes the sliding doors on the enterprise when they get stuck. You are the girl who offers Kirk a notepad for him to scribble on. You are basically the bottom of the hero career ladder…

And here is the thing. It maybe AD 2652 (or whatever) but people manning space stations are just as shallow, self-obsessed, dorky, and fixated with social-media as they are now. none of this ‘enlightened future’ crap that you see in star trek! The interface for the game is loosely based around modern social media apps, so it’s a nit of a humorous dig at sci-fi conventions and social media obsession.

If you played my life sim game ‘Kudos’ you will have an idea of how these things work. Only this one has cooler outfits, and space! and aliens!

There will be lots more information on the game in the course of time, I’m just basically waving ym hands and saying “We are making this game, what do you think?” right now :D.

Long slow checklist of stuff

Posted on February 28, 2012

There hasn’t been much to blog about lately. I don’t have a set-in-stone beta-date for GTB, but it’s likely to be the first half of March. This clashes horribly with GDC, and it’s associated press crush, and also with a friend going to Australia, and also with stuff I can’t talk about just yet but will do soon.

Right now I am just slogging through a list of tons of features in the game, making sure they work, and do what they should do. In doing-so, I’m finding all kinds of minor quirks that have crept in. As designs and code changes, stuff often gets left in a paradoxical state, where it no longer makes sense. For example, I had three options when picking defender as a mission:

Scripted AI
Adaptive AI
Adaptive++ AI

And as defender, two options:

Attacker uses scenario-defined designs.
Attacker uses any designs (including yours).

The thing is, the 2nd two defender options are the same as the attacker ones. It was just described really badly, and makes much more sense now I’ve harmonised it. This is one of those things that isn’t a ‘bug’ as such, just a thing that is obviously ‘wrong’ to a newcomer to the game, but has so much code & design history (I won’t bore you…) that it went by un-noticed by me for months.

The one thing that I reckon will confuse people about GTB, and the thing I’m still not happy with, is the vast complexity of different options when it comes to how to play a battle. This isn’t just a tower defense game. It’s more like a tower-defense/attack / RTS/ simulation toolkit. I guess it’s ‘little-big-planet-meets spore-meets tower defense. None of this trips-off-the-tongue. I can see a lot of me waving my hands in videos trying to explain the various permutations of how to play the game. I guess that will make for content-rich interviews :D

 

 

Look! Naked Booth Babes!!!!!!

Posted on February 21, 2012

It’s sad isn’t it, that this is probably one of the most cost-effective ways to get attention to your game. In my dreams, I’d love to  exist in a world where the only PR that was necessary was to send videos, screenshots (real ones, not ‘target renders’) and playable demo copies to journalists, and then let the public and the critics pick the best games on their merits.

But it is not.

I could get 100,000 people to come to my site tomorrow. It’s easy. You just take out your checkbook and pay the money to google adwords, or yahoo search marketing etc. It’s a done deal, it’s easy. Of course, it may not be cost effective. And this is where it gets murky.

I am currently investigating the pros and cons of flash game sponsorship as an alternative to traditional banner-ad promotion, which I have toned down a lot for the last 2 months. So far, I think I like it, even though I had one profitable sponsorship, and one relatively disastrous one.  What I’m thinking about now, is actual physical promotion at events such as trade shows. They vary widely. I’ve been looking at how many people come to these shows, the cost of hiring a booth, and a monitor and PC, the travel costs to and from for me and probably at least one other person. Overnight accommodation etc…

And rapidly it becomes very very expensive. I’ve heard quotes of $200 to ‘hire’ power cables at your booth for 2 days. Are you fucking kidding me? Yes…it costs money to rent a big hall and promote a show, but lets live in the real world for a moment. Do we really want an industry where the only games that get press attention are the ones that set aside $30,000 for trade show expenses? This is insane. That $30k doesn’t make the games any better.

I’m pretty sure a business case could be made for me going to some agency, hiring a few bikini-models with huge chests and long blonde hair, giving them ‘Gratuitous Tank Battles’ T shirts, and sticking them on a booth for 2 days to pout at journalists. The thing is, I’d feel like I was just cheapening the industry I like, and wasting money that could have gone on music, sound effects or art. Can you imagine ‘booth babes’ at a literary festival? Do they have them at Cannes? (I really have no idea).

I don’t think I’ll be hiring booth babes any time soon. I’m sure eventually there will be some cheaper, less tacky indie-focused events for me to promote my games at.