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

Zyngas numbers are scary

Posted on July 3, 2011

Lets look at how many people are logged into steam right now, in the middle of their BIG summer sale:

2.3 million

Wow etc. Lets all say how huge the steam audience is. It certainly shows how much bigger valve is than positech, that’s for sure :D. But hold on…

Zyngas IPO means some real stats on the people playing zyngas games:

148 million unique monthly players

Holy alphabeti spaghetti batman. That’s a lot of people. Even though the majority of them never give Z any money, it’s still a staggeringly good business. Granted, Zyngas profits aren’t that high given the silly value the company has been put at, but even so, lets forget the money for a moment, and look at the fact that there are 148 million people prepared to play zyngas games.

That’s incredible.

It’s just a pity that the company was founded by a guy who didn’t give a fuck about his customers, and even bragged about it. I don’t care if my next game sells 1/100th of GSB. I still won’t bundle some shitty toolbar with it.

I hate it when companies like that do so well, mostly because it sends out signals that encourage the good guys to do the same thing. That’s whats so cool about successes by minecraft, frozen synapse, world of goo etc. It’s so cool when game devs who are nice guys and genuinely love games do so well. You don’t have to be like zynga to make a career from making games :D

Deferred Rendering / lighting. Balls, maybe not

Posted on June 28, 2011

For a while I’ve been thinking about putting deferred lighting with normal maps into GTB. This was something I talked about briefly during the development of GSB but it never happened. it basically a way to ‘fake’ the 3D lighting effect with a 2D image, *if* you have the original 3D model the  2D image came from, and thus can make a ‘normal map’.

Here is what I mean:

http://experimentalized.blogspot.com/2010/07/2d-deferred-normal-lighting.html

This stuff is definitely not my area of expertise, and to confound the problem, all of the tutorials and explanations of the effect seems to concentrate on XNA or doing it with actual 3D scenes, whereas mine is a 2D engine.

Plus, it seems that it doesn’t do what i wanted it to, which is to take a lightmap full of various light sources (image the whole scene, with just the ‘light’ rendered onto it), and convert that into realistic looking shadows on 2D sprites. it appears to be a single-light source only solution, involving pixel shaders. Bah.

As I type this, I wonder out loud if bump maps are the answer to my problem? It’s not a disaster if there isn’t a solution, as GSB looked fairly pretty, but I’d like to take things up a level with GTB. There is only so far you can go with 2D top-down view rendered stuff, but I’d like to be the prettiest, shiniest 2D game of it’s type, if at all possible. The other effect I tried once but wimped out of was those distortion-map effects where you get a sphere that distorts the pixels accross it, and thus get a ‘shockwave-air-blast’ style effect. I think Call of Duty 4 used it a lot. I ran into ‘tearing’ and other bugs and eventually abandoned it in a strop :D

Anyone got any tips for fairly awesome 2D top-down effects in games?

(The minute I have my logo finished I’ll talk about GTB)

 

Opened the fridge: Achievement unlocked!

Posted on June 26, 2011

I quite like achievements in games, but have you noticed how they, and general ‘gamification’ is now showing up everywhere, including really silly places?
I posted a question for the first time recently on stackoverflow, a site where coders ask and answer questions. I asked ONE question, and got 6 replies. For this, my account unlocked what seemed like a dozen ‘badges’ and ‘achievements’ I think I got some ‘reputation’ and probably other crap too. Meh…

I notice project wonderful is doing the same thing. As an advertiser, I can unlock ‘achievements’ there too.

Sorry but this is bullshit. I like earning super-duper-medals when I’m pretending to be space captain cliffski or slaying dragons, but when I pick advertising or debug my code I don’t need to be treated like I’m playing pokemon. It’s just silly. I’m sure it *works*, and makes busienss sense, but I still find it a bit weird.

What’s the strangest place you’ve encountered points, achievements and gamification lately? Does it bug you?

Tankfest 2011 Pictures

Posted on June 25, 2011

So today I spent half the day at TANKFEST, at the tank museum at Bovington, England. It was very TANKy, to put it mildly. I was amused to notice signs pointing to ‘tank museum and monkeyland’. lets just hope there is never a security breach at monkeyland, because they will be heavily armoured primates, that’s for sure.

TankFest is where you get to see old tanks (like the churchill) and new ones (challenger) charging about on a tank-race-track, as well as go fondle them up close. The best bit for me was probably the WW2 re-enactment guys who were there in force, very WW2-geeky of me, I know. Let the tank-porn commence:

This is the As90 artillery system(above). I climbed inside it and had a chat to the dude manning it. I was curious because it’s the thing that makes my windows rattle when they test it on salisbury plain. Grrrr. It can fire 3 rounds before the first hits the ground, and then scarper quickly before the enemy fires back.

This sums up the day really. people dressed as German soldiers, and kids climbing on a WW2 tank. Kids these days have no respect for history. Bah grumble, ‘get off my tank’ etc…

 

I don’t remember the exact number, but this is one of those US half tracks with the rear-mounted anti-aircraft guns that can massacre ground troops. Quite speedy too.

For reasons that escape me, I was drawn to the area with German soldiers in trenches. They had a little mock-trench standoff re-enactment between the Germans and the Russians.

Some of our plucky desert rats showing the lesser nations just how many guns we can stack in neat little formations. OH YES.

For undisclosed reasons I was drawn to trying to get some ‘top view’ photos of the tanks. Here are some of the ones parked outside. Inside, there are about a hundred trillion tanks. It’s a HUGE museum.

Is that a T-34? I think so. Anyway, it was the only Russian WW2 tank in the outside display. They had some other, MUCH BIGGER ones inside. I still vote for the Jagdpanther and the Tiger as my favorite tanks. I think I’ve convinced my better-half that having a ‘favorite tank’ is normal for a man of my age.