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

Show Me The Games bundle last day etc…

Posted on June 12, 2011

The SMTG bundle runs out tonight at midnight. If you missed the earlier blog post, then I suggest just going here:

http://www.showmethegames.com/bundle1.php

And checking it out. It’s five hgh quality indie games, on a sort-of-strategy theme, than are bundled together for $28.50.

On the topic of SMTG, that brings me to the question of the sites future. I’m really please that SMTG is up and running, that it gets some traffic, that it looks nice, and that it has the support of so many developers.

That’s the good side.

The bad side is that the site earns $0, and actually costs some bandwidth, plus also the site takes time to develop further. Frankly, I don’t have the time to dedicate enough effort to constantly add content, and I can’t afford to hire a full time (or even decent part-time)  site manager to handle it. I like to have total control over stuff, so I’m not looking for a volunteer, I prefer to pay people and then tell them what to do :D

So although SMTG works very well, and definitely drives sales to developers etc, I’m unsure what will happen to it next. I’ll continue to add new games that I think are really awesome, and I hope to find some time to add features and improve upon it over time, but it’s not going to grow like Steam or even Moddb, because of lack of time. Maybe when my next game has shipped I’ll get a lot more free time and spend a few months on it, but I already have to find time for top-secret-side-project #1 as it is… Ho hum.

AQTime

Posted on June 10, 2011

Yesterady I bought AQTime. It’s $600. That ain’t cheap. It’s profiling software, so basically its something that helps me write faster code. I’ve used it before, and it’s extremely good. I hope I can make my new game faster and smaller-memory-footprint than GSB by using it.

Already I’ve found out that some code that I thought was fast (searchlights) is in fact scarily slow. What’s more, I know the exact lines of code that cause the problem and it’s likely easily fixed. yay!

Plus fog of war code is done and dusted. Double yay.

I hope to have some interesting screenshots to show off in a few weeks. I’ve done the flashy graphics stuff before the gameplay balancing and level design, which means early screenshots of GTB will look nicer than the frankly awful early GSB ones :D

Also… there was a fox in the field opposite the house yesterday. It seemed to be just prowling about, midday, in the sun. Who needs springwatch when you have a fox? :D

This is what they want (as tiswas used to say)

Posted on June 9, 2011

I got a lot of grief from various parts of the web for daring (how dare I!!) even mentioning the topic of games pricing, and the value of an indie game. Apparently, this topic is as off limits as anti-semitism or saying that The Phantom Menace was cool.

Meh.

Free markets conspire to give people what we want. We get exactly what we deserve in so many ways. People don’t care about politics, so we get corrupt politicians. People don’t care about eating healthily, so we get hormone boosted beef and…

People like games where you just click stuff and spam your friends. So we get farmville. And to go one stage further…

People LIKE to argue about the price of games, DRM and piracy. Trust me, I know, I have blog traffic stats. I know what gets people reading, and commenting. A tiny fraction of people get abusive and angry, but then this is the internet and as charlie brooker has said, you could give people online a free massage and they’d moan at you.

It would be simpler, and pretty boring to have a blog where I just talked about vertex buffers, never said anything about the games industry was bad or could be improved, and just had some cat pictures. But that would be boring to type and you wouldn’t read it. 99% of games developers talk purely in tedious bullshit marketing cliches about “How we are excited to work with our partners to bring this compelling new SKU to the market”. I’m pretty sure we have enough people doing that already :D

xkcd gets it...

 

First Solar Payment

Posted on June 8, 2011

Sooo.. at long last I’ve just made the first deposit payment for getting my much-talked-about solar panels installed. This has been at least 5 years in the making. ‘Sheesh’ etc…

This is what I’m getting:

A 2.15kWp system.

10 x MPE 215 PS05 schuco modules. Total area 14.96 square meters installed in 2 rows of 5 at ground level. (roof is unsuitable).

A sunny boy SB2500HF-30 Inverter.

The quote says that it should generate 1845.56 kWh per year. They calculate that if I use all that power (and I will) it will save me £230.70 a year based on 12.5p/unit electricity cost (bound to rise dramatically over the lifetime of the panels). (however my current provider charges 11.52p/unit).

edit: just investigated and in the last year we used 4,134 kwh, so this set of panels is slightly under half my total usage.  I bet that’s because we have an electric cooker…

In addition, the feed in tariff would pay 1,845 * 43.3p = £799.13 a year.

Total income is thus £1,029.82 per year.

Total installation cost is £10,608.

Assume the panels are worthless after 20 years, I’ll earn £21,216 over that, which would be a gain of £11,000. I can see that the performance of the panels will degrade by then, but I strongly suspect energy prices will rise enough to more than compensate. I also can’t see the feed-in tariff being reduced or abolished for existing installs by any government of any color.

Obviously the panels may not generate the described amount. There is some shading in the garden (bah!). And I’m not going to cry into my tea if the output is below maximum.

Interestingly, the cost of the panels+inverter dropped about £1,000 in the last 8 months. Also of interest is that VAT on them is charged at only 5% (although tbh, if the government really want to kickstart a domestic renewables industry that needs to be 0, not 5%).

Fun fun.

No point in me talking about my new game today. People are swooning over E3 videos :D

 

crowdsourcing a small business

Posted on June 7, 2011

Here is a crazy idea for a website that I wish existed.

Say you had a small business, probably a one-person affair.  A corner-shop, or maybe a hot dog stand, or anything where there is just one or two of you. An indie dev would be fine, actually.

Imagine a website where you could go, and anonymously (in terms of not saying exactly where your business was, or what it was called) you could lay bare ALL of the facts about your business, in terms of finances. Every day, you would upload your current sales figures. All your expenses and bills would be online (anonymized).

the site would have forums, and you would need an account to post. The idea, would basically be to help run peoples business. You could comment on their sales, and their plans. You could suggest new pricing strategies, refer them to data on other businesses you thought appropriate, and the owner could decide whether to take people’s advice or not, optionally awarding karma to people who provided decent feedback.

What’s in it for the business owner? It’s like having 1,000 varieties of the ‘bloke down the pub’ who has an idea on how you could do better. This time you get advice from all over the world, from all kinds of people. On the whole, people will be genuine and helpful, and if they aren’t they will get modded down anyway.

What’s in it for the forum posters? Entertainment. There are a lot of armchair experts and business-obsessed stats geeks like me. I’d love to wade through the sales stats for my local shops. Maybe I’m sad, and unusual, but I bet I’m not the only one. It’s a big internet.

What’s in it for the website owners? Money. A site like this would be a magnet for small business owners. High-value advertising screen-estate for people flogging business books and accountancy / marketing services.

Why isn’t there a site like this?