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

Show me the frozen synapse

Posted on May 26, 2011

Have you heard of the stealth indie strategy game Frozen Synapse? If not, today is your lucky today because here:

http://www.showmethegames.com/

is an article on ‘the making of’ that game, and the game itself is finally released today. if you like what you see you can grab the game direct from the developers site. The link is in the article.

Grind-free for the time-poor gamer!

Posted on May 24, 2011

I guess it’s generally considered desirable to promote a product for what it *has* not what it does not have. This is unfortunate because I can see a lot of ‘features’ that would enhance a product purely by their removal. My pet hate is the new squeezy nozzle on heinz ketchup, but putting my personal table-sauce related jihad to one side, and thinking purely about games, I can imagine several features, whose omission that would pique my interest…

  • Now featuring absolutely NO startup movies or publisher logos!
  • Now featuring a total lack of cheesy voice acting and macho quips!
  • 100% free from sexist and racist stereotypes!
  • Absolutely no grinding or filler!

All of these would get my thumbs up, yet nobody ever markets a product that way, even though I’m sure there are games that omit all these annoyances. There must be something about good marketing practice that means it’s a bad idea to promote a negative? (although ‘non-bio’ and ‘no sugar’ come close)

Take a game like portal. It is apparently short. I’ve never played it to the end, so I don’t know. I’m sure a lot of people would panic if a game was announced proudly as being short, but I also suspect a lot of people (middle aged, with kids especially) would welcome a game that was high quality fun, condensed into a reasonable length of time. I don’t care about ‘finishing’ games, but I find myself losing patience with any movie over 2 hours long. My time is limited, get to the point.

I spent a day playing Halo in the office at Elixir once (I was ‘on call’, not there to do work…) and was enjoying it right up until a bit where the next mission involved backtracking the last 15 minutes. This was clearly filler, to make the game feel longer. It was like a really tedious scene that any decent editor would crop from a movie.

Even from the Fellowship Of The Ring.

And yet, big budget games are full of that stuff.

I make sandbox games, so they don’t lend themselves to being marketed this way, but it would be great if some games did seek out the ‘time-poor’ gamer. I know there are lots of us. Aren’t there?

School behaviour and your future job prospects

Posted on May 24, 2011

I’ve blogged this sort of thing before in some ways:

https://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/?p=1118

But I was interested to read this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13508807

“Pupils in the UK were better behaved than the international average.

But Asian countries and regions dominated the top places in this good-behaviour league.”

I am so un-surprised by this. People in rich western countries don’t instill any sort of urgency or panic in their kids to make them study hard. The kids see the parents with cushy jobs and think that homework isn’t a big deal. They leave school with very poor skills and are totally outclassed by foreign competitors. Remember, you aren’t competing against your parents generation, but against kids your age is Japan, China and Kazakhstan. The Kazakhstan kids are paying attention whilst British and American kids text each other and kid around. I have a horrible feeling that we have an entire lazy, ill-educated generation who expect a lifetime of ipods, flat screen TVs, new cars and a luxury house and decent pension, but who have no way to finance any of this.

If you are 15 now, do you really not expect to live to 90? or 100? given modern medical science. How much will that require in terms of a pension? And this is the generation that has student debt from the start, and a huge national debt to pay off one day, not to mention massively increased job competition from the developing world, and increased automation and robotics meaning there won’t be so many menial jobs even if you wanted one. There are already thousands of people with relatively poor qualifications working in call-centers that will be replaced by voice-recog/synthesis AI within 20 years. What will they do? Wash cars? (nope, robots do that already).

I don’t have kids, but if I did, I’d be making damned sure they were top of the class, knowing who they are up against. The near-future economy isn’t defined by mining and construction, but bybiotech, nanotech, computer science and maths. I can’t see any reason why the next big technological boom can’t happen in China or Kazakhstan.

Now do your homework. :D

 

Game Clue #7 plus decision making

Posted on May 20, 2011

I was shopping for cakes today and bought 2 cakes. There were 2 of us, and we wanted one each, and the guy says “You can get a third cake for the price of 2, which cake do you want?” and although that’s a good deal, it kind of bugged me, and (in my obsessive analytical way) I realised it bugged me because I had lost control of my decision making right then. I had strode into the cake shop, confident of my wants, my decisions, my choices and my needs, and suddenly my whole world view (I want 2 cakes) was reversed at someone else’s decision.I thought I knew what I wanted, and someone else had taken over and was making me operate on their terms (they want to sell more cakes).

I mention it because it reminded me of ‘the social network’ which I watched last night. The harvard guy talks about how harvard encourages students to create their own job, rather than just take a job. I thought this was an incredibly good attitude and should be drilled into ALL students, not just ones at elitist super-expensive universities.

You almost certainly don’t have the job you want. You might *like* your job, but that’s different. You didn’t *really* choose your job. Someone else had an idea, and wanted to make/do/build something. They then worked out they needed some people do do parts X and Y (probably the annoying, boring bits) and they posted a job ad, or asked a headhunter for someone to do it. They then wrote a contract, on their terms, and offered it to you. They will tell you what to do, and keep you doing it as long as it is useful to them.

Employment is a very one-sided situation for most people. Imagine showing up at a job interview with your own contract and asking the employer to sign it. Laughable isn’t it?

Working for yourself is not just different in minor job security and tax and quality-of-life ways. It is a fundamental re-arrangement of the terms upon which you carry out a good third of your existence. Even if you are 80% sure you prefer employment to self employment, I strongly recommend trying it before you hit 40ish, and you become too risk averse. I don’t know many people who tried it and went back to a regular job.

Here is another clue alluding to my next game. The last three were a bit hard. I would have thought trench art and stormtrooper helmets were pretty easy to spot, but I’m impressed how rapidly someone can spot a tiger tank gun barrel, especially when it’s a photo of one I took myself :D. Enjoy:

Clue #7

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