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

I don’t ‘get’ the ipad

Posted on March 5, 2011

Not long ago I actually left the house and went shopping. Obviously I didn’t actually buy anything, but I did end up in an apple store, for the first time ever, fondling an ipad. I used to be an apple hardware engineer, so I have no hatred of them, but I haven’t ever owned anything more than an ipod. Anyway…

I just don’t get it.

I can see that it’s a geek fantasy to have a ‘padd’ from star trek as a geek toy, I can imagine all sorts of cool commercial uses for it, I bet a lot of admin staff in airports or warehouses or any sort of travel hub or whatever, have a legit use for something like the ipad. In other words, places where you are stood up and consulting notes now and then.

But at home… no.

Basically if me and my better half are surfing the net, or wanted to look at photos or whatever, then My default position is to stick my feet up on a pouffe, slouch like a student on the sofa, and park a laptop on my legs/belly. This works perfectly. The keyboard acts as the base, and the screen is constantly adjustable to get the perfect viewing angle.

With an ipad, I’d have to hold the stupid thing, or grab a cushion to prop it up, or some other silliness. I also find it much easier to control whats on the screen with keys or a touchpad, so I can still…you know…SEE the screen as I do it. The first dozen times you zoom in by splodging your hands on the screen is cool, but isn’t this just the silly tom cruise interweb interface again? (I admit it is cool to turn pages this way though).

Seriously…who reads like this? (img from http://www.grip-it-strips.co.uk/)

I also don’t think the ipad is especially thin, or lightweight, compared to a fairly high-range lightweight laptop. Obviously, I didn’t buy one, I also think it’s hilariously pricey for what it is. So tell me, what am I missing? Am I just lazier than everyone else? am I just tragically uncool? Or after a month of fiddling with your ipad do you wish it was the same form factor as a netbook?

Attic Insulation again…

Posted on March 2, 2011

Theres some games conference going on, but I’m not there, and it’s very pazazzy, so I thought I’d blog about loft insulation instead. I’m sticking it to the man.

I live in a very old (1750s) house built out of mud and dead peasants, and it’s extremely cold at times. This is because the house was built before mankind invented double glazing, or indeed, glazing, it sometimes seems. Anyway, part of my five year stalinesque plan is to insulate the darned thing, and we are currently working on the attic. the attic is big, has lots of old beams and is about two hundred degrees below zero.

Taking away the side panels to see what was behind them revealed this:

Which is to say mostly 18th century rubble, dust and the remains of fossilised birds nests. Not a completely poor insulator, but not exactly aerogel. Clearly we could do better, but we needed to preserve an air gap to allow air to circulate. These old houses need to ‘breath’. We ended up wedging individually cut pieces of reflective-backed foam insulation between the rafters, with tiny blocks to hold them in place. That felt is all that is between me, and the stone roof tiles, and then open country…

Eventually that was all done on this bit, which is the lower section of a quarter of the half of the room we are currently doing. This will tke years. (we ended up doing a quarter of the attic, to date). a second  layer of felt goes back, pinned on top of all this.

Then the fun bit, which is laying lots of ‘semi-rigid’ sheeps-woolesque soft insulation between the floor rafters (not visible here), and then laying an additional layer of really wooly even more sheeps woolesque stuff over the top, curved around to prevent any drafts. You can also see a big thick mega-chunky piece of foam insulation that will go in front of all of this, behind the wooden side panels (the panel itself is very thin and crap). The sheeps woolesque stuff was horrid. cue lots of spluttering and itching.

This is everything put back in place, all I need to do now is fill the slight gap where it meets the beam with flexible filler, then I’m going to give the whole thing a coat on nano-paint. it sounds like bullshit, but we used this in our living room and it’s very very good. Basically a nanotech paint additive that reflects heat. great for insulating where cavity walls don’t exist and internal insulation isn’t an option. This is what it all looked like before we started. This time it might be warm though. It’s certainly quieter.

The other end of the room is much much harder to get to, so we are employing someone to come balance on ladders and do that end for us. One day, the temperature of the house will get to the stage where we can have just 2 duvets in the summer. One of the positive outcomes to doing this, is that as I lay there covered in dirt, hammering nails and swearing, I remembered why I gave up carpentry to become a computer programmer. Woodwork sucks. Debugging might be annoying, but C++ doesn’t bend when you hit it.

Hegemony Gold

Posted on February 28, 2011

As you likely know, I also run the indie games website ‘ShowMeTheGames’, and I just stuck up coverge of a new ancient greek RTS game called Hegemony Gold. Basically an expanded version of an existing game. It’s very good, and certainly worth a look. Screenshot:

And obligatory linky:

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

Website experiment #3 red vs blue

Posted on February 26, 2011

Red buttons are NOT better than blue buttons. I have hard data for my gratuitous space battles index page demo button:


In fact they are much worse:
original
variation

Nothing beats hard data. Extrapolating from this is probably less helpful, given that my page is mostly blue so it might have ‘jarred’ but I had guessed that might be a good thing. it wasn’t.

Two web sales mistakes you may be making right now…

Posted on February 24, 2011

Here are two assumptions you can (wrongly) make as an indie game developer:

1) If you show ads to someone, and they buy your game for $22, you earned $22 for showing them that ad.

2) If you spend $1000 on ads/marketing in december, and made $1200 worth of sales, you made a profit.

lets look at 1) first.

Obviously, you need to compare PROFIT not revenue, so we can assume that you got $22 after paying the payment company / portal royalty for that sale. But is that $22 the real profit from that customer? No, it’s only the start. If you release some DLC, a sequel, or just another game at any stage, you already ‘have’ that customer, in terms of them being aware of your business, and happy to purchase from you. What you need to do is to look at the average value of a customer over the customer lifetime, not that one sale. My maths tells me that a straight analysis of my google ads in December 2010 shows me losing money…. on the single purchases that derive from those ads, but I definitely make money on the long term. You don’t know the average revenue per customer? Find out…

Now 2)

There is a tendency to look at the total sales and subtract the ad budget and deduce the remains as profit, but there is another deduction to make, and thats ‘sales you would have got anyway’. Obviously we all get word-of-mouth sales, review-induced sales, and search-engine related sales. You need to look at your analytics *only* for the paid-traffic segment, and work out what proportion of sales to assign to the ads, THEN work out if you are making a return.

Don’t think that you can make assumptions there either, the paid traffic might be more(or less) likely to visit the buy page, so you need to actually analyse that. Again, my december stats look pretty awesome if I assign all my sales revenue to the ad budget, but if I only assign the sales that came from the ad traffic, it’s a different story.

These are just two more, of the fourty-million ways in which people can not know the numbers, and thus lose money on ads. This is time well spent. It also makes a change from debugging :D