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

Game designer job. (yes really)

Posted on February 16, 2011

I’m not actually offering someone a *job*, job. It’s not a permanent thing. I’m looking for a contractor, just for a week. Even if I *did* have the work (and money) for a permanent employee, I wouldn’t do it. The UK insists on burdening employers with so much paperwork and bureaucracy it’s literally better to just not bother and stay a one-man business. Bah etc…

Anyway…

See Gratuitous Space Battles?

See the campaign add on Galactic Conquest?

That campaign add-on has only ONE map. It’s fixed, every time, and people would prefer it to to have variety. Hence I want to have another 3 maps made that are different, and let the player choose from them. This will require some coding by me, which isn’t a lot, but it would involve a fair amount of editing, play testing and balancing, and I don’t have the time to do it.

This is where my new padawan will come in.

Basically I want someone to take the GSB campaign, and come up with 3 new maps, all new planet names, all new facility locations and anomaly locations, and a new network of connecting hyperspace doodahs. There is a debug editor, of sorts, built into the game (I’d get a debug copy to them) which is flaky as hell, because my tools suck, but I used it myself so it can’t be too bad.

I’m thinking it’s probably a full time job for a week. I’m thinking it’s worth $1,000. I know full time lead designers don’t work for that, but this is more of a junior designer/tester thing anyway. Don’t shout at me, I’m only a frail humble indie :D

This is who I need:

  • Someone who speaks and types very good English. Language barriers can be hell.
  • Someone over 18.  This sounds horribly cruel, but it’s purely because if you are under 18, there are probably all kinds of horrific laws about employing a minor, and I don’t want angry parents suing me. Sorry about this…
  • A very keen gamer, likely someone who has played GSB and likes it, and plays a lot of strategy games. You will definitely have to be very familiar with how the game plays, and be reasonably good at it before starting to do this.
  • Someone who has a free week coming up very soon (Feb/March, really). I don’t want to leave it longer than that. I doubt it’s doable in evenings and weekends, but you can try and convince me otherwise.
  • Someone professional , with a good eye for detail, organised and capable. I’m pretty sure I could talk people into doing this for free, I’m paying hard earned cash because I want a top notch job done that I can happily put my name to.

If this applies to you, please email me at cliff@positech.co.uk, with details about you. Any references or CV style stuff would be welcome, but not essential. if you are a game design student at some college or university, then maybe this is a good opportunity to wangle it into the course. If you are an unemployed game designer with pro experience, this is ideal for you. Don’t forget you can work from home, and 90% of the time you will just be fighting space battles, and checking it’s fun. There are worse jobs out there, trust me. Plus it looks good on CVs.

I’ll pay the full amount by paypal or bank transfer on completion. You can trust me, I’ve been around decades, and employed dozens of people in similar ways. I always pay! There will be a contract/NDA to sign, naturally.

If you know anyone suitable, please tweet this to them, or whatever you hip kids do these days.

BTW this will be a free update, not new DLC.

Explosion Design

Posted on February 15, 2011

I’ve spent another whole day working on particle /explosion stuff and tools. I was very pleased with the explosions in GSB. They look like this:

But much better in motion. I think that’s not bad. However, just because I think it’s not bad doesn’t mean it can’t be a factor of ten better. I’m aiming for ILM-standards, so there is a huge way to go.

GSB had a particle editor, but it wasn’t as good as it should be, mainly because it was built as an external program, and a crap one. I am notorious for making rubbish tools. I should just ask Eskil to make them. Anyway…

Here is the very first attempt at the explosion / particle editor for LB. It’s not vaguely finished, not even by 50%, and I really need to support zooming in! Anyway, the main thing is that it’s built into the game, which means a lot less hassle to edit effects and then toggle back into the game and see how it looks. Plus it uses the exact same source files as the in-game effects, so it’s less messy.

To be honest 90% of the effort was a re-jig of the class structures for a lot of my particle code, rather than actual tools production. Obviously all the GUI code there and the graphics are from GSB, don’t worry, I’ll get a brand spanking new GUI design for the new game in time.

I’m determined to finally make a game that has decent tools from the start, to make me more productive.

In other news, I was woken at 3AM by the death screams of what sounded like an injured pterodactyl in the garden. It *might* have been some less exotic bird, but I’m not so sure. Glad I hadn’t just watched some creepy horror movie.

Gratuitous Space Battle campaign too hard?

Posted on February 14, 2011

Hardcore GSB players, who have played 100+ challenges would say “no way” but to a lot of new and casual GSB players, who only played offline, the campaign can seem like a suicide mission. Here are some tips:

1) Don’t rush to expand. You need to build up. Trying to take and hold a planet with 2 or 3 ships is futile. Think bigger.

2) Don’t build slow moving tanks. You WILL need to retreat them at some point, and if they are too slow, you are toast.

3) Make sensible choices as where to attack, based on your needs. You either need cash, or you need crew for your ships. Deciding which planet to take next is pretty vital.

4) Keep an eye on loyalty. Loyalty acts as a multiplier for the income or other facilities on a planet. Taking a world is step 1, you MUST hold it for a period too, else it’s just a waste of lives and ammo.

5) Hold the chokepoints, those places where hyperspace lines converge. Especially ones which have anomalies preventing certain ship types. These are your best barriers against enemy attack.

If you are still getting crushed, feel free to edit how the campaign runs…

Gratuitous Space Battles/campaign/data/campaign_opt.ini lets you edit all this yummy stuff…

connected_fleet_multiplier = 0.5
loyalty_boost_per_turn = 0.05
loyalty_fall_per_turn = 0.15
threat_fall_per_turn = 0.05
threat_rise_per_turn = 0.11
enemy_attack_chance_multiplier = 1.0
fleet_garrison_loyalty_multiplier = 0.01
max_fleet_garrison_loyalty = 0.20
no_attack_window = 6
no_attack_fadein = 8
no_attack_homeworld = 36
homeworld_attack_fadein = 8
max_ai_attacks_per_turn = 4
ai_repair_low_rate = 0.1
ai_repair_high_rate = 0.3
ai_attack_spam_freeze = 6
ai_homeworld_spam_freeze = 9
ai_new_conquered_attack_freeze = 5
ai_new_conquered_threat = 1.0
ai_armsrace_fear_degrade = 0.05
ai_armsrace_fleet_growth = 0.17
ai_fleetsize_reduction = 0.04
ai_armsrace_fear_spread_multiplier = 0.6
newgame_credits_normal = 10000
newgame_crew_normal = 450
newgame_pilots_normal = 50
newgame_credits_easy = 16000
newgame_crew_easy = 600
newgame_pilots_easy = 70
newgame_credits_hard = 5000
newgame_crew_hard = 300
newgame_pilots_hard = 32
repair_cost_multiplier = 0.5
diff_game_length = 500
diff_min_adjuster = 0.5
diff_max_adjuster = 2.0
futile_attacks_threshold = 0.4
ai_repair_adjuster_easy = 0.5
ai_repair_adjuster_hard = 1.5
nobattle_boredom_threshold = 10
emotion_consec_victories_cocky = 5
emotion_consec_defeats_depressed = 5
emotion_cocky_adjust = 1.3
emotion_depressed_adjust = 0.7
maintenance_percentage_easy = 0.005
maintenance_percentage_medium = 0.015
maintenance_percentage_hard = 0.025
proximity_boost_multiplier = 0.9
freshy_conquered_minfleet = 2000
freshly_conquered_needs_defense = 6
freshy_conquered_undefended_penalty = 0.09
aifleet_replacement_limit = 24
ai_max_fleet_size = 200000
absolute_attack_freeze_max = 10
absolute_freeze_reduction_after_conquest = -8
lostworld_attack_freeze_easy = 8
lostworld_attack_freeze_medium = 4
lostworld_attack_freeze_hard = 1
max_fleet_growth = 4000

Democracy and steam

Posted on February 12, 2011

Sooo… After being annoyed about reading a message from someone along the lines of ‘I’ll only buy games on steam’ I tweeted angrily earlier and pointed out that steam was not the whole PC market, and got dozens of tweets from people extolling the virtues of steam. I know the virtues of steam, I’m a gamer too. I have an account on there, and buy some games there. My beef isn’t with steam (I love steam), but with the mindset that you turn over your freedom of purchase choice to a third party. I would go berzerk if I was told I can only buy food from Sainsburys, or could only watch the BBC, yet people seem happily to confine their game purchasing to the stock of a single store.

Anyway…

I made a game called Democracy 2. (I did the original too). It’s a politics sim, a sort of ‘Sim Country’ game, and it’s quite complex and technical. It has, however, sold extremely well over the years, and continues to sell now. I’ve sold seven copies so far today, and it’s only 2PM. Not bad at all. It’s also won various awards and praise in reviews yada yada. It is *not* as polished or good-looking a game as GSB. But it has depth and lots of originality.

Screenie:

Anyway…

You can’t buy Democracy 2 on steam. You can get it from impulse, direct2drive and gamersgate, but not Steam. Obviously you can buy it direct. I offerred it to valve ages ago, and they rejected it. I then offered it again, after GSB had sold ten zillion copies, but they still rejected it again, which is a pity. They said

"This is just not a good fit for distribution on Steam."

Now obviously, steam can do what they like. They are a private company. They might think the game is too amateurish. they might think it won’t sell. They might think that their time is better spent getting bigger budget, or newer games listed. Democracy 2 is a few years old now. This is all up to them. However, I can’t help but think it would sell really well. It’s a game that looks a bit sucky in screenshots, but people get into it really quickly. I think there is a market there, especially amongst the ‘I only buy games on steam’ crowd. It’s very moddable too.

Sooo, if you are someone who quite likes the look of D2, but would only buy it if it was on steam, please let them know. It only takes 2 minutes, just fire off an email to valve, hopefully linking to this post, and saying you would like to buy Democracy 2 if valve sold it. I’d appreciate it, and you never know, it might get listed. Stranger things have happened!

http://www.valvesoftware.com/contact/

The perfect indie game company

Posted on February 11, 2011

2012

Here is my vision of positech industries in 2012.

There is one full time employee, and it’s still me. Most of the personal stuff relating to the core business is still done by me. It’s still me on twitter, writing this blog, and designing the games. It’s still me making the big business decisions, and I still own the company 100%

The Positech Engine is now much bigger than before, and takes up a larger chunk of each games source code. Some code is being written by contractors, such as all of the editors and mod tools.

The positech website is completely outsourced, with a web developer and designer paid to update and improve the site. The developer also doubles up as a server admin, and handles coding all of the php and database stuff required for positech’s games. Possibly the same person is a community manager, forum admin and moderator, and in charge of replying to tech support emails. Either the same, or another person runs showmethegames.com

Specially written client software handles all of the business data for everything, integrating sales data from all the different sales channels, and tying it in with multiple advertising agencies to produce simple, accurate charts showing how everything is going. Ad budgets and management is all handled automatically, occasionally emailing a contract artist to request some new variants of existing adverts to keep the campaigns fresh. Every single buyer of the game can be tied, as much as possible to the way they heard about my company or games.

A large portion (at least 25%) of the profit for the company still comes direct from sales to gamers, not through third parties.

Positech has multiple games selling on steam.

There is a contract assistant game designer who helps with level balancing and design, and some back story stuff. There is also an artist employed on a contract basis, but working probably six months a year. Pre-release testing is handled by a dedicated tester, employed on a contract basis. New games are tested out on actual gamers in meatspace, and they are filmed whilst playing the game so I can analyse facial expressions as they play.

Positech has diversified slightly, just in case, maybe by buying a part-share in a large wind turbine, or maybe buying some woodland, or investing in a non-games tech company.

Oh and I nearly forgot. I celebrate New Year 2012 by finally getting planning permission for solar panels.

HA!

like THAT is going to happen :D