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

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

Things adwords should change

Posted on February 10, 2011

Here is my wishlist for google adwords:

1) Hire some more people to approve image ads. They don’t need to be google engineers. Anyone who can click a mouse could do it.

2) Add the ability to copy image ads from one ad group and campaign to another without uploading them again. If I need a separate campaign for the UK, then I need to upload everything again. That’s madness, and makes 1) worse.

3) Allow the ability to have ads within a single campaign or ad group that are shown only to specific countries, ditto with kerywords. The word ‘obama’ isn’t as relevant in Birmingham as it is in new York. Creating a copycat campaign is overkill and pointless.

4) Allow us to edit the destination URL of an ad without re-uploading it.  That check is already automated so there is absolutely no excuse for not doing it.

5) Allow me to easily view which conversions were triggered by which ads or keywords. Right now I can just see ‘conversions’ as opposed to an easy break-down by type.

6) under networks, allow me to set up groups of target sites which I manage individually. I’m only allowed ‘managed’ and then ‘everyone else’. I’d much rather be able to set up groups of sites, especially ones I could then transfer to another campaign with just one mouse click.

and now the big one

7) Allow us to set a spending cap for a campaign and stop it when it runs out. Come on, this isn’t rocket science and everyone using adwords thinks your ‘adwords is designed for ongoing ads’ is bullshit. If we want a fixed budget for a certain ad, you, the ad provider should let us do that. It’s a cynical and cheap ploy to get us to accidentally overspend, and it’s infuriating and silly.

That’s about it for now :D

Website experiment #1

Posted on February 8, 2011

I thought I’d blog these in future. I’ve been trying out this page:

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/index.html

Vs this page:

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/index_var1.html

To compare what percentage of people click the demo button. The second one has some missing content, and I theorised that fi there were less distractions and fluff on that page, it might push more people to hit the demo button. In fact, I was wrong:

Still, it was worth a try :D

Considering combat mechanics

Posted on February 6, 2011

I’m thinking out loud here.

New game (codename: LB, previously G4). Involves military units shooting at each other. One of the mechanics I quite like is heat, where you would have heat based weapons, like flamethrowers, or incendiary bombs. I like the idea of units being vulnerable to, or impervious to, heat as a weapon.

I also still want the idea of armor, and of shields. I like the amount of variety that gives, all before you worry about actual hitpoints and structural damage. What I am unsure about, is exactly how to put all this stuff together.

GSB had a terribly complex system hardly any casual players got their heads around, so I’d like to avoid that. Things I did like was:

  • Shields had to be taken down by different weapons to those that did major internal damage.
  • Concept of different payloads for each weapon, especially missiles.
  • Shields could be taken down, then would not come back.
  • Shields could recharge over time, but armor was finite, without external repair modules.

I had some overcomplex stuff, like individual shield modules being down, rather than the whole thing, of shield-disruptors and the uber-complex shield-reflection and penetration mechanics.

With the new game, I like the idea of overheating a unit until it explodes. You can optionally add heat-sinks, of course, and I could even have environmental factors, so in some scenarios, losing heat is harder than others. However, there are a number of mechanics I’m unsure about.

  • Firstly, Do I have a three tier system like before, where you have to down shields, then armor, then do internal damage?
  • Can heat based weapons just go straight through shields?
  • Do heat based weapons have any effect on armor? and can they go direct through armor? They need to be as good as other weapons…
  • If heat dissipates over time, and shields recharge, aren’t they just 2 flavors of the same mechanic? and if so, does that really matter?
  • Is it worth having dual mechanics? For example, energy-based weapons obviously damage shields, and then armor, but do they also generate some heat?

I want a system that has some depth, but I want it to be understandable to someone who grabs the game for 10 minutes to see what it’s like. Obviously I can ‘drip-feed’ stuff in, so maybe the demo level only has shields,armor  and energy weapons, and I could introduce heat-sinks and flamethrowers later.

Lets watch some numbers change

Posted on February 5, 2011

When you are a game designer, you become more attuend to this phenomena, but it is all around us. In games, we really notice it. In fact, a talented journalist once reviewed kudos by saying “it’s just watching numbers go up, but sometimes, that’s all you need”. (or words to that effect.)

You probably know what I mean in terms of stuff like ‘leveling up’ in games like World Of Warcraft, or earning skill points in an online shooter. It’s nothing new, when I was a kid there was a lot of obsession about winning a place on the high score table at your local arcade. We seem to love nothing better than getting a high score, a better score, better than our friends, better than yesterday, better than 10 minutes ago.

It’s only when you analyse it, you realsie it’s not just in games, but everywhere. We love getting a pay rise, even if the rise is taken up entirely by extra tax. We care about the ‘top 10’ or the billboard ‘top 100’.  And we love seeing numbers change. It’s not enough to know who is #34 in the worlds richest/fattest/sexiest/cleverest person. We need to know they have risen 4 places!

I love playing the stock market, I get a whole page full of numbers to check, and they go up and down in REAL TIME! And deep down, I know that one of my motivations for getting solar panels is that I’ll get to watch more numbers change each day.

What does surprise me is that employers don’t do this stuff more. My brain would melt if I had a job on a checkout at a supermarket, or driving a truck long distance. However, if there was some built in emtrics and measurement meta-game to my job, based on how efficiently, or consistently I did my job, I’d end up focusing on that, and it would probably make my job go much easier.

People love seeing numbers going up, and comparing numbers, why don’t workplaces make use of that?