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

Getting bigger?

Posted on September 21, 2010

GSB, and positech could be bigger than they are. I only have so much time, and frankly I’m knackered :D. I have no time to work on anything but the campaign game now. Ideally, there would be an ipad port of the game, idally there would be a game for the iphone, designed as a mini-game version. I just can’t do this stuff. Ideally the game would have a version that works on netbooks properly…

Maybe the solution is to find a few more ‘strategic’ partners like I have with redmarblegames, who do the mainstream mac port. There is also the possibility in the longer term of doing a GSB 2, or also maybe doing a spinoff game. A naval or land battle version, for example. This is all separate from my vague ever-changing plans for ‘Game 4’.

Gratuitous Space Battles is my most succesful game to date. It represents the clearest opportunity since I quit mainstream game dev, to increase the size of the company, and actually employ or strike deals with people to work alongside me. Do I want to do that?

I really don’t know. I wouldn’t be doing it for the money. I’m not convinced it would be more profitable anyway, but more because it’s taking me years to make a game, and I’d like to make a lot more. Maybe one day I’ll find the exact right people to make games on a fixed contract, or to even employ. I can’t help thinking that I’m being a bit too timid. You can only grow a company so much by increasing your ad budget and sticking with one employee.

I have a little sideline project that’s an experiment which will start in a few days. Not a big deal though. Not a revenue earner, either…

Hmmm…..

Solar Update

Posted on September 19, 2010

I’ve been working for hours on the campaign, so this is my break:

I emailed the solar company yesterday and finally said yes. That is the end result of a long torturous period of talking to different companies about potential installations, and looking at a total of 4 different roof locations, before eventually sadly concluding that they would have to be ground mounted.

What I’ve said yes to is an array of 10 PV  panels, in 2 groups of 5, in a portrait orientation, so as to minimise the width of the array, as the shading from the trees and the house take place at each end at the start and end of the day, thus minimzing overall shading. This means the array is likely to be about 5 meters by 3 meters in size, and means there is less room for parking, which is fine because this is the money I’d otherwise have bought a newer car with anyway :D

The panels themselves will be schuco MPE 215 (215watt) modules. The inverter will be a sunny boy, with a remote monitoring system called a sunny beam. If I can find out how to code a blog page widget to show current solar output, I will :D.

The installers (no doubt optimistic) estimate is for it to generate 2.15kwp which is 1,792KWH per year. Thats £740.19 in feed in tariff and a saving of roughly £268.33 per year. Thats a total of £1,009.02 per year on an investment of roughly £11k. Thats a ROI of  9.1%, or ‘much better than any bank account’. Now you see why I’m doing it :D If the power generated was 50% lower, it’s *still* a good investment…

HOWEVER. All this assumes that I get a) Listed Building consent and b) Planning permission. I am optimistic, but planning people can be very prickly. Quite *why* anyone could object to them is beyond me as you can only see the site from physically in our garden, plus they don’t even touch the house. I’m still nervous about getting an answer though.

I’ve wanted solar panels for about 10 years now, but I won’t believe it’s really happening until I have them working. The plus side to all this is the proposed site is right outside my office window, which is kinda cool.

Now back to debugging…

Gratuitous Balance Tweaking

Posted on September 18, 2010

I’m back 100% on the campaign tomorrow, I’m at the stage of doing tutorial text for it, then I need some complete run-throughs. Then maybe a pre-order beta release.

I’ve also been drastically improving the games memory usage. And also some baalnce tweaking. This is what I’m likely to be changing:

nomads:
Awazem loses its cost boost, gets 8% armour boost
Duwasir loses its armour boost, gets 10% speed boost
Majali reduces speed penalty from 22% to 12%
Abbadi gets an 8% armour boost
Nomadic dogfight laser damage increased to 8
Nomadic beam laser power usage reduced to 13

general:
guidance scrambler beam weight increased to 147
EMP Shield ecm strength increased from 66 to 82
All frigate armour maxdamageabsorbable increased by 20%
EMP Missile launchers, (both types) missile speed 25% faster. fireinterval reduced 10%, ecm strength increased 10%
Decoy missile launcher weight reduced to 70

order:
Limpet launcher limpetweight increased to 8.2, cost reduced to 110

Feedback welcome. More announcements soon, hopefully.

Memory allocation improvements

Posted on September 15, 2010

I’ve been working on about 16 different things, but one of them was to reduce the memory leakage of GSB. I know some people design very cunning survival-mode fleets and have battles that can go on for an hour or more, and basically GSB leaks memory quite badly right now. Also, if I ever want this game ported somewhere, it will need to get it’s memory use under control. Plus campaign games sometimes lead to some VERY big battle, which makes the issue worse.

Lots of fiddling around (writing my own memory allocation debug stuff) means I could watch exactly what was getting allocated mid battle. I dumped every memory allocation during battle to a text file, then chopped off the first 10,000 (so I don’t worry about early allocations, which are then cached and re-used anyway), so I could see what the long term persistant offenders were.

The next step was to ensure I was looking at the *amount* of RAM being used, not the number of small trivial 20 byte allocations. Those need optimizing too, but not now. To do this, I stuck all the text which looked like this:

file:..\src\GUI_Particles.cppline:429 28672
file:..\src\GUI_Ship.cppline:733 204
file:..\src\SIM_TargetedModule.cppline:905 48
file:..\src\SIM_TargetedModule.cppline:981 12...

Into Excel, and created a pivot table out of it, to nicely summarise each allocation type by number of calls and total RAM allocated. It was clear that particle allocations were rare, but huge. It was immediately clear that I was allocating memory for a big mega explosion even for the tiniest 7 particle fighter-impact effect. All I did was re-write the particle code to calculate on application-start what the maximum number of particles were that this emmiter could ever need, and then ensure it never allocated more than that when I created it.

Some more work with extensive debug display code mid-battle was done to ensure the new system was working as expected, and that the majority of the allocated RAM was indeed needed and being used.
End result? My test battle (Multari nebula, a fair few fighters, fought to the end with all options turned on) went from a peak of 403MB for GSB.exe to 305MB. That’s pretty darned good. The savings on bigger, longer battles will be pretty noticable.

Expect that improvement to be folded into a future update.

Gratuitous DLC Experiment

Posted on September 13, 2010

Ok, first things first, let me announce the release of a new race for Gratuitous Space Battles. They are called the nomads, and you can see more info here, and watch a video of them here (or below). And you can even go buy the new DLC here.

The idea for the nomads are a sort of retro-future race, suggesting a species that has been around a loooong time. They are travellers, and fighting purely for sport. They don’t come with any new technology or weapon types, but they do have a few extra tweaked ship modules. Also, there are not new singleplayer missions, this is just a race for you to use in existing scenarios, or in challenges.

Here is an embedded video showing off the new ships:

Now comes the slightl wacky bit. I’m selling this DLC for $5.99, just like all the previous races were, and there is no change there. If you are a long time GSB plauyer and just want the new race, then go buy it, it’s $5.99. That gets you the standard version of the DLC. There is also a ‘discount’ version of the DLC. The difference between the two is that one is $5.99 and one is $2.99. That’s it.

Obviously the standard one costs more, and I get more money as the developer. The discount one costs you less, and I get less. There will be updated stats on the page here showing who bought what.

It’s entirely up to you, which one you buy. You decide. I would obviously prefer you bought the standard one. Nobody will ever know what version you bought, the files are identical. This is a bit of a sudden manic experiment to see what happens. If you genuinely have very very little money and would have waited months hoping for a bundle or a sale, then you could make an argument you could get the discount one. If you frankly, *do* have the money to spare and would buy it anyway if there was only the $5.99 option, I’m asking you to do that.

This might make me look really stupid, but I’m prepared to risk it. I like trying new stuff in business. I think it will be interesting either way. Also, the DLC is more about promoting the game and making a bigger range of ships, so there is more variety. None of these expansions are really aiming to make money, the core game does that. ( I hope!)

Anyway, it should be interesting. If you find the time to tweet, facebook like, link to, blog or otherwise promote this experiment, I’d appreciate it. It could be interesting.

Cheers,