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

Gratuitous Mac Battles

Posted on August 4, 2010

IT IS DONE!

At last, you get to blow up spaceships with the approval of steve jobs. We wouldn’t do anything without the approval of steve would we?

Clicky here to go to redmarblegames website and grab the Mac version of Gratuitous Space Battles.

http://www.redmarblegames.com/gsb.html

Tell your friends! Tell your enemies! Tell random people in the street who look like mac owners! (feel free to retweet this too…

I don’t need a 2nd job, or heroin

Posted on August 2, 2010

There seems to have been a huge growth in two areas of game design in the last 5 years.

1) 2nd Job games.

Most people call them ‘MMOs’ , but the basic gameplay seems to be this: You start out at the bottom. You go to someone who stands there all day doing nothing who tells you to go kill 5 spiders. When you do that, he gives you a miniscule promotion, and then tells you to kill 10 spiders. Repeat until dead.

This sounds like some of the early office jobs I did, only rather than the spider-dude paying me at the end of each month, with an MMO, I pay for the priviledge of doing this job. No thanks.

2) Heroin

I’m lucky. I don’t get really addicted to farmville games, or flash MMOs. I know people VERY addicted to world of Warcraft or EVE. People who run online games who I know have tales of people spending $300+ a month on in-game items. Why? Because they are addicted.

Peoples’ brains are different. A BIG chunk of people have whatever neurotransmitter or collection of neurons it takes to get them totally hooked on games which keep you in a  tight feedback/reward/effort loop, ad finitum. A lot of big companies are tuned into this and boy do they exploit it. Keep them playing…Keep them playing… Spread out the gameplay, because the players time is considered worthless to them. Quantity, not Quality…

And we are only at the very early days of this. People have already shown adverts to people while they lie in MRI scanners to fine tune the ads to the way peoples emotions trigger. This will come for games, if it isn’t already being studied.

Luckily, I seem to be immune to 2) and I already have a job, so 1) doesn’t appeal to me. There are still fun games out there that I enjoy, but they are becoming an endangered species. Company of Heroes is now Company of Heroes online, because they want micro-transactions and the addictive push-button-get-banana gameplay that earns zynga so much money…

I see *why* gaming is going this way, I just feel left out and a bit saddened by it.

Campaign Repair update

Posted on July 30, 2010

When I started designing the campaign, I put in code for repairs to ships, where you could repair individual pieces of damage. An attack on a ship might damage a module, doing 25% damage to it. You could repair just that specific piece of damage, if you so chose.

The idea was that rather than just clicking ‘repair this ship, 1,240 CR’ you could spend less, if funds were tight, and just repair critical modules. I wrote a ton of code to generate slightly silly technobabble descriptions of each piece of damage. All of this is in the campaign and working.

In practice, when testing the campaign I find myself invariably repairing the whole ship, or if funds are tight, just leaving it to the next turn when funds are available. The fancy repair interface is a bit overdone and over-engineered. However, I see no good reason to remove it entirely, it’s kinda fun, and allows micro-managing for those who want to, so it’s staying in.

Something that did change today is the cost of repairs halved. Previously it was the same as construction. If a module cost 400CR and took 25% damage, it cost 100CR to fix. Now it’s 50CR. Why the change?

Well in practice, repairs are reasonably rare. It takes time for ships to retreat, especially cruisers, and in battle, by the time you realise your fleet is screwed, the chances of all of them managing to turn 180 degrees and warp out are quite low. You often lose half the fleet during the retreat, unless you make an instant judgement at the first sign of the enenmy, and call an instant withdrawal. Combined with this, there is is the issue of repair yards. Not every system has them, so the damaged ships need to make a few warp jumps back to the nearest connected repair yard, before they get fixed up. By the time you do this, you might as well build new ships.

So….. Repairs will be cheaper than new build. I think it balances out better this way, and it makes sense in gameplay terms anyway. The real frustration should be logistics, and having retreated and thus given up territory, rather than resenting the cost of repairs. I’m aiming for a ‘company of heroes’ style mechanic, where its sensible to retreat and fight another day, if outgunned.

Ransomware cheap DLC

Posted on July 28, 2010

I was looking at a certain games portals ‘new releases’ list recently and saw tons of tiny bits of DLC for under 3 dollars. Very cheap. I assume that this stuff makes money, or at least breaks even.

It got me thinking about the possibility of similar priced DLC for GSB. I’m not especially keen to do any more fully fledged expansion packs. I did three, and you’d be surprised how much work is involved in adding new weapon types and modules. The game is hugely involved now. The weapons for the order took ages to balance. The swarm was easier, but they still took a while.

Right now, I’m 100% dedicated to the GSB campaign game, which is horribly complex to code (yet pretty simple to play, it’s not galciv or anything like it). As a result, I’m not about to make any new module types or other gameplay-affecting stuff.

But then… is there a market for just new ships hulls? Either more hulls for the existing races, or maybe another new race, but one with no specific new tech. Just new visual shiny basically. Would people be interested? To do a whole new race costs a lot in artist time (and some cliff-time for the damage textures)., but if I could find a way to make it break-even, I’d do it. I love designing the ideas for new ships. It’s mostly artist work, so I can keep working on the campaign.

Has anyone ever run, partaken in, or seen a ransomware model working? The idea is that people pledge money (and actually hand it over, it’s not just a promise) to a third party. When that amount reaches $X, the product is produced, and released (presumably for free?) and the developer gets the money. Kind of like donations, but with a target.  If the limit isn’t reached, I assume the people get their money back. I hear people talk about this idea, but I’ve never seen it happen. have you?

The marketing / production tradeoff

Posted on July 27, 2010

There is a tradeoff every developer is making when it comes to spending money. You either spend it on the product, or marketing and promoting the product.

Now the romantically inclined might suggest that the best thing to do is just make the best possible game you can (100% product) and then the product will ‘sell itself’. Word of mouth news of your awesome game will do the work of the ad-men, and you will sell games by the bucketload.

The cynically inclined might suggest that the best thing to do is to market the hell out of your game. It doesn’t matter if the product istelf is a bit rough, because if 20,000,000 people get to hear about it, then you are bound to find enough of them who are bored enough to hand over the cash.

Obviously sanity lies somewhere in the middle. Finding out exactly where it lies, is not easy. To make a rational decision requires you to be able to measure the difference each dollar you spend actually makes. Clearly that is not easy.

With improvements to a games quality, you can sometimes tell that (for example) version 1.23 has a 22% higher conversion rate from the demo than version 1.22. This is assuming you have a clever enough order process to track that, are sure people aren’t trying an old, mirrored demo download and so on. Even then, this is completely useless, because it only works on the demo. Maybe version 1.23 full version is so awesome it encourages 18.34% more of your buyers to refer a friend to the game? Maybe screenshots from version 1.23 got featured on a website whereas 1.22 would not have, thus pulling in more eyeballs etc…

You might assume that it’s an easier thing to measure how effective marketing and promotion are. To a point this is true. I can tell you the CPC, CTR CPM and other boring acronyms for all my ads. I can plot very accurately the curve of CPC rising as total ad spend also climbs, and the  sales/ad spend is also very easily measured. Google Analytics even shows you the ROI for each individual site where your banner was shown. However, this leaves out an absolute ton of variables. Maybe someone saw an ad on their work PC, then bought it later on theirs (not tracked). Maybe someone saw an ad, told a friend, and the friend bought it (not tracked) and so on…

And that’s only for directly net-connected stuff like ad buys. I ran a competition where I gave away a hideously expensive plastic spaceship model. Did that get me any PR? any sales? any good word-of-mouth? VERY hard to tell. I spend quite a bit of time replying to emails from journalists, and seeking out websites to promote the game. Is the return on investment there better than coding? Who can tell…

For me, spending money on ads is quite an easy decision, because there is only one of me. Doubling my ad spend doesn’t require any more of my (overstretched) time at all. So I’m not having to do a weigh-up of time on marketing vs time on the game. it’s much harder to weigh up anything that takes actual time away from coding. There is still the decision as to weighing up money spent on contractors (art, web design, sound) vs money spent on ads. And then of course there is the tradeoff between employing an artist (product) vs employing a PR guy (marketing).

Personally, I’m wary of actually employing PR people. I’m a one man company. The ‘brand’ ‘story’ and ‘image’ of Positech games is just me. It would feel silly to have someone try and ‘re-brand’ me. That’s a level of corporateness which I don’t want to get into.

…of course, if I’m really good at PR, then I already employ a person to do all this, and he is the one typing this blog post. Cliff’s busy coding, as always

..or is he?