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

Gratuitous Cat Picture

It’s not my next game, but it is exactly what it says. I’m very busy doing tech support and business stuff, and debugging, and campaign coding and…. etc etc. So I’ll blog properly tomorrow… maybe. In the interim, here is a picture of jack, my youngest and most bitey cat.

Jack says thankyou for all the games purchases that paid for his tuna.

The fine line between marketing and addiction in games

I don’t normally blog just to link to someone else’s writing, because that kind of bugs me, but allow me this rare indulgence. This is worth a read:

http://kotaku.com/5605532/how-an-army-of-junkies-and-kids-enriches-tech-titans

It’s a bit one-sided. I don’t like the moaning that virtual items ‘never existed’. Just because something is encoded digitally does not mean it has no value, even if the scarcity is artificial. (I own a ‘limited-edition’ print of a painting of a native american dancer, on the wall of my office. That’s artificial scarcity, and nobody minds that…).

But given my beef with that specific complaint, it’s still an interesting read. I’d hate to think people spent too much money, money they didn’t have, especially if they got into debt… on my games. I need to earn a living, but I don’t need money enough to risk getting people addicted to something just to line my pockets.

There is a fine line between clever marketing and design, and exploiting psychological tricks to wring every last penny from addicts. Modern companies of all types need to pay attention to that line, and not cross it.

Gratuitous Mac Battles

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

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

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.