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

Epic opinions

Posted on July 15, 2010

I’ve mulled over whether to say anything at all, but if you can’t say what you think about the games industry when you own your own company, when can you?

I was part of a panel yesterday at Develop, the games conference for developers in Brighton UK. I was speaking about ‘microstudios’ with Robin Lacey(Beatnik), Sean Murray(Hello Games) and Mark Morris(Introversion), all of whom are good guys. As a one-man outfit, I’m the real baby studio there, but at 13 years of experience, also the grandfather, so I guess that makes me middle aged. Anyway… all was cool, and there was much joking and mutual silliness. Apparently I am the Barry Manilow of game development, and a mug to spend £75 on jeans. And the topic then came up of how indies can respond directly to gamers on stuff like messageboards. Basically I started making the point, and mark was also agreeing about how someone can email you as an indie dev, and you can reply personally back to that potential customer, and hopefully, that way you have converted that guy to buying the game.

At this point, there was this derisive snort from this guy in the front row, who said something to the effect of ‘one guy? who cares, that’s a waste of time’. He then started to lecture us on how that’s a silly way to do it.  I’m 95% sure that all four of us on the panel thought ‘what the fuck?’ as well as ‘who is this guy’? compounded by Robin asking him if he worked in marketing.

Anyway… it turned out this guy was Mark Rein from Epic, although he seemed to assume everyone within earshot knew exactly who he was, and why he must obviously be right. I got the impression he was there to laugh at the little guys, or to just inform us how we are all wrong. Interestingly, it seemed there was someone from sports interactive (one time indies, as I recall) there, who seemed more on the indie wavelength than Mark. It would have been cool to chat with him.

So… I’ve given this a lot of thought, and weighed up the pros and cons of just putting this down to misinterpreting someone, and so on, and I have reached this conclusion.

Mark Rein is a jerk.

Now I suspect this is not groundbreaking news, although it is to me, because I’ve never met him or even seen him before. However, this experience seems to confirm my opinions on Epic and companies like them in general. Now Mark may well look down on humble indies like me. He may well think I’m doing it wrong. he may laugh when me and Mark discuss the pitiful money our companies make, and giggle at the fact that we reply to gamers on a one-on-one basis… But fuck him. I would rather earn minimum wage making indie strategy games for the PC, as my own boss, with an original game, satisfying a hardcore niche of friendly customers (the one-thousand-true-fans-philosophy), without a publisher telling me what to do, and without having to leave my house to go to work, without having to do ‘crunch time’ (because, dude… its like so macho to work until 3AM and never see your family)… Than I would work at epic for megabucks. The sheer overwhelming stench of testosterone would probably give me a headcahe, combined with the dizzy excitement of exactly what shade of grey our next game’s space-marine would wear as he kicked alien butt. (I feel bad working on Gratuitous Space Battles for almost 2 years, but it seems like that old ‘wisecracking space marine with big muscles and chisel-jaw’ idea has been stretched out longer than the hundred years war).

I have absolutely no doubt mark would just naturally assume me feeling like that is jealousy, which, as anyone who knows me personally would testify, is just fucking funny. I really don’t care about Epic, and their games, as they are way way too macho and ‘dude’ for my liking, and don’t have demos, so I just assume they haven’t changed since Unreal Tournament. I try not to comment on games I don’t like, as each to their own tastes etc.  The only reason I’m moved to give a damn enough to state my opinion, is that I resent having some triple-a studio jerk come and tell someone whose run a microstudio for thirteen years that he is doing it all wrong. If Mark from introversion suggests I’m doing it wrong, thats cool, he does what I do, and has some serious experience, ditto anyone on that panel, or anyone with long indie experience. And I listen carefully, often over lunch.

But Triple-A studio bosses trying to lecture me on how to communicate better with gamers? Fuck off.

Cliff Harris (cliff@positech.co.uk)

When adsense isn’t worth it

Posted on July 11, 2010

I was reading an article on a games blog recently, and noticed our ever-present strobing friend, the ‘evony’ ad.* Apart from the ubiquity of the ad, and my lack of interest in ‘saving my queen’, what I really noticed was the prescence of a google ad on such a low traffic blog.

I can see how a lot of people would think it makes sense for people to stick small google adsense (or similar) ads on their blog, or maybe even their indie developers website to ‘bring in some cash’. I think it’s a bad idea. (I am selling stuff too, and need money, but ads on a site can be a step too far. My games are here, feel free to buy one to support my blog, I won’t mind :D)

There is a tradeoff happening here. You are basically giving up a bit of your creation (in this case, screen-space on your website) in return for some revenue. I think a lot of people get the calculations dead wrong.

Does your site get 10,000 page-views a month? That’s a ‘not bad’ amount of traffic for someone who is actively trying to build a web business (although positech gets more :D). If all of those 10k impressions result in an ad view, then that’s 10 CPM, as the hip-cats say online. How much is a CPM costing an advertiser?

I actually pay about £0.20 for a thousand impressions when I buy ads. So assuming you get that, and google takes 70%, you get £1.40 a month in ad revenue, or not enough to buy a coffee. If you are not based in the US, currency conversion swallows the first 6 months income.

Is it worth it? I reckon not. The point of my rant, is not to say that it isn’t worth it for people running those ads, it may well be worth it. You might get more than 70%, or a higher CPM, or way more traffic. But have you done the math? Is that banner ad on your website actually making any vague economic sense?  The big name popular, succesful and much loved games studios don’t stick an adsense banner on their site, and it just reminds people that you aren’t in the same league when you do it. If you can make the numbers make sense, then fine, but it really is worth checking the numbers.

* I know about adblock, but I tend to leave it off. Some websites really do run purely from ad revenue, and I’m happy to support that, unless it’s entirely overdone.

At last reaching code size issues

Posted on July 7, 2010

For indie games, my games are pretty big in code terms. By the standards of big triple A games, they are fairly simple. The problem with any game, is not really the lines of code as such, but the interconnections and complexities.

Now, if you have coded big systems for ages, you get used to writing very modular stuff. All my games are split into SIM and GUI classes, which in theory have very very little overlap. The problem is, that games of the sim/management genre become more and more intertwined between those two concepts. This means lots of unintended side-effects, and that often means more bugs. It also means a lot of possible permutations to test, and that invariably leads to more bugs.

In theory, I suspect the real answer to scaling up code is to go beyond merely thinking in a modular way, and to write totally distinct programs, or at least DLLs. Having a clearly defined interface between the Sim, the UI and the gameplay rules is very handy and if you actually stick the GUI in a separate project, it makes it easier to stick to that with real discipline. That also makes it easier to have people port your game, switch to a different graphics API, or mod the game. To be honest, I’m not as good at this stuff as I should be, and the campaign code for GSB is bringing that home. It’s been far too tempting for me to just stick a bunch of spaghetti into the GUI code for a dialog box that does some SIM stuff. I re-designed various code today to make it more organised, but I should probably do quite a bit more of it.

I wish I’d coded totally open AI that could have been scriptable, or at least existed as a DLL that modders could expand. Coding that sort of stuff is normally a full time job for someone for a year though, so you can imagine why I didn’t do it :D

Why GSB is not like a normal RTS (deliberately)

Posted on July 6, 2010

Have you seen korean starcraft players?

http://kotaku.com/5580080/korean-gamers-are-faster-than-a-speeding-bullet

fast huh?

Although it’s impressive, and kinda funny, it’s also a bit depressing and kinda sad. I like to see the RTS genre as a mostly ‘S’, and not so ‘RT’. If I was 14 years old, I’d think differently, but I’m not. One thing spending your teenage years learning neoclassical heavy metal does, is to teach you that someone with more free time than you is going to be faster than you. Always.

When I was at Elixir, I worked on a game that got canned, which was like speedball. it seemed to be a really strategic game. The player who won was the cleverest, the most strategic thinking. It played a bit like real-time chess. The reaction-time and number-crunching side of it was minimal, it was an ‘outwit-the-enemy’ style game. I liked it.

GSB doesn’t care how fast your reactions are. You can be 55 years old and have arthritis, you can still design a kick-ass fleet, and a cunning challenge.  I know starcraft is a massively popular game, and they know what they are doing, but you can only really design good games if they are games you personally enjoy playing. I can’t compete in FPS games or arcadeish super-fast RTS games, but I can compete happily in GSB. I also like the asynch nature of online challenges, because it eliminates the asshole attitdue of many online RTS players, who drop connections when losing or mock you during in-game chat,

I met the guys from introversion for lunch today. Had a good chat about games and indieness. It’s always refreshing to chat to people who understand what it is you do, and do something similar.

The idiot box

Posted on July 4, 2010

How much TV do you watch? If you are like me, you are watching less and less. It seems to get less appealing every month, let alone each year. I’m sure eventually my TV will be used for DVDs, and maybe the news.

One of the TV progs in the UK that is supposedly for grown up, intelligent people who want to know what’s going on in the world is Newsnight. It’s a lateish-night politics and current affairs program. The last time I saw it, they were doing an item on the upcoming voting reform referendum, and whether or not it would cause a split in our governing coalition. How did they present this serious and deep issue?

By an animated cartoon showing the two leaders as john travolta and olivia newton john, and playing the music from grease. Oh, granted, there may have been a few minor nuggets of actual commentary about the topic, using short words and visual aids, but I still felt like it was aimed at the 4-8 year old market, who should definitely be in bed at that time.

British TV is increasingly embracing it’s role as ‘the idiot box’. Not only are a lot of the subjects covered by TV purely for bored idiots, but even the stuff that you would think was serious, or needed in depth coverage is treated as some sort of lame comedy routine. Maybe some clever TV analysts have discovered that everyone with college education or higher just doesn’t watch it anymore, so they just cater to the lowest common denominator? Silly visual gimmicks seem to assume that the entire audience has attention defecit disorder.

Maybe I’m weird, but I can cope with watching someone sitting still, talking to camera for ten minutes in a normal voice about something that is really interesting. When I read a book, the book doesn’t have little animations, or cartoons, or wave its arms about wildly every sentence to keep my attention. Books can’t do that, so they compete merely by having good content. It really doesn’t matter how much you wiggle your head and wave your arms as you talk, if you have nothing to say, nobody cares. We get closer to this mitchell and webb parody every day…