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

How to stay motivated whilst programming a game

Posted on July 2, 2010

Lots of people want to know the answer to that question. Most indie games fail. Most indie projects never get completed. I don’t have any way to prove that, but any indie game veterans will know it’s true. Here are my top tips. Some of them may seem like they de-motivate, rather than motivate, but I get motivated by knowing how important and serious it is for me to work hard. Most indies don’t realise how hard they are going to have to work, and how good their game has to be.

1) Code something you like.

Just because you did your research and can prove that a poodle simulator is the best choice for the current games market, doesn’t mean you want to program one. You might kid yourself that you can see it as a ‘mere engineering challenge’, but you won’t. Getting out of bed when nobody forces you to, with no deadline and no boss, to go code poodles probably won’t motivate you for a solid year. Pick something you are passionate about. I love sci fi and space battles, so making gratuitous space battles was a no-brainer. On a related note, save up some ‘fun’ coding for when motivation is low. Feeling keen? code the save game system and the options menu. Get them out of the way.

2) Surround yourself with inspiration

I listen to music from star wars or star trek when coding easy stuff or doing art. Coding scrollbars can seem dull, but the music reminds me these are spacefleet scrollbars and that makes it ok. The people who play your game won’t see the code, only the art and the game, so keep a picture of the final ‘atmosphere’ of your game in your head all the time. Does your pc desktop wallpaper not reflect the mood of your game? why not?

3) Keep a log of what you did each day.

Sometimes its easy to think the day was wasted, that nothing got done. I have lists of things to do for my games like this:

  • Fix bug with plasma torpedoes
  • Resize scrollbars
  • Add tooltips to buttons
  • Add transition to options screen

At the end of the day my log looks like this:

  • **DONE**Fix bug with plasma torpedoes
  • **DONE**Resize scrollbars
  • **DONE**Add tooltips to buttons
  • **DONE**Add transition to options screen

And that makes me realise how much I got done. You get a tiny adrenaline rush by crossing things off a todo list. Make one each day. Make the entries small, simple items, rather than huge projects. It should always be possible to cross something off each day.

4) Do some shiny

Mr Spock would code the entire game engine, get the gameplay balanced using just coder art, then add the graphical fluff last, to minimize re-doing work. I used to assume that made sense too. I used to rail against Lionhead for having so much artwork, code and music done before we were even sure how the game played. So much work got thrown away. Now I realise it’s important for your motivation to have something that looks and plays nice ASAP. The GSB campaign add-on hasn’t got all its gameplay coded yet, but theres a gratuitous map-zoom effect in already, plus background music. Having those things there keeps me positive about how cool the final game will look. There really is a good reason to code some shiny stuff in the first 25% of your project. Just don’t go mad.

5) Hard lessons in money

I gave a talk at a conference recently about the reality of indie games as a business. To be short and sweet, you need to sell a full-price game direct to a customer every 45 minutes, or you probably won’t make a career as a  full-time indie. That means at the very least someone grabbing your demo every 240 seconds. When you keep this in mind, you realise you need to make your game really good. Better than it is. You need to do better, just to survive in this market.

6) Stay aware how high the bar is (know your competition)

Don’t forget that for most gamers, the competition isn’t other indie games, but AAA games, or even other activities, TV, movies, etc. When I worked on the battles for GSB, I spent very little time looking at rival games, and virtually no time looking at indie space games. I compared it to the best sci-fi battle scenes I knew of, by ILM. Yes, you have to pick your battles, and graphics might not be one of them. Spiderweb compete on game length, Dwarf fortress on gameplay depth. Whatever it is that you are competing on, you need to ensure you aim as high as you can. Also remember that your game isn’t measured against the best game there is right now. It’s measured against the best game when your’s gets released…

8) Take short breaks.

Get away from the PC for a short while, so when you come back, you are fresh, keen and energised. Physical activity is a good idea. I do archery now and then. It’s ideal because it involves standing upright, concentrating on a distant object, and 100% focus on what you are doing. It’s the perfect sport for desk-bound geeks

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Staying motivated is hard. Everyone has the same problem. Often, its the deciding factor between getting your project done or not. High motivation trumps everything. There are indies making games who are homeless (yes really) and who had to make them ‘undercover’ in Cuba. They still got stuff done. Lack of experience, lack of money, lack of time, can all be overcome by sheer bloody determination, if you can summon it. Now stop reading this, and type out tomorrows todo list.

Crappy windows code

Posted on July 1, 2010

Soo… some people have a bug in GSB where in fullscreen mode, the titlebar of the windows ‘window’ is still there, but invisible, meaning you can accidentally hit the close or miniomize buttons, or worse-still, double click and then ‘maximise’ the already fullscreen window.

I have encountered this a few times in GSB myself. but cannot reproduce it right now. It’s certainly not reliable. And it’s annoying. I would love to fix it. I’m pretty sure its something to do with the windows code that selects either a windows style or windows class.

currently I use:

wcex.style            =    CS_CLASSDC | CS_DBLCLKS;

and

HWND gWnd = CreateWindow(appname,appname,
 WS_BORDER | WS_CAPTION | WS_SYSMENU | WS_MINIMIZEBOX | WS_MAXIMIZEBOX,
 0,0, width, height, GetDesktopWindow(), NULL, hInstance, NULL);

Both chunks of code I haven’t changed in ages. I suspect the code is wrong, but am finding it impossible to find what is ‘correct’. Looking at the directx samples makes me want to cry. In amongst 500,000 pages of incredibly convoluted, confusing, totally over-engineered MFC style bullshit that they call ‘DXUT’, there is a hint that microsoft themselves use just CS_DBLCLKS and WS_OVERLAPPED. The thing is WHY? There is no documentation. In the old days, directx5 used to tell us we need to use WS_TOPMOST or somesuch.

You would imagine that as 95% of people using directx write games, and 90% of them want to, at some point, run fullscreen, that the directx docs would have a line saying “for fullscreen apps, you need to select these options for your window”. No such clues have emerged though.  Another evenings trolling through coding forums no doubt…

Shield Support Beam

Posted on June 29, 2010

Right, so here we have a brand new module I think I’ll just add to the game. I was thinking about shoe-horning it into the campaign, but that is a bit awkward to do. It’s the first module that affects a ship on your side that isn’t the owning ship. Its….. (drumroll)…

The Shield Support Beam!

Or ‘Remote shield energy projector’ or whatever I finally call it…

Basically it lets a frigate beam-over shield energy to reinforce a failing ship on a nearby friendly cruiser. It’s a frigate-only module, only working to reinforce cruisers, with a max range of 450. Crew use is  8, power use is 18 (high!).

screenshot (its the blue beam thing): I may well tart-up the graphics for it a bit more. Click to enlarge.

The beam looks for nearby friendly ships whose shields are below 80%, and then triggers this beam which empties it’s ‘capacitor’ into the target ship, over a short burst of time. That then reinforces the target shield, back up to it’s normal strength. This is basically a way to temporarily gvie a nearby ship a really fast shield recharge, and is a defence againts those fleets that hurl 100 plasma or 100 missiles at your cruisers and crush them instantly.

I’ve tested it lots, but obviously it remains to be seen how people use this. Obviously you could stick 3 frigates behind every cruiser, in formation and have super-reinforced shields, but that ties up 3 frigates that have to stick by their cruiser, and also chews up 3 sockets and a ton of power. It’s a weapon socket, so that matters. So far, I’ve found it handy to combat plasma spam, but not a totally killer-app.

I’ve also set it to be an empire-only module, initially locked (but cheap to unlock). I like the idea of making any future modules race-specific, to give the races more flavour.

Thoughts?

back to the campaign tomorrow…

Selecting suitable user-generated fleets

Posted on June 28, 2010

I’m hoping that the Gratuitous Space Battles campaign add-on will make use of existing player-designed fleets to give a vast population of potential enemies to fight. Although this system is coded, in-use and working, it needs a lot of tweaking. (I also suspect it might be advisable for me to have this as an option, with a stockpile of ‘cliffski-designed’ fleets available for use instead). My current basic criteria for selection from existing fleets are:

  • Produced relatively recently (no beta or massively old challenges)
  • Has a good enjoyment Rating
  • Has more than x ratings (to ensure its not just a few friends)
  • Is valid (no modded content). The client filters out expansion pack fleets for people without them automagically.

I think, from my early playtesting, that I need a bunch more criteria. I’d like to avoid spammy fleets, or fleets where any ‘tricks’ are used. I think I need to at least add this:

  • All ships have engines
  • If the fleet is larger than X ships, then there is more than 1 type of ship design present, or no design is more than 75% of the hit point worth.
  • The fleet has more than x different weapons modules if larger than Y

The pain with this sort of thing, is although it’s trivial to do this in C++, I have to code all that sort of thing in php as it runs on my server. Effectively, new challenges get processed as they get rated, and may get added to the ‘potential campaign fleets’ list. That means lower productivity, as I’m more a C++ than a php coder, but that’s progress for you.

I’ve got a good few days work done on the campaign stuff, and am dfinitely 100% back into it. It’s still a long way off (I have music for it, but no art yet, for example), but its should be good fun. As long as sales pick up a bit, I hope to continue with improving the campaign after its launch too. There is huge potential for it, if people like it.

Also, I added a retweet me button thing to the blog today, feel free to use it!

World Of Love

Posted on June 26, 2010

I was at this yesterday:

http://indiegamesarcade.com/world-of-love/

Giving a talk about the business side of indie game development. I have my phears that I will be forever known as ‘the piracy guy’ or ‘the business guy’ which would be sad. Even the ‘my powerpoint slides screwed up guy’ would be better than that.

However, I gave a talk on the topic because I know a lot of indie guys struggle financially, and I wish they could afford to be full time, supporting themselves from their games so they get to make more cool games. I hope what I said was helpful, and not too negative. When you look at the hard numbers behind indie gaming, it can seem impossible. If you can’t sell a game every 52 minutes, you will need a day job, basically. (And that means a demo download every 5 minutes, assuming an awesome game, 1 game a year, 100% of the profits, and one person consistantly making popular games without a flop, illness or other eventuality).

Anyway, I met tons of cool people, and shook hands with loads of people I’ve emailed and forum-chatted to but never met. Eskill Steenberg gave an amazing demonstration of how Love was made, which makes my tools look like the amateurish crap that they are! I finally saw a live demo of subversion, and that was fantastic. This may be the first introversion game I like enough to go buy. Plus Terry Cavanagh gave a great presentation of games that made me laugh out loud, which is rare enough.

It was also pretty surreal to end the conference in a karaoke bar singing bon jovi whilst eating chinese/japanese? food. Maybe now people will finally believe me when I say I cannot sing. I accept kierons explanation that I was trying to do ‘Bon Jovi, sung by Bob Dylan’, the best.

I am 100% convinced that waiters in karaoke bars are given special, probably year-long training not to show any facial expression as they enter a cubicle full of drunk english people singing out of tune. Especially if the song is called ‘I touch myself’. All very strange…

Back to work tomorrow methinks.