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

Re-investing…

Posted on May 15, 2010

Lets say you run a business. The business makes $40k in a year. You are used to living on $40k, so you spend it, and have a reasonable life. Then suddenly things go well, and you make $50k the next year. Do you

a) Have a better year, buy better donuts, drink more beer and enjoy the $50k

b) Have a slightly better year, buy a few more donuts, spend $5k of the surplus and invest the other $5k in making the business better.

c) Stay as before and invest the whole $10k on making the business better.

I think most people are like a). I think a lot of people who work for themselves are like b), including me. I suspect that a lot of the dotcom billionaires are like c). I read once that valve basically took all the money from Half Life’s success and invested it in Steam and Half Life 2. I suspect this is true. I would guess that when World Of Warcraft was making tens of millions in profit, Blizzard took ALL that money and reinvested it. Then did the same when it made hundreds of millions. It turned out to work very well for them…

The problem is, no matter how much I may intuitively see this, and would even recommend it as a policy to others, I find it difficult to do myself. Maybe I’m just not as obsessed with running a bigger company as the dotcom guys, but when positech has a good year, I tend to bank some it (paranoid about having a bad year), spend a little bit more on the business (ooh look! some professional spaceship art), and buy a new TV. I tend to fear that if I don’t spend some of the company profits when there are some, it might crash and burn one day and I’ll have nothing to show for it, whereas with my current policy, at least I have a new TV.

I read Duncan Bannatynes autobiography, which is a great read. He made an absolute fortune from ice cream sales once. he then invested ALL of it in making retirement homes. he sold his car, re-mortgaged his house, even sold his TV to make the final payment on the first home. He had multiple maxxed out credit cards at that point. James Caan did the same. They went from having a good income to being penniless and in debt, because they could see the return in the long term being a whole step-change higher.

I don’t reckon I could ever do that. And even if I could, I’d be a nervous wreck doing it. What about you? Are you risk-averse? or a dotcom dude?

Todays Bugs

Posted on May 13, 2010

I found a bug today, after it was reported by a few GSB modders. I had done some cunning optimisation for my file handling months ago, where my Ini File loader code kept a file open during it’s lifetime in case another section from the same file got read soon afterwards.

It turns out that the C Runtime barfs if you try to open more than 512 files, under all circumstances. This is fine until you mod an extra 300 modules into GSB, then it just dies. So… problem fixed. Ideally my ini file code should be able to handle this better entirely, but thats for another time,

The second ‘bug’ is still underway, (point defence modules appear to not respond to damage, but in the debugger, they clearly do…) but its pointed me to a third one, that was also reported…

When a point defence beam shoots a missile, it may not work. The missile may be unharmed. In this instance the missile is still ‘claimed’ by the PD module until it dies, so no other PD module will have a second go at it.

I could fix this trivially, it’s just an oversight*. But would that make PD too powerful? It’s already prety good, albeit some of it’s thunder has been stolen by the Swarms Smart Bomb. It’s only going to kick in where you have a few incoming missiles and multiple PD modules. But that second chance to fire could save you from that vital pesky megaton missile, or Order nuclear bomb…

Thoughts?

*easily explained though. The neutron power surge generated by the point defence beam temporarily blinds the targeting mechanism of other PD modules from homing in on the positronic flux decoupler on the same missiles.


Edit: actually the PD bug is now fixed, making them fire much slower as a result, so I’ll fix the multiple-attempts  bug to compensate. it also turns out that the fire-Interval for guidance scramblers is misleading and not applicable, which explains its strangely high effectiveness, so that will be nerfed slightly too…

Campaign Game

Posted on May 11, 2010

Just a quick screenshot showing the state of the current campaign game UI. This is zoomed in on a planet to show the fleets there, the UI for building new ships and the list of facilities there. It’s all very coder-art and work-in-progress. I’ll likely not do the icons myself.

It is getting there though…

Banner competition Over!

Posted on May 10, 2010

Ok, so that competition is now over and I picked my fave. Obviously banner ads have to do various things, not just look the most awesome. The reason I picked this one, is it *does* look very nice AND it also gets across how the game works, which is very important. I suspect a good few people assume ‘gratuitous space battles’ is an arcade game, and this makes it clear that it isn’t.

The winner is Mark from the sunny (and prime-minister-less) UK (total fluke). I’ll be sticking the centurion model in the post to him tomorrow. Cheers Mark! I’ll be tweaking this banner a bit and then give it a go and see how it does :D

Thanks to everyone who entered the competition. There can only be one winner, because I could only afford one model! :D

‘Fluff’ ships

Posted on May 9, 2010

Something I got coded today on the campaign game is purely visual fluff. I have a map with different planets scattered over it, and they are linekd by wormholes that only connect certain pairs of planets, so you can’t just hop all over the place.

To make it clear that those wormhoels are, in fact, wormholes, I’ve added a bunch of ships flying back and forth along their length. The impression I’m after is similar to a few scenes from Revenge Of the Sith, where you see obvious ‘space higheways’ above coruscant with lines of ships heading back and forth. I loved that :D.

Obviously, for the purposes of the campaign game, they are implied to be personal ships or merchant ships. The space navies are your department, these ships are just background fluff.

It took me about an hour to two hours to get it right. Just drawing a bunch of sprites going between two points is easy, but they had to work within the zooming and panning interface, and also have to scale with processor speed for smooth movement. Then they need variations in speed, and have different source images (in a texture atlas). Also, they need to fade out at extreme low zooms, so you don’t waste time drawing stuff that’s tiny. lastly, they need to be batched together as an optimisation so that there aren’t a bunch of texture swaps. It’s all those fiddly bits that take the time. Plus I need probably another 30 mins to put together decent tiny ship sprites for use as final graphics. Should be easy and fun :D

In other news, Democracy 2 is still just TEN DOLLARS, because due to pretty unusual circumstances, the UK STILL has no government, and I proudly boasted it would be 50% off until a prime minister met the Queen.

bah.

BTW, the competition to win that spaceship runs out tonight. I’ll pick a winner tomorrow, so enter now, if you haven’t already done so.