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

Question about buying games, friends etc.

Posted on April 12, 2010

I’ve been thinking about that classic situation where you buy a game and think it’s cool, but your friends don’t have it. I’ve experienced this lately with Just Cause 2, Men of War and even Mount N Blade. It’s cooler to know loads of people playing the same game as you.

Some companies do clever discounty stuff where they give people the ability to give away discounts or extra copies. (‘gifting’ is a word that really offends my feeble sense of grammar somehow).

I wonder what people think about this?

If you own Gratuitous Space Battles (for example), do you know someone who hasn’t bought it, who you’d like to pester to buy it? If so, and you were given a money off token for your friend to get the game at a discount would you:

A) Think thats cool, because you get to give away a discount code to a friend, plus they might now get the game too

B) Think you were ripped off by paying full price for the game.

I think A) personally, but I’m biased because I run a business and read a lot about this sort of thing. I don’t like the idea of making anyone who bought a game from me annoyed about their pruchase, so I fear there are many people who think B) but am I wrong?

Gronda Gronda Rangdo!

Posted on April 11, 2010

If you are aged 35-42ish (rough guess) and from the UK, and a geek, you may well have just yelled Gronda Gronda Rangdo, or made a spluttering sound with your bottom lip and fingers, which of course is how the Grand Rangdo of arg would communicate.

For people who think I’m on drugs, I’m referring to The Adventure Game, a BBC2 TV series broadcast in the early 1980s. In theory, this was for kids, but it was a show you wouldn’t get for kids any more, because it made the kids think.

In simple form, TAG was a puzzle gameshow with celebrities, but unlike current fare, it wasn’t about making the celebs look stupid or them suffering, or about encouraging them to sleep with each other or shout abuse at each other. In TAG, the celebrities were given logic puzzles, and had to co-operate to solve them.

They were given logic puzzles and had to co-operate to solve them.

Imagine that now? It sounds very quaint doesn’t it? but the Adventure Game wasn’t the only TV show of my youth seemed designed to make me think. There was, of course stuff like Think Of A Number, all about science and maths and so-on. Then there was How! explaining how things work or get made. Then we had shows like The Great Egg Race and Now Get Out Of That.

The TV of my youth was great (it was doogy yrev!). It trained me to think logically, to embrace stuff like science and maths, and to be creative and critical. TV today seems to be designed to make you buy lip gloss and laugh at peoples suffering. I’m hazarding that the former is better for society than the latter.

What went wrong?

Or am I remembering it too fondly? Dismissing too easily stuff like Bang Goes the Theory, and forgetting mindless stuff from the same era, entertaining though it was.

Gratuitous Campaign

Posted on April 9, 2010

In amongst everything else, work continues on the campaign mode for a future expansion / game / whatever for GSB.

Here is what the map currently looks like (very work-in-progress).

Originally I had planned to just string together a bunch of scenarios (new ones) and have them play out like a very simple singleplayer campaign. The big difference, and what made this worth playing, was that you kept the same fleet, so for the first time you had to design fleets that were all-rounders, rather than tailored to a specific enemy. This would make the game more strategic, and elss trial-and-error, and would be l33t. I still like this, and I’m keeping it.

However, for whatever reason I started thinking bigger than that and I am increasingly linking in the online challenges with the campaign. Now the map is entirely online-integrated. What this means is as follows:

You grab your fleet and move it to planet X. The game tells the server that you have moved to planet X, and it sifts through a list of all possible enemy fleets it has stored that will provide a decent challenge for your current fleet, and one is selected for you. That fleet, together with its orders and deployment gets downloaded and becomes your enemy at planet X. That fleet *might* have been designed by me, or it may have been a fleet extracted from an existing online challenge. In other words, you are playing against someones challenge fleet. (If you dont have expansion pack races, they won’t show up, you will get vanilla enemies.)

That fleet might out-gun you, or maybe you just aren’t equipped to fight against it for whatever reason. If so, you can retreat, and choose a different path. Here is where it gets fun:

if you decide to go back and fight that planet X challenge again, the server remembers, and YOU get the same enemy again. there is no going-around them if you want to go to planet X. Not for 24 hours. Then, then server ‘forgets’ who was there, and you may get a different fleet if you try again. Thats 24 hours in the real world. As in, come back tomorrow.

Everyones fleets will be different, and people will be at different skill levels, so the fleets are not persistent across everyone. Every player has a unique view on the world, its just that the fleets they encounter are player designed.  I’m trying to design this to be ‘massively singeplayer online’, in that you are playing a changing, dynamic, partly player-populated world, but without the direct competition or griefing that can ruin most MMOs.

All of this stuff is in and working. It’s the other 99% I still need to code :D. I have grand plans for the ‘point’ of the campaign game. I want a freeform universe for you to explore and conquer with your fleet, and need to add some capabilities to different worlds to encourage you to move your fleet around. Plus achievements and so on. There is a ton to do, I want it to be l33t. In the meantime, there will be another new race coming to the game.

Yoru thoughts on how this stuff will work, are most welcome.

Election, lightning server issues…

Posted on April 6, 2010

Lots going on.

Firstly there is going to be an ELECTION in the UK. At last. I was so surprised… Anyway, to celebrate this, you can get Democracy 2 for half price. ONLY TODAY. So get clicking! As I live in a safe seat, my vote is practically pointless. Hurrah for our crappy electoral system. But I digress…

Yesterday I was doing various bits like adding support for fixed terrain items to GSB for modders, which means you can do this, and in theory do a naval or ground combat mod. That then led me onwards to add in this, which is an attempt at that flickery lightning effect from Star trek: The Wrath Of Khan. Its configurable on a per-mission basis. I like it.

Also, not related to lightning, my server was down for a while, maybe 25 mins yesterday. Huge apologies. Nothing would have worked, but you should have been able to play GSB, if not upload or download any challenges. It’s fine now.

Back to campaign stuff now… Patch 1.37 will come soon, once I’ve added some stuff the campaign will need.