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

Jam tomorrow

Posted on March 12, 2010

The rumour is that a lot of people are staying on at Infinity Ward because they are owed huge bonuses from COD:MW 2 and if they quit before they are paid, they lose the right to them.

This is depressing, and very evil, and not at all uncommon. Not just in games, but everywhere. I’ve had a lot of different jobs, in a lot of different companies, and the vast, vast majority of them have an employee incentive scheme called ‘jam tomorrow‘. They don’t call it that, but that’s what people call it when they see it for what it is.

There are basically two strategies to keeping decent staff. (Nobody cares about keeping bad staff, in fact, they are doing you a favor if they quit). They are:

1) Make the job great, in terms of earnings, benefits, working environment and job satisfaction

2) Vastly increase the opportunity cost of quitting.

Now clearly 1) costs a lot more than 2). You can pay the gullible fools a pittance, not pay out any benefits, and make their lives miserable, and the dumb schmucks still stay in their cubicles. Clearly 2) is the way to win!

But that is old school thinking from factory floors, the industrial revolution, people churning out simple, measurable, mechanical work, where the objective was just to keep people working.

Game development doesn’t work like that. The work is very difficult to measure. You can’t stand over a programmer and tell if he is working well, or hard, or at top efficiency. Ditto an artist.  Is that texture the best you can do? Really? How do I tell?

Activision are using the sort of trick that cynical factory owners used to try and keep people working the lathe, and that just plain does not work for knowledge workers. I did my best work when I was motivated and happy, and my worst work when I was cynical, negative and felt cheated. I’d wager you are the same. It’s a worse strategy than just flinging monkey shit at your staff, because at least then, they would quit and you would realise you are doomed. This way, the staff stay there and grumble and drag the productivity of the company down.

Activisions strategy might look to them like it is working. But it isn’t. They are just demotivating their staff and delaying the inevitable resignations. This isn’t a 19th century pin factory, it’s 2010 and the new economy. Someone tell the activision bosses that.

Experimenting (mercenaries?)

Posted on March 10, 2010

It’s actually quite easy to overlay colored re-skins onto some of the models in GSB. I might have to do a tutorial and release some of the photoshop files required. I found just slinging a camoflage texture onto the Imperial Centurion cruiser looked quite cool: (click to enlarge)

It’s non trivial, because you need to re-composite all the damage texture stuff together, and it’s not done in game on the fly (sadly), so you need to save out new damage, hulk and sprite textures for any color variation.
Still… it points to future (sequel?) possibilities, as well as the potential for some cool mods. I envisage a fleet of breakway ‘seperatist’ ships that differ only in their coloring. or maybe a MK II coloring for each ship. As well as being kinda fun, I think it would be nice to have different texture options for ships so that you can tell apart 2 different configrued ships without staring at the turrets. I would ultimately love a ship texture customiser / chooser / painter thingy.

For now, I’m just stroking my stubble and thinking about the possibilities…

“Stay Close, fuschia leader”

Posted on March 9, 2010

Ok, so new orders are something people often campaign for, and I like the idea of a ‘stay in attack formation” style order for fighters. So today, I went to implement that, and opened an entire canning-factory full of nematodes. I ended up re-writing the AI a bit so there is a definite concept of a fighter squadron (which I’d got by without, until now). The code gets involved, because each squadron needs a leader it can follow, and that leader needs to be re-elected in the case of the leader getting blown up, its engines shot down, caught in a tractor beam or limpet-mined. I need to test all of that works… Also I need code to assign slots in a general formation to each fighter, so they don’t bunch up too much, and look l33t when flying long distances,

I also needed to handle combinations of orders like ‘stick together’ and ‘formation’. I think they *do* need to work together, so you can have a fighter squadron sitting in formation at the rear, set to attack effectively only when their parent ship is destroyed, at which point they will then still stick together.

Of course, the big question is “is it best for the fighters to always stick together?” I suspect not, I suspect it depends if you want a bunch of general purpose dogfighters, or a coherent strike force. I like to think it’s a fine balanced decision, but only real life game testing and the eyes of a thousand GSB experts will tell. Here is a video showing how it’s looking right now:

I should probably add some suitable ‘stay in formation perkins!’ comms chatter too…

More challenge refinements

Posted on March 8, 2010

I’ve been fixing some minor bugs and issues today, and doing some businessy stuff I won’t bore you with. I’ve also been tuidying up the challenge list screen, given the new fangled details window. It now looks like this (click to enlarge)

Basically the details button replaces the old download and delete ones, the history button has moved, and there is a new column showing a challenge’s unique ID, and allowing you to sort by it, handy for finding a specific challenge if you know it’s ID, which I hope will be of use for forum discussions etc.

Feedback most welcome!

Also, GSB got a geat new review here:

http://www.games32.com/Gratuitous-Space-Battles-(PC)-Reviews/p2000_articleid/1296

Yay!

New Challenge Details Screen

Posted on March 7, 2010

This isn’t finished yet, so this is just a work in progress screenshot, click it to enlarge…

This is new challenge UI stuff. I got sick of squeezing more columns in 1024 res on the list view, so now those download and delete buttons get replaced by ‘details’ which opens this new screen for a selected challenge. All the old data is here, with room for some more, and the history of that challenge is now auto-downloaded and displayed here at the top right. You can also now see the challenge ID in the titlebar, (I’ll probably add that to the list somehow too). there are two super-exciting new things:

  • The challenges now uplaod a screenshot of their deployment, as you can see. Obviously old challenges will not have one, but new ones will. I’m very happy about this :D
  • The challenges now have a parent, because when you win a challenge, you can send your fleet back as a ‘retaliation’. These get listed like any other challenge, but if you pick one of your challenges, you can see a list of it’s retaliations on the bottom window. I don’t have a super-threading view of it all, but this is a first step.

My plan for this is that

  • Players will be able to see what a challenge looks like before downloading, which helps detect ‘spammy’ fleets for people who prefer not to play against them
  • There will be a more on-going to-and-fro between players over who has the best fleet, using retaliations.

I still have more tweaks, and a ton of testing to do, to make this work well. I’m hoping the next patch will really improve the online stuff. Ideas and feedback are most welcome, as ever.