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

The Milky Bars are on me!

Posted on February 15, 2010

I suspect that there are two types of ads:

1) Ads that draw your attention to stuff, and maybe sell it

2) Ads that act as background noise to constantly remind you of a companies or products existence, so you recall it at a much later purchase time.

My ads (and likely ANY indie game ads) fall into 1). We hope you see the ad, read the ad copy, click it, and try the demo, then buy the game. Ha! we hope…

But look at TV ads. Pay attention to the next group of TV ads you see, and count what percentage of them are ads for products you haven’t heard of, or companies you don’t know about. I bet its zero percent. These ads are either shown 10 times a day or not at all, because they are all type 2) ads. They don’t work on their own.

The best examples (and the most annoying) here in the UK are car insurance comparison websites. How many can you name? Try it (if you are a brit )

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I bet you named gocompare and comparethemarket.com. And when was the last time you needed to get a  competitive car insurance quote? On average 6 months ago, if at all. These ads work like  the ads for directory enquiries numbers here in the UK. You will notice that there is little or no actual information in them at all. I’ve seen 100+ adverts for mazumamobile.com, and have no idea what they said. They only really need to say a single thing:

mazumamobile.com

And that will eventually stick in your head.  The majority of  TV ads are semi-ignored, absorbed in our peripheral vision, or maybe just overheard from another room. Ad designers know this. That is why TV ads are so annoying and seem to be targeted at idiots. The content is, sadly, irrelevant. All that matters is the name. That name can stay in your head for decades. If the name sucks, you need a tagline. If you are 30+ in the UK, do you remember these?

“I’m a secret lemonade drinker”

“Made to make your mouth water”

“Helps you work rest and play”

If you EVER saw these ads, I bet you know the products, now, even fifteen-twenty years later. Scary isn’t it?

One of the small number of companies I own shares in is Marks And Spencers.  One of the reasons I own them is they have a flipping superb ad agency working for them. One that we will remember years later,

Remember, this wasn’t just a blog post. This was a Marks and Spencers Blog post :D

I wish my ads were that good…

$630,000 a year

Posted on February 14, 2010

If this is right:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/Inside_ms.mspx

Microsoft have $58 billion revenue a year and 92,000 employees.

The average revenue per employee is thus $630,175 a year.

Holy shit.

I must remember this the next time I read some microsoft bashing from linux or google fanboys. Microsoft isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon.

Democracy 2 (still)

Posted on February 13, 2010

I restarted some of my old ads for my politics sim Democracy 2. I’m just trying to see if they still generate more sales. This is a game that has surprisingly good sales, even over 2 years after it was made. It’s never going to be #1 anywhere, some portals still won’t even sell it, but it was well worth making and definitely a profitable game.

TBH I have no idea why sales of it have recently been so good. It might be the’free Democracy 1 for Maine and Michigan students’ thing. (I must look up here the sales are from. I wish BMT had better reporting…). Or maybe its the fact that the US has upcoming midterms and the UK an upcoming election?

Either way it’s welcome…

Two new features for GSB

Posted on February 12, 2010

I was honestly trying to work on new DLC, but hey, I ended up adding and improving some stuff. One thing I ended up doing was mouse cursor changes, so it actually changes to the windows pointy finger thing now to show you that you can click something, which is quite nifty. I also added two features.

The first feature is the ‘fleet overlay’ at the left of the screen. It’s a scrollable column of icons for every ship in the fleet. The tooltips show your current damage percentage, and they fill red as the ships take damage. you can also click them to zoom to that ship. It’s a handy way to see at a glance in big battles which ships are taking hits. I also added a tiny arrow icon to toggle that new feature on or off, in case some people don’t like it. I have a tiny UV bleeding issue on that button I must fix…

gratuitous space battles fleet overlay UI

The second feature is rather cool for statistics-freaks. If you have played much GSB, and spent much time on the ship design screen, you will know the frustration of seeing “weight=122” and not really knowing how that compares to anything else. Obviously you can go through each module of the same ship class and compare, but wouldn’t it be better if the game makes that trivial to do?
Tada! It does. You can click any of those data entries at the bottom left now, and get a comparison window, ready sorted and scrolled to show where the current module fits in. I hope people find this useful.

gratuitous space battles ship design screen

Now I can get back to work designing fleets for the religious aliens in the next DLC…

Both these spangly new things will be in version 1.32, which will get released shortly before the new DLC. Yay!

Programming Gratuitous Rocket Trails

Posted on February 9, 2010

I was watching District 9 ( I liked it, except the more yucky violent bits), and there were some cool rapid rocket trail effects in it, and it suddenly reminded me that the rocket trails in Gratuitous Space Battles aren’t good enough at high speed. Take a look at this rocket trial, from a rocket cruiser missile at 4x speed:

Crap isn’t it :D. At normal speed it’s fine, but at super high speed, the missile actually moves too fast per frame of rendering for me to actually space out the particles. So I just knocked up some code that instead of doing this: (pseudocode)

HowFarHaveWeTravelled?
IsItTimeForAnotherParticle?
IfSoPlaceAParticleHere

does this:

for(distance_accounted_for = 0; distance_accounted_for < actual distance, distance += particle spacing)
{
  Position = LastMissilePosition
  Position += (distance_accounted for)
  Place a particle at Position;
}

Which is more work :D But it’s worth it, because even at 4x speed it now looks like this:

I know it’s a bit late to be worrying about all this months after the game came out and got reviews, but I am just completely drawn towards tweaking the game to look better. Also this means I can experiment with superfast rocket trails which will still look good. Also today I’ve done all of the debris and turret gfx for the new race in the new DLC/expansion pack thing. Now I have to actually design their ship configurations, and allocate their bonuses. Then I need to do their mission deployments, and then it’s pretty much done (and I then need to balance and playtest it). Yay!