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

Eat your own dog food

Posted on January 6, 2010

I’m not literally talking about what lister had to do: (2 minutes 30 in)

Nope, I’m talking about the phrase often used in software development, or any business these days, which means ‘use your own product’.

I think there is likely a decent correlation between successful businesses, and those that eat their own dog food. I play my games a bit, not enough tbh, although that primarily a lack of time. I’m going to set aside a few hours today to just play through some challenges. I have found so many bugs, and had so many ideas, post-release, just from experiencing my own games with the mindset of an end user.
If you are an indie dev, and there is something, anything, no matter how small that disappoints, bugs or annoys you about your game, then fix it. Fix it now.

    Today

. Tomorrow you will find something else that needs fixing, and fix that too. This is how games go from good to really good.

Of course, sadly not everyone eats their own dog food. I bought two products recently that did not. One was a picture frame with a tiny hook on the back to place over a nail. The hook was tiny, and bent easily and was in the middle of a large frame. The sheer physics of it made it literally impossible to hang it on the wall by the hook. They *never* ate that dog food.

Then I bought a TV cupboard thing, one of those ones with a shelf for all of the DVD player stuff, and a hole cut out the back for the cables to tidily go through.
The hole was too small to put a plug through, and most EU appliances now have moulded plugs you can’t remove. The hole was effectively useless. They *never* ate that dog food.

Bon appetit!

Coding for the sake of elegance

Posted on January 4, 2010

I’m working on campaign stuff for a future (long way off) GSB expansion pack.

Right now, when the player clicks the battle screen to show the missions, there is an extra “campaigns” tab, and when that screen is initialised, the game currently loads in all the campaign data, including data for all the encounters within each campaign.

That doesn’t take very long tbh, it’s fairly negligible, even in debug mode.

Yet I am determined to fix it. I can just load the campaign name, and only bother loading further data if that campaign gets selected, and the player goes to the next screen. Otherwise, I’m wasting time.

Back in the days of the ZX81, that sort of delay would be very long, slow and totally unacceptable. It would be hugely wasted processing to load any data you didn’t really need, regardless of how much effort it took or complexity was involevd to avoid it. These days, it really doesn’t matter so much. We have more than 1k of RAM, we have more than a million times as much.

And yet it still bugs me. The code is inelegant, and I must fix it. Like most games programmers > 30 years old, I’ll never shake that desire to code ‘close to the metal’ and get as much performance as I can, even in fairly unimportant scenarios like this. Maybe it’s a good thing? Maybe thats why GSB surprises people sometimes in how well it runs on crappy old PC’s :D.

Is the casual boom over?

Posted on January 3, 2010

There was a time a few years ago when casual games seemed to be the BIG THING. Almost everyone was making a game where you matched 3 things. Then they all cloned Bettys Beer Bar (You might remember the first clone – Diner Dash). Then they all cloned Zuma, then… etc. I lose track of who everyone was cloning after a while.

This wasn’t the golden age of indie game development. In fact, it was the golden age of actual indie game developers rolling their eyes and wondering what the hell people were thinking, when developer after developer announced their ‘innovative’ new clone of whatever was #1 on bigfishgames last week.

Not surprisingly, a lot of casual games bombed and made virtually no money. At least, for the developers. The aggregators, who owned the platform like BigFishGames and Relfexive probably made a fortune. I wasn’t immune, I had Kudos and Rock Legend on a number of those portals. I still get the royalty checks for them, although it’s nothing to get excited about.

Nowadays it seems everyone is cloning farmville, and I think I might have glossed over the bit where everyone was making a browser based MMO game. In 2010, I’m sure there will be a new goldrush (maybe the new mac thing) where indie developers all chase trying to cash in on the latest #1 guaranteed way to make millions.

Because I don’t make games aimed at casual portals anymore, or even ones they would be interested in stocking, I’ve taken my eye off the ball. I have zero interest in games like that right now, I always only make the sort of game I personally think is cool at that point in my life, but I am curious as to the state of the market. Has it collapsed? Or are more and more people each year still shelling out actual money for the latest reskinned dress-up or clickfest time management game?  That would be (as a game designer) a bit depressing, but  it wouldn’t stun me…

Collosal space battles (in fuschia)

Posted on December 31, 2009

Aren’t TV and movie space battles a bit tame?

Take the battle of Waterloo. It contained approx 140,000 soldiers. The battle of Kursk was 900,000 Germans vs 1,300,000 Russians, complete with 3,600 tanks and 20,000 guns. This was a big battle between two countries in a world war, fought over 50 years ago, when the world population was smaller.

Imagine a modern day non-nuclear war between China and Russia on one side, and everyone else on the other side. Now picture it as a purely naval battle. How many people would be involved? Lets say conservatively that each side only fielded 2 million troops (a trivial subset of fit, able potential combatants). Lets look at a big US battleship : The USS Massachusetts has approx 2,000 crew involved. Lets assume only 10% of our navy serve on these big ships (200,000 men) so thats 1,000 battleships, in an all out naval war. (remember we are talking a war for survival, not the relative peacetime deployments of today).

That’s a large fight between two earth-bound nations.

But lets assume a planet with less water-coverage than earth, and slightly larger, so it has double our population. Thats a factor of two. Now fast forward another two generations time wise and assume a doubling of that population again. Thats x4. Now assume that they are all on the same side (x6) and that they form part of a federation of 20 such worlds (still an incredibly small speck in an average size galaxy). Thats 120 x 1,000 battleships.

What I’m getting at, is when the Rebel Alliance attacked the death star, they seemed to do it with the sort of navy you would use to maybe lay siege to Malta, or at best, to attack Dieppe. Hardly a clash of galactic powers.  Assume 20% of your 240,000,000 are in fighters and thats suddenly 12,000,000 fighters, or a million twelve man squadrons. Imagine how long “all wings report in” would take… Imagine how quickly you run out of colors?

“Peach-tinted fuschia leader standing by”, “Oaky pastel rose leader standing by…”

So I guess that issue, and the whole problem of ILM filming a million plastic model flybys in 1983 doesn’t help.

I know what you are thinking, Even Gratuitous Space Battles isn’t really gratuitous enough is it? Maybe for the sequel…

Buy now, pay later (not for spock)

Posted on December 30, 2009

I went shopping a few days ago, and even in the middle of a recession caused mainly by lending to people who have no money, this phrase is everywhere:

BUY IT NOW, PAY IN A YEAR

I don’t go for these things. In fact, I only ever bought something (apart from a  car) on credit once, purely because they offered ‘interest free credit’ and refused to give me a discount for paying cash, which I found insulting… Anyway…

Why do these things work? Are people really that stupid to fall for it? Actually yes, and they aren’t stupid, they are emotional, or passionate, and they can’t help it.

I’ve been reading more pop neuroscience books, and reading about the difference between the amygdala and the pre-frontal cortex. Basically the amygdala does the emotional stuff, the PFC does the analytical bit.  The amygdala is seeing “BUY NOW” or more importantly “NOW” and the PFC is seeing “pay later…“.

Why does this work? Because the response from the amigdyla is faster, and often (for most people) louder. It’s especially true for the young, when the PFC is still developing.  Thats partly why they can be more impulsive and reckless, and why kids can’t resist taking sweets even when they understand they will get more sweets later if they resist the urge for 5 minutes (Someone tested that, and found it a phenomenally good indicator of future financial success).

It’s all down to evolution, the amygdala gets first dibs on our attention because it does the rapid pattern-matching stuff such as “IT’S A SNAKE!!!!” rather than the cool analytical “it’s a stick” that takes longer. The amygdala takes care of time sensitive vital emotional stuff like fear, hunger, lust etc. It’s the bit that makes negative scary political TV ads work, and it’s also why BUY NOW PAY LATER works.

Our brains have evolved in creatures concerned for short term survival. Its way more important to eat when we find food than it is to worry about being overweight, hence we have huge trouble  dieting. The same is true of all problems with long term planning. You conciously want to work on your indie game, but your amigdyla just wants you to eat, sleep and have sex. It’s a tug of war!

I’ve read that the stroop test is an indication of how your amygdala beats your PFC, but although it’s fun i’m not convinced. Thats just two different types of pattern matching going on surely?

However, I’m sure there is some truth to the thing that we are hard wired for irrational short term passionate thinking. that’s why some we are rubbish at saving, dieting, healthy eating, or basically doing anything that fights our emotions. we are a long way off becoming vulcans :D

If you are thinking how does this make me sell more games, it’s all about how and why people make purchasing decisions.

You could be playing Gratuitous Space Battles RIGHT NOW. Just Click here for free food sex and sleep.:D