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

AI Spam

Posted on December 27, 2009

Spam is getting cleverer. I deleted some spam from the forums yesterday, and about 100 spam comments this morning form the blog. The thing is, they are becoming more and more cunning. They are contextual spams, that do a passable job of imitating genuine comments from people, albeit confused people with English as their second language.

For example, on my blog post about PC power consumption I got this:

“I don’t have concrete figures, but they should be using very little power with no load attached”

I suspect that the blogspam AI has scanned that post, then gone through a huge database of sentences that contain similar words to words which show up in my post (such as power, load, figures) and pasted in a sample sentence from what is obviously a different, but relevant conversation. All very clever. But two things strike me as not very clever:

1) If you are trying this super advanced AI-spam, try not posting 100 comments in 1 day from the same username on different topics. Thats kind of a big huge giveaway isn’t it?

2) This is a shit way to make money. Do you really think that if you spam a million blogs with pointless comments, enough idiots will follow links in the posters signature to convert to paying customers that make it worthwhile? Do you actually think google are stupid enough to push up your search engine rankings because you get 1,000,000 backlinks from totally irrelevant blogs?

The spammers seem to think that if they send enough spam, and get enough traffic, they will get rich. I think that’s an incredibly naive and scatter-gun approach. I earn enough money, but I don’t get a lot of traffic. The reason my traffic converts into enough sales to pay my bills is because I get relevant traffic. Traffic from people who play PC games, preferably strategy games, ideally (at the moment) sci-fi fans or political gaming fans.

If I look at traffic from ‘stumbleupon’ the site that semi-randomly sends visitors to something roughly in a category they enjoy, it converts at a rate of about $0.01 per visitor. If I get traffic from a PC strategy gaming website the return is up to sixty times higher. Quality not quantity. The 1,000 true fans, and all that. My tip for the people behind new AI spam is to go write some decent AI software for something useful such as natural language processing for customer service support enquiries. You will earn more money and feel better :D

Klingon Christmas Cake

Posted on December 23, 2009

She said I could decorate it “however I wanted“.

Oh rly?

Stage one:

You will need

  • Marzipan
  • Christmas cake
  • Icing
  • Klingon d’k tahg

Stage 2:  Imperial klingon emblem cut out into marzipan and smaller icing using klingon weapon

stage 3: Add some edible gold stars to represent the many star systems of the klingon empire! and tada: A feast fit for a warrior! Qa Plagh!

” batlh Daq joH’a’ Daq the highest, Daq tera’ roj, QaQ DichDaq toward Hoch.”

You might remember me from such festive treats as my klingon pumpkin

Users self-help forums

Posted on December 22, 2009

I have had recent (bad) experiences with this phenomena, but it’s not the first time.

How many times have you gone to a website for a game, a service, an ISP, some software, whatever, and found an ‘official’ self-help forum for users? I seem to recall Dell used to do it, and now almost everyone does it.

“Welcome to the community help forums where fellow member of the ABC community help solve each other’s technical problems”

What this translates (to me) as is this…

“Fuck customer service. We will let you dumb schmucks who bought our stuff fix each others problems. Meanwhile, we are on the beach! Good luck losers…”

I check my forums daily. I don’t post in every thread, and I don’t fix every problem, but I at least flipping TRY to do so. I read every support email I get, and I won’t make you jump through hoops to email a real person. The person is ME. here is my email address: cliff@positech.co.uk.  Here is a clickable one:

cliff@positech.co.uk

Here it is bigger;

cliff@positech.co.uk

I get quite a pile of spam because I am so free with my email address. You know whose problem that is? MINE. Whose problem is it not? My customers.

Fuck email forms, fuck ‘self-help community forums. Fuck “your call is important to us” and definitely fuck “We are experiencing higher than normal traffic“. If you bought a game from me, and it doesn’t run email me. email me now, and I’ll do my best to fix it.

And the next time you encounter a software provider or other company that expects you to not only make do with ‘community’ tech support, but to act as their unpaid helpdesk staff, make a mental note to avoid them in future. Only by hurting the business of people like that will things improve…

And just to add some positivity, who can I name with the same attitude?

Seth Godin, the marketing guy.

BMTMicro, my payment provider,

Cater Allen, the UK bank.

errr….. feel free to add to the list.

Lets talk about patch 28

Posted on December 19, 2009

Ok, so patch 28 for gratuitous space battles is out, bringing the game to version 1.28. Hurrah. Lets take a looky at the two big new things (in addition to the major crash bug that was somehow still in the game, and is hopefully now hunted down and killed).

CUSTOM CHALLENGES

This is a big deal. If you go to the challenges screen, there is a new ‘custom challenge’ map, which opens up a whole new screen showing stuff to fiddle with to basically create your own map, from existing backdrops, plus settings for pilot limits, budget, and the supply limits or spatial anomalies present. You want a battle with a 10,00CR budget, 4 pilots, no shields and no missile modules? You got it kiddo!

You can save out these custom scenarios or load them in, (if you save them out, that lets you name them, otherwise they default to ‘custom map’. Clicking the deploy button takes you to the normal setup screen for arranging your own fleet, and from there you issue a challenge as before. I hope people really investigate this as an option for the game, because it gives a lot more creative control to the player. If you thing fighter rockets are overpowered, you can issue a challenge where there aren’t any, and see what other methods people use to beat you. if you like a certain map but wished it had a ‘must have engines’ requirement, you can do that too. And if I add in extra anomalies or scenario options, they will all end up in this editor too.

MESSAGING

The game now maintains an on-line ‘inbox’ for everyone, and auto-sends you a message when your challenges are beaten or played, or when someone sends you a challenge. It also gives you the option of sending post-challenge feedback to the issuer. This means less wondering how the hell they beat you invincible fleet, and more reading the gloating from your nemesis, which is of course, all in the spirit of GSB.

1.28 took a lot of under-the-hood fiddling, but I think these two things were missing from the game, and needed putting in. I wasn’t sure the challenge stuff would be as popular as I wanted it to be, but it has proved to be very popular, so it’s been l33t to go back and add this stuff to an existing game. The game will auto-update if you have registered it on-line, but I’ll be getting updated patches to the distributors like steam and impulse and the others right away.

Scenario Editor

Posted on December 15, 2009

I’m a big fan of modding and game editors. people love to tweak a game they way they want it, and I support that 100%. So with this in mind, here is a work-in-progress screenshot of the custom scenario editor.

The idea is that there is a new way to launch a challenge (maybe from the challenges window), rather than selecting an existing singelplayer mission. That new button takes you to this screen which lets you tweak everything. Once done, you can then click deploy, and arrange your fleet like any other mission, then issue that as a challenge to anyone else. You can only use backgrounds that already exist in the game, but everything else is tweakable.  The only big chunk not done yet is changing the deployment zones. I may end up adding that later and using defaults for now. My UI coding is sadly slow and inefficient :(

Together with in-game messaging, this is the second big feature that will be in the next patch (alongside many bug fixes) which will be 1.28