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

Kudos to Kiva

Posted on May 19, 2009

Positech Games is not Intel, I do not make megabucks. However, it does make a small profit, and once I’ve spent my allowance of profits on silly things like robot vacuum cleaners (stopped using it tbh), I have some pennies left over which I sometimes put into a site called Kiva.


Kiva - loans that change lives

If you haven’t heard of kiva, here is the one-line pitch. Kiva is a bank which provides loans to people in the third world. Basically you stick some cash in using paypal (minimum loan is $25) and then you browse the list of people you want to lend money to, and pick one. Over time, the money gets paid back, and you can take your money back then, or re-loan it. Kiva pay you zero interest.

I don’t mind the zero-interest, because that’s one way kiva makes some money to run the site (you can donate too). Also, given current bank interest rates, zero is almost competitive :D

I’ve stuck the odd $25 in kiva for ages now, and have lent money to 24 different entrepreneurs all over the world. Here are some examples:

  • Nguy?n Th? Nhân (Pig farmer in Vietnam)
  • Francisco Javier Lopez Ruiz (Fruit seller in Nicaragua)
  • Sok Kung (Farmer in Cambodia)…

I love kiva because its not just throwing charitable cash and hoping to solve a short-term problem, its investing in countries helping to build up their own economies and become self sufficient. I’m a bit of a politics junkie, and very aware of how first world mega-corps can screw third world producers, so I’m often lending money to farmers in the third world. I like the idea that I help out tiny one-man companies like mine, who otherwise would have to go to some big evil bank, and I like screwing those banks out of business too :D. Also, I’m aware how lucky I am to be born in a wealthy country like the UK. If I was born in Cambodia would I have a nice internet business? I doubt it. I like to see a chance being given to people who want to start a business and live somewhere that makes it difficult.

Kiva is a good site, the loans seem to ALWAYS get paid back (maybe poorer people are more honest than city bankers?). You can give gift certificates, and join groups who all lend money in the name of an organisation (I’m in the indie game developers group :D).

So remember, Somewhere there is a vietnamese pig farmer who feeds her pigs thanks to your purchase of Kudos 2 :D

Fixing minor graphical things

Posted on May 17, 2009

It’s the weekend, so rather than working on gamey stuff I’m making the battles look better :D. I’ve been improving the way the big ships explode so the drifting hulks fade in better, and the subsidiary explosions now blast in various directions. Turrets now smoothly track their targets, and there are various other small tweaks like highlight flares when bullet weapons fire.
My last niggly annoyance of the day is bullets, by which I mean laser pulses.
I draw all the bullets in one go, to make it extra fast, which is fine, but to do this I have to draw them AFTER I’ve drawn all the ships.
The thing is, the bullets are quite big, and when they ’emerge’ from a gun turret, they obscure it for the first frame. Ideally, I’d draw the bullet above the ship but below the turret so it would emerge naturally.
I think I’ll code a real horrid hack, which is to mark bullets as ‘n00bs’ for the first few pixels of their existence, and draw the n00bs separate from the main bullets.
That way I keep generally drawing them fast, but I also don’t get any anomalies when you hit pause and catch that 1 in sixty-off chance of seeing the frame where it looks wrong…

This is why game code looks like spaghetti. All those hacks are there for a reason I tell you!

SimSocial and Kudos 2

Posted on May 16, 2009

I’ve already got emails on the day it went live asking about the similarity between Kudos 2 and the new SimSocial game by EA. So here it the explanation:
I worked with EA years ago doing some contract work, and recently they contacted me about working with me to do a version of the Sims that would be based on the gameplay of Kudos2. That game is SimSocial. If you look in the about box for the game, you will see the credit and link back here.

I’m happy about the deal I did with EA, and think that the games complement each other well. Obviously they have major differences and I’m sure there will be some Kudos 2 players who will play SimSocial, and maybe some SimSocial players will be tempted to come try Kudos 2. It’s great to see a game idea re-implemented in another way, and I hope it’s a great success.
I thought I better announce it here right away in case anyone thinks I was ripped off (I wasn’t) or that I copied the idea from them ( I didn’t).
Cheers :D

Reflecting beam lasers

Posted on May 14, 2009

My recent design thoughts and today’s tweaks make it clear I needed a way to see visually that lasers were just bouncing off enemy shields and achieving nothing, so I added a sort of ‘bounce’ effect to the lasers (see video below). I didn’t bother doing any fancy maths for the collision reflection, it just skews off at a slightly random angle. Does this look ok? (also there is some quite cool shooting of rockets by a point defence laser going on in the second clip).

Spaceship speed

Posted on May 13, 2009

I’m having balancing issues with some of the existing game mechanics. One of the things that I use to differentiate weapons is their tracking speed. Some smaller weapons track fast but do less damage, and vice versa. Basically the tracking speed is compared to the targets current speed, and this gives some multiplier for the ‘hit chance’.  Obviously big cruisers are slower than small fighters.

So far so lovely.

The problem is that in general, you want your ships to position themselves at a certain optimum range, and pound their enemies from a distance. In the case of the big cruisers, that means move into range, sit there and go zap until you or the enemy dies. The problem is, the minute you sit still, tracking speed becomes irrelevant. This means that when fighting against cruisers, tracking speed is basically no big deal, and the weapon with the highest damage-per-second, range and penetration of armor/shields wins.

The solutions are many and varied:

1) Have an optional ship ai-behavior of ‘keep moving’ where your ship basically spins in circles at a certain range (clunky and difficult to get a reasonable turning circle)

2) Always assume the ship is at max speed for hit purposes (might look silly)

3) Introduce a new mechanic to compensate (maybe ECM resistance?) and ignore tracking speed for weapons aimed at the bigger ships.

4) Just make greater use of balancing the existing mechanics to still make the choices interesting

I’m currently drawn mainly to 3) and 4). Any thoughts?