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

Making actual tools

Posted on May 24, 2009

I know that editors and level tools are part-and-parcel of most game development processes. Most games companies have at least one full-time tools programmer, who will work 8 hours a day for a year designing, coding and supporting the tools made to build the game. However, when you are a one-man-band, dedicating that amount of time to tools just isn’t viable.

There are several solutions. You can try and hit the happy medium where you spend enough time to get usable tools, but don’t let it eat too much into your schedule. You can produce really good quality tools that make game production a breeze, then realise you have not got close to finishing a game and you have to go get a day job again… Or you can just hack everything in manually using notepad and excel and worry about it later.

I’ve traditionally chosen the last option. I hate MFC, which is the ‘language’ that tools used to be built in, and I’ve never learned java or C#, which is what people often use now. That means that when I coded the few tools I use (like my particle-engine tool), I hand code them in C++ just like the games GUI. This takes ages.

Until now, I’ve been manually editing text files for the spaceship data. I have a master spreadsheet with lots of the data in, to make balancing easier, but there is a lot of manual staring at paintshop pro and memorizing pixel positions to type into notepad. Clearly this is mental.

So this weekend I made my very first steps towards a proper ‘spaceship-hull-editor’ for the game. This is still a makeshift hacked tool which won’t ship in the game, it’s just a quick tool to make it easier for me to tweak some of the graphics data, such as placing particle emitters for burning ship hulks. It’s a small step in the right direction I guess.

In non-tools news, I’ve been fixing a lot of very minor graphics glitches, the odd disappearing piece of debris or mis-aligned laser blast, or slightly crappy looking tractor beam graphic. The game is looking quite nice. Next week will be geared towards some online-integration, and some general gameplay code.

BBC interview

Posted on May 21, 2009

I had two people from the Spanish BBC website at my house this morning to interview me for a thing on digital piracy. It’s pretty cool to be interviewed at all, but it’s unfortunate that it’s about piracy. It all comes from the ‘talking with pirates’ blog event from last year. I don’t really want to be seen as ‘the piracy guy’. I’d much rather talk about game design, or other issues within the industry. They filmed an interview with me, and took some shaky cam footage of GSB. If it goes on-line I’ll post a link here. Maybe I’ll be dubbed in Spanish?

I saw the new star trek film 2 nights ago, and it was weird seeing tons of spaceship debris and escape pods. it’s like they have been playing my game :D Yet more inspiration to make the GSB visuals look good…

Cat Rescue

Posted on May 20, 2009

On Friday we noticed our youngest (3 years) cat had stopped eating and was subdued. Jack ALWAYS wants to eat, so this was very weird. He didn’t show any interest even in cat treats. Throughout Saturday and Sunday we got more and more worried because he had eaten almost nothing and didn’t seem to want to move. He also wanted to sit outside in the rain.

Monday morning he went straight to the vets. He had a high temperature and an eye infection, which they gave him injections and eye drops for. On Tuesday, he went back to the vets after nothing much had changed (eyes were better but he still wouldn’t eat). They admitted him to a proper Rolf-Harris style pet hospital. There was talk of x-rays and blood tests and more.

The vets couldn’t take a blood test,a s they encountered heavy resistance from jacks claws, so they put him out for an x ray and took it while his shields were down. The results were grim, because he had serious liver and kidney problems somehow. I still suspect he has eaten something out in the garden that was a mistake.

Anyway, they kept him in overnight and put him on a drip, and did some other technical things that I don’t understand, but which make for a long and expensive price list.

This morning he is all better, he is eating, and I just picked him up and bought him home. he meowed all the way home but jumped straight out of his box and landed right by his food bowl, so he is back to normal :D

It’s great to have Jack back. The only problem is the fact that his Vet bill is a collosal chunk of this months games revenue. We need a national health service for cats :D

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!