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

The Juggling Game

Posted on April 2, 2009

I often forget birthdays, things I’ve arranged to do socially, where I’m going for lunch, or what I agreed to do for someone. Why? My brain is just full. Here is some of the work related stuff I’m juggling right now

  • A port of Kudos 2 to a new platform by a partner
  • A translation of Democracy 2
  • Artwork for GSB
  • Arranging a musician for GSB
  • Chasing money from a Russian Publisher
  • Getting a portal to use my wire transfer details to pay me
  • VAT (sales tax) return for the last quarter
  • Possible use of Democracy for a magazine article
  • Checking payment from a US publisher for something under NDA
  • Advertising budgets
  • Checking my forums to reply to tech support or similar discussions
  • This blog
  • Analyzing web traffic to see if some recent changes were positive or negative
  • Keeping an eye on the casual games portals payment schedule so they don’t fall even further behind
  • Selecting sounds for GSB
  • Programming GSB

That last one is obviously the biggest, and GSB is effectively four games in one, so it’s a bit of a nightmare all on it’s own. The truly depressing thing is there is very little out of this list I could easily hand over to someone new, even if a) I could afford someone, and b) I found someone suitable.

I guess at least it’s indoor work with no heavy lifting :D

Last Blog Entry

Posted on April 1, 2009

Sorry to suddenly do this without further lead-up, but NDA’s have meant that I’ve been unable to discuss it until today.

I’ve been offered a very lucrative job doing behavioural modelling for a government agency in the UK. I’m not at liberty to discuss all the details, but it’s an extremely interesting job, and of course the pay and conditions are very attractive.

Obviously this means that my current game (gratuitous Space Battles) will not get made, and I will have no time to support my existing games either. I’ll be making arrangements soon to discontinue the positech games website, as the company will effectively be wound up before I start work next week.

it will be strange wearing a suit and tie and going back into an office again, but the work I’ve been asked to do is so interesting, and so exciting that I’d frankly be a fool to turn it down in the current economic climate.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has bought my games over the years, and hope you have enjoyed reading this blog from time to time.

I’ll post more details on what I’ll be doing once I’ve spoken to HR and worked out what is and is not ok for me to make public.

Cheers everyone!

Turrets in and working

Posted on March 31, 2009

Here’s a screen shot of two of the ‘federation’ ships with their turrets attached. I have decided to ignore 3d renders for the ship turrets on the design screen and just re-use the gfx from the actual in-game. I think that’s more consistent and it was only adding a needless 3D look to a defiantly 2D game anyway.

One day I might be able to have designable ships where you can move cosmetic bits about, but because the sprites are actually 3D renders and use self-shadowing, that might be a bit problematic. Even placing turrets is pretty cool though.

Aiming at laptops

Posted on March 30, 2009

One of the big problems with Kudos and Democracy (my two best selling games so far) is that they are basically fixed resolution games. Democracy 1 supported two resolutions, and you can always hack them by fiddling with config files, but basically those games assumed a certain size screen and didn’t scale up or down.

With Gratuitous Space Battles, I’m aiming to support both people with huge monitors, and hopefully people with small laptops, running 600 pixel high screens.

That will mean some major fiddling with the ship and fleet design screens, and the pre-battle deployment screen too. The big probloem will be those 600 pixels. Of course, I could do some super-dynamic scaling thing, but it’s not nice reading text designed for 1900×1200 on a 600 pixel height laptop.

What I probably need is a number of different windowed layouts for different size monitors. The battle screen will be easy, because it already happily scales without any issues.

So if the fixed resolutions of Democracy 2 and Kudos 2 bugged you, don’t worry, I’m fixing it this time :D

BTW, I released a free add-on mini-patch to Democracy which adds a new dilemma for banking bonuses:

Turrets

Posted on March 27, 2009

I’ve finally got code written that supports the same ship module having different sprites on different spaceships. What this means is that the same weapon (fast pulse laser) can look different on a rebel ship to a federation ship, so hopefully they don’t ever look too out of place.

This works fine, but right now I’m assuming I’m using the same hi-res 3d image for the weapon on the ship design screen, regardless of which ‘race’ the ship hull is from. I have several ways to fix this, none of which are ideal…

I could have different 3d renders for each turret on the ship design screen, depending on the race of the ship hull. This is a lot of work, and also might be confusing. Shouldn’t the player be able to recognise a pulse laser icon regardless what race he plays?

I could have a generic 3d image for the design screen, but represent it differently on each ship, which is easier, but it means breaking the visual connection between the 3d render and the 2d sprite which might be confusing.

I could scrap the idea of the turrets representing individual variations, and just have 3 or 4 turrets for the battle screen, and tons of different 3d ones for the design screen.

I really like the idea that placing a turret in the design screen reflects exactly what the ship will look like in battle. However, it doesn’t really matter in gameplay terms, and ease of use on the design screen is the most important thing. Maybe I keep all the data the same, but have different sprites and 3d renders depending on the selected ship hull. In any case, there is tons of 3d modelling, rendering and data entry to do…