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

Game Developers Interviewers Suck

Since when did game developers all become indoctrinate dby marketing and PR bullshit? It seems now that a lot of the interviews you read with actual coders and designers (not the publishers) have stuff like this in:

“It was an incredible thrill and privilege to be able to leverage the awesome IP from that title to provide a compelling and dynamic experience for this platform, and it will be available across multiple SKUs”

Nobody wants tor ead that crap except shareholders.  What I want to know is the honest thoughts and opinions and experiences of people. But you don’t get that, just a lot of marketing speak. People are interviewed, then everything interesting gets censored by the marketing dept until its just character-less, souless mediaspeak.

Here’s some brutally honest comments by me on some of my own games and indieness. if I had a PR manager, he or she would never let me say this stuff:

“Starship tycoon is basically transport tycoon in space. I was originally doing a space combat game, but for some reason I don’t even recall it got converted to a space trading one. I was a pretty crap coder when I made that game, and although generally it runs well 90% of the time for 95% of the people, you should check out the demo first, because it *does* have some bugs in it, and tbh they are not about to get fixed.”

“Kudos 2’s days at work are the low point of the game. I just didn’t have the budget, manpower and time to write enough events for all the differnt jobs, and I was delusional thinking I could do it. When I play the game, I do find myself skipping the text descriptions of my day at work. It’s the one design bit I don’t like.”

“Right now there is a price war going on between the casual games portals, and it’s going to seriously squeeze a lot of the smaller casual game developers out of business. Personally, I don’t care that much, because a lot of them are just churning out diner dash rip-offs for someone else anyway. Would we really give a damn if they went out of business?”

Wouldn’t it be more fun if every develoepr interview was mroe like that? I think so :D

New game clue image #2

I always thought these looked kinda cool, and the people working there didn’t get enough of the glory

Clarifying the multiplayer cheat thing

A lot of people have said to me they think it’s a bad idea to allow cheaters to edit files for a multiplayer game, especially my next game. Let me clarify:

The next game *will have a multiplayer element to it*. To some extent. But not in the way you generally get in multiplayer games.

Although you will have free reign to edit files for modding purposes, there will be no way to ‘beat’ another player by doing so.

I might introduce some element of file checking and CRC gubbins at some stage, but I want a hugely moddable game, and if you let people mod stuff its hard to then prevent them cheating unless there is a central server blah blah, and I don’t want all the hassle and cost associated with that.

I’m not making an FPS style game where the normal worries about aimbots are a concern. When I explain how the multiplayer bit works, you will see what I mean :D

Next Game clue #1

Might as well keep you guessing. But here is a very general clue as to what sort of game I’m doing next.

More clues to follow

Beating Multiplayer Cheating

Could it be that the best way to deal with jerks in online games is to just make their efforts futile by doing way entirely with the idea of anonymous massively multiplayer competition?

That’s what I reckon, and here are my expanded thoughts on the topic.