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

Widescreen support, publisher logo things

Posted on September 26, 2008

Three things got done in the last 24 hours.
Firstly I got wide-screen support in the game, which kicks in automatically if your desktop resolution is 1280×768 or 1280×800. It then runs the game full screen as 1280 x768. In a window, it is always at 1024×768. This was basically a move to support wide-screen laptops, which are very commonly used for the more casual and indie games now. The game looked a bit crap when stretched to fit those resolutions, so I did 5 minutes fiddling and it all works fine. I’m really pleased with how easy it was to get this working, a sign that the underlying code is good :D

The second thing, which I did today was add support for those tedious logos at the start of the game. Don’t worry, that aren’t in the Positech sell-direct version, but some of the casual game portals insist on having their logo present. The main game screen looks so cool I don’t ant to clutter it, so I decided to support the full screen fade in and out thing you normally get. Not an inspiring job…

The best thing was rewriting the background display code so when it changes from normal rendering to super-funky ‘you are drunk’ wobbly buildings, there is no really bad jump (it still skips a bit), and a lack of clever color-fading. Now it’s all one system, which makes everything look a lot nicer. This was just a bit of graphical polish I wanted to get done.

It’s going well, and I’m on track to put the game up for sale on October 1st.

Kudos 2 Character Creation screen

Posted on September 25, 2008

A first look at customising the avatar for Kudos 2. This is just me going through some of the options. Once you select your avatar and play a game with them, they get saved out as a preset that the game will sometimes preselect for you later.

I’m tired and keep getting confused…

Posted on September 24, 2008

I’m 7 days away from releasing my new game, and the list of stuff to do is a bit grim. I keep making silly mistakes, like giving people the wrong version of files, and then doing it again,

It’s like crunch time, but being the only person who has to do everything. Arggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

It’s all about the numbers

Posted on September 23, 2008

If you look at a publishing contract, there are pages and pages of legalese bullshit. 99% of it is the same crap you get in all of them, which 99% of the time is totally irrelevant in practice. it has to be there, so both sides are happy but it’s not a practical problem.

This is stuff such as “you didn’t rip this game off anyone else” and “we have right to use name of the game to market the game” etc. Unless you are dealing with satan, a lot of games publishing contracts for on-line are very similar.

And then there is the vital stuff such as:

What royalty you get per copy sold

What the deductions can be

When you get paid.

Those 3 lines pretty much sum up the haggling of games contracts. It matters a BIG DEAL how much royalty you get. Some websites reckon they are doing you a favour to offer you 40% (yeah right, fuck off, I don’t need you, but you need games). Some pay a lot more, some pay a huge amount.  Some have a nebulous definition of deductions. And many of them assume you will take whatever is offered (think again).

I’m about to contact a few on-line portals to sell Kudos 2 through, alongside my own site. Of course, I REALLY want people to buy the game direct, because I make the biggest cut that way, but some people are so used to buying from certain other sites it’s tough to tempt them away. Generally, I make about 50/50 from my site and from everyone else. If it started skewing too far towards other people, I’d panic. I want to earn money to pay MY rent, not everyone else’s.

Here’s a last reminder for anyone who hasn’t heard it before:

“IF YOU DO NOT SELL YOUR GAME AT LEAST PARTIALLY DIRECT FROM YOUR WEBSITE YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST THROW A PILE OF MONEY IN THE FIRE”

Game designers are blind cockney elves

Posted on September 19, 2008

All game designers are blind. Every single one of us. Peter Molyneux, Will Wright, Sid Meier, even little old me. We are all massively totally hugely blind.

In some areas.

It’s inevitable.  That game you enjoy and play a few hours each week, we spent at least a year staring at it EVERY DAY. We possibly sat in three hour meetings about the inventory screen and whether it should be done another way. If we did any serious play-testing, we saw the “you have been attacked by a cave troll” window about 500 times. It’s not news to us, it’s just like the furniture. No big deal.

When I used to work in city server rooms, I ended up totally blind to the security, and the cabling. City server rooms are so security concious its laughable. One room even weighed you on the way in and the way out to check you didn’t swipe anything (or leave anything in there). Many of them had CCTV pointing at you at every stage of the torturous trip in and out (swipe cards, pin entry, physical keys all combined). After a while, you ignore it. Most server rooms have so many cables running from computer to computer that it all gets put under the floor, and round the back of some of the racks is an exercise in cable tangle hell. After a while you ignore it.

The problem with being a small team or lone game designer, is you ignore those really obvious faults, inconsistencies, confusions, bugs and irritations, not because you don’t care, but because you cannot see them. Most US game designers don’t realise all the elves have mid-west accents. Nobody thinks their accent sounds weird, but it always does, to other people. Cockney elves may sound amusing, but to a cockney, a mid-west elf is just as silly.

I’m sure I’m making the same mistake with my new game, but I’m doing what I can to avoid it. Different people, of different ages, genders and nationalities are giving it a try. They always spot things I never would have, because I’m blind to them. If you are making a game on your own, you are also blind to your mistakes. Get someone else to take a look, and listen to what they have to say.