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

Asset Effects for Kudos 2

Posted on August 27, 2008

Some of the things you buy in Kudos 2 have ongoing effects that happen every day (like the newspaper its assumed you read, or owning a fast car or a pet). Some have effects that happen only when you use them (like weights or a chess set). And some have one-off purchase-time effects (like a fashionable outfit).

The problem with the ongoing daily effects is the player had no way of knowing what they are, so I’ve spent a big chunk of this morning coding this sort of thing so they can see them:

It’s amazing how long it takes to code something like that and ensure it a) works, b) looks nice and c) is bug free. It also exposes a efw other minor niggles that then needed fixing. Oh well, slow but steady progress!

Yet another podcast interview thing

Posted on August 25, 2008

Tonight at 7PM GMT. it’s here:

http://www.wcradio.com/

diggable here:

http://digg.com/gaming_news/Cliff_Harris_interview_on_WoW_Radio_Aug_25th

Blurb:

The show will air on Monday at 7pm British time (2pm Eastern US). Listeners
can visit http://www.wcradio.com and tune in from the frontpage.
Alternatively, loading http://www.wcradio.com/listen.pls into most popular
media players will tune automatically into the stream. The show will be
available after airing in the form of a podcast, via itunes, all popular
podcast aggregators and on our website in the TB’s Show about Videogames
archive – http://www.wcradio.com/shows.php?selectShow=96

I’m actually getting some work done on Kudos 2 today (yes I know it’s a bank holiday). Just some minor improvements such as getting people to phone you when you get back from an event and complain about you not accepting their offer, etc.

Dropping More Prices

Posted on August 24, 2008

I just dropped Democracy 1 (the original game) down to just under ten dollars. As of right now you can get the game for $9.99.

This is partly because it’s an old game, and partly because it’s a response to all those piracy comments about the price of games. I think the game is pretty good value at ten dollars. The basic game design is the same as Democracy 2, although the way it simulates stuff is a bit simpler, and the interface and presentation isn’t as slick as the newer one. However, if none of that bothers you, you can get a pretty decent stratgey game for under ten dollars now!

My companies year-end is at the end of September, so yesterday I entered all the data to see how I was doing in the run up to the business year-end. It’s not as good as I would ahve liked, definitely making less money than last year. Tbh, most of the profit of last year was selling Kudos and My other games on portals. Democracy 2 sold well, but Rock Legend didn’t. I didn’t really make any money worth getting excited about from retail at all. This is all a bit worrying, although I guess you could blame the ‘credit crunch’, but that just sounds unlikely to me. I’ve possibly spent too long making Kudos 2 (and it’s not done yet), and I really need to get my ass in gear now.

Here’s hoping Kudos 2 sells as well as Democracy 2 did (or better!). That would keep things ticking along.

Brits who made the modern world

Posted on August 23, 2008

There was a short 30min documentary on Ch5 in the UK last night, about the guys who made the game ‘Elite‘. They were 2 college kids from Cambridge, UK. One of the best facts from the program was that when they released the game, there were 150,000 BBC computers in the UK. And their game sold 150,000 copies. Now THAT is a hit game. That makes World Of Warcraft look like barbies riding school.

The bits I enjoyed hearing about was how obsessed theyr were with optimising the code and getting the machine to do much more than anyone had before. They had no debugger, and no tools. If the game crashed, they couldn’t step through code line by line as we do now, they had to stare at the code (all 16k of it) until they found the bug. That’s serious hardcore programming. I managed to code 4 games before I worked out how a debugger worked. I never even saw people step through code until I got my first job at Elixir. Sad eh? It’s MUCH easier with breakpoints and a debugger, trust me!

I miss the days of having to optimise code to oblivion. I love reading about tricks like compiled sprites and loop-unrolling, even though many of them are irrelevant now. I’m not the worlds best programmer, but I have managed to code some pretty optimised stuff now and then. I’m very happy with the particle systems I’ve coded, especially how well they run on low spec machines. Given no worries about actually finishing games and shipping them to bring in some rent-money, I think I’d happily spend ages ripping out huge parts of my games are re-optimising the, just for the hell of it. One day maybe…

Playing catch-up

Posted on August 21, 2008

So much has been going on. I did a podcast interview thing as part of this:

http://savygamer.co.uk/2008/08/savygamer-podcast-episode-2.html

Then there was another interview here:

http://insidergamersloop.com/?p=437

Then i joined a tech podcast thing here:

http://saunderslog.com/2008/08/20/squawk-box-august-20-iphone-vs-n-series-smackdown-and-talking-piracy/

And there’s another interview today hopefully, plus some stuff for a UK newspaper, hopefully Saturdays Guardian. I also have been bugfixing in Democracy 2, some pesky bugs I can’t believe I missed. Plus I’m trying out a new payment provider right now. All this, and I saw the stage version of Mort last night. Eeek.

I have got SOME work done on Kudos 2, and hope to get a lot more done today and maybe the weekend.