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

Virgins Letters to thieves

Posted on July 3, 2008

This:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7486743.stm

has got a lot of thieves up in arms. here is a typical comment on the BBC website:

“I think it is just stupid because people cant be bothered 2 buy every cd with there favourite song on because people might not like all the songs they sing”

TOUGH.

Don’t buy it then. Don’t think you are still entitled to have it. Do these people ever pay in restaurants? Or do they only pay for the chips they ate, not the few they left because they were a bit too crispy?

I’m sick of thieves trying to rationalise their actions. this attitude is so widespread now, that I am wondering about what other programming work I could do for a living, after the next game is done. I just don’t see the point of working so hard to make stuff people expect to take for free. it’s soul-destroying…

Cue someone tryinfg to re-define theft to make taking other peoples work for free seem ok…

*sigh*

Phear my share-dealing skillz

Posted on July 2, 2008

or not… as the case may be. I’ve long been 100% sure that UK retailers Marks & Spencers is a sure fight stock market bet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7484700.stm

Fuck. I lost hundreds of pounds today on the stock market. Grrrrr. The thing is, the company is VERY profitable, its profits last year and its revenue were up on the previous year. It has a very well defined market niche (eco-friendly upmarket food and high quality clothes) and strong customer loyalty, and unmatched brand recognition. Plus its sales have only dropped 4%. Why on earth did its shares drop so much?

So much for my attempts to be a stock market guru. I guess I’ll stick to indie games, at least they make *some* money!

Balancing middle and late game code

Posted on July 1, 2008

I’ve been working on the balance of the game today. Stuff like how easily you put on weight, how much money you earn etc. I’ve made some big changes and hopefully tomorrows playthroughs will show an improvement in the long term balance.

The problem with testing a simulation game is it gets too easy to just play it the way *you* play those games. I have quite a specific style of management game playing. I tend to eventually gravitate to a single variable (like population size in sim city, or profits in Vegas:MIB, and almost ignore other aspects of the game as I zone out on trying to maximise that variable. When I play kudos, I tend to be very career-focused, so I need to ensure I don’t polish and tweak that area of the game to the exclusion of other areas. I also tend to never finish games, but keep restarting with different tactics, so the middle and late games can get a bit repetitive. I’m aware of this tendency, and keen to fix it this time around.

One of the ways I hope to do this is by unlocking content as the game plays. The mechanic for this is social events organised by you, the more you do, the more options you unlock. If you play the game naturally, this means you are still unlocking some new options after an hour or more of play, so the game stays fresh all that time at least. By the time the game is finished I hope there to be enough content and variety that the game stays fresh throughout all ten years.

Imaginary Property!!!111111ONEONEONE

Posted on June 30, 2008

It’s popular amongst anti-copyright dorks to use the phrase ‘imaginary property’ when they are ranting about Intellectual property, usually as some juvenile method to rationalise pirating music, movies and games. Apparently, IP is just ‘imaginary property’, so why should they pay for it?

Lets make a deal, I’ll let you pay for my Imaginary property using that imaginary money in your bank account. Both exist purely as strings of numbers, agreed? But of course, if you don’t think that trivially copied strings of data have any value, please email me your sortcode, account number and bank login details. I’d like to ‘share’ your bank balance. Sharing is caring right?

Website stuff

Posted on June 29, 2008

back in the early days of Positech I made quite a few smaller, lower budget games which you don’t see me actively promote any more. The games still exist though, and some occasionally sell a copy or two.

Because I’ve always developed my own web site, I’ve gone from it looking dire, to less dire, to a lot less dire, to tolerable, as I’ve introduced new games and new mini-sites for them. This means that a lot of the older games still linger on the positech site with crappy designs, older logos and screen-shots, and other badness.

Over the last few days I’ve found some time to revisit those pages and make them look slightly less dire, even slightly consistent, and make sure they link to the main page. I also added some very small text links to them at the bottom of the main page, so they aren’t entirely orphaned any more. I also added a few adwords panels (worth a try!), and dropped the price of my old budget puzzle game thing.

Step into the past with my earlier, cheaper games!

http://www.positech.co.uk/rocky

http://www.positech.co.uk/minefield

http://www.positech.co.uk/planetarydefence