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

A dystopian future short story about manufactured desire

Posted on November 4, 2017

Long long ago, people used to think about what people needed, and make that thing, and sell them. people needed a table, so a carpenter made a table, and sold the table to the person. Then the person would need another table a few years later, and another table would be made. Then carpenters developed better tools, and the process of making tables, clothes, food and everything else became quicker, easier and cheaper, and we made more stuff.

Soon everyone could have not only a shared table, but their own table, and not only that, they could have multiple sets of clothes, not just for when some were being washed, but separate clothes for separate occasions. You could afford your work clothes, and you had separate leisure clothes. Even special clothes to sleep in, and then came ‘formal’ clothes, the suit for weddings and posh events. Eventually we progressed to a situation where you would have an entire wardrobe of clothes, and you picked them based on what mood you were in, or the season.

Then fashion came along and told you that even though you had enough clothes to wear, and clothes for doing X and for doing Y and clothes for Summer, and clothes for Winter, and clothes for the evening and for the afternoon, and for sports, and even for different sports (golfing trousers…) suddenly all of that was going to change because your clothes were UNFASHIONABLE. That meant you had to ditch all your clothes and buy completely new ones.

And once that worked, clever people who had by now long discovered psychology, started to apply the principles of fashion to other things, including the thing that was for many people the second most expensive purchase of their lives : cars.

Suddenly cars were ‘old fashioned’ and despite happily fulfilling the task you bought them for, you wanted a new one. This spread to almost all consumer products, not least TVs, and personal computers. We ended up buying a new laptop, not when the other one died, or got broken, but when a newer model came out that was slightly thinner, slightly lighter, slightly faster (for a while at least).

Now fast forward to a dystopian future where you don’t have a trained psychologist working in marketing, but EVERYONE is the marketing department studied behavioural economics, psychology and neuroscience. A future where most employees in the PR and marketing department are data scientists. A future where the amount of information collected about customers, and their use patterns, and their desires, and dreams, and fantasies and ideals…was all gathered by private companies who would use it, not so much for the improvement of mankind in any way…but to make a product that those people would always buy.

The endgame, the final desire of such a system is to produce a product that has multiple contradictions. It has to be seen as exclusive and premium, and luxury, and yet at the same time be marketed to everybody. It has to have a premium price, despite having no features that any rival product does not already has. It has to appear cool hip and desirable, and the company that makes it portrayed the same way, regardless of how that company behaves behind closed doors.

It doesn’t have to be any good, have any improvements whatsoever over any other version of EXACTLY the same product. It only has to be *seen to be* better, not actually be a better product. And if at all possible it needs some tiny visual indicator, visible to someone nearby, on the same table, or bar, that the person who has the product most definitely has the very expensive new one. Thats all it needs to do. And in this dystopian future, they can sell a product to you that bad, and they can be that blatant about it, because they have totally and utterly weaponized modern science when it comes to manipulating your psyche so that irrationally, you still want it, and you will still buy it, and you will make that company the wealthiest company on the planet.

Hybrid and electric engines in Production Line

Posted on October 28, 2017

So I have put it off long enough, due to fixing and improving existing things, but the ongoing clamour from the user-base to include these features into Production Line (which for new readers, is my PC car-factory tycoon game), means that I needed to give in and stasrt work on getting it into the game, which is what I’ve done for the last few days.

The design basically comes down to defining each car as being one of three types, based on what people generally refer to as the ‘power-train’. A car is either ICE (internal combustion engine (diesel/petrol), Electric or Hybrid. This is simple enough, and I can work this out from a cars design simply by seeing if certain mutually-exclusive features have been added, for example ‘hybrid power-train’. Any car that is not explicitly hybrid or electric is assumed to be ICE. (This system also allows support for me to at some later stage maybe implement diesel/petrol as two distinctly different technologies.

The slight complexity comes from the fact that for the first time in the design of the simulation, this has to be applied to each CAR, not each design. This is because you can (and players do) change the features of a car design while cars are actively being produced. Its no good changing car type A from ICE to electric when 33 cars of that design have already skipped battery installs and have fuel tanks and radiators…

So thats the first obstacle I had to get over. the second one is to add new power-train-specific support to each production slot. For example, the ‘fit fuel tank’ slot will now fix a battery instead if the car at that slot happens to be a hybrid or electric car (and each of those their own battery size). There also is now support for entirely skipping a slot if the task its performing is irrelevant, which in the case of radiators and pure-electric cars is indeed the case (also exhausts).

So those are the big code changes that have been needed, along with support (with backwards compatibility) for saving and loading the power-train type of each car currently in the game. The other steps are relatively simple, in that they involve setting up new research, new unlockable upgrades and the applicable car features for Hybrid power-train, Electric power-train, and Large Battery support. (Electric cars will initially default to small batteries, with large ones being a researchable option). I also needed to add new resources for electric motors, and 3 different battery types, plus a composite resource for a hybrid power-train. That gives me ‘basic’ support for a choice between ICE, Hybrid and Electric . From then on, in future updates, I can introduce slots to manufacture those components, such as make battery, make electric motor etc, and maybe some researchable techs for higher power-density batteries etc. Thats all in the future.

For now it just feels good to know I’ll have this new tech in the game in a few days time.

In the meantime I am off to Indiecade Paris where I will be giving my down-to-earth honest talk called ‘how not to go bankrupt’.

Oh and by the way, if you are a steam customer, or a direct-bought customer with a steam key (which comes with every order), you might be interested to know that we now have cool Steam Trading cards available for the game.

Oh…and last thing, the steam Halloween sale is on, with a ton of cool positech bargains. Production Line is NOT discounted, nor will it be in any other sales this year, but you can buy it from the link below for $17.99 :D

Your game sells…because your game sells. (or the opposite)

Posted on October 22, 2017

How many people are playing PUBG now? 2 million? 2 billion? 2 trillion? Whatever the number, we know its insane. We also know that its player-growth was not slow and steady, but what seemed to be an accelerating exponential growth. It seems that pretty much everywhere I go, I keep seeing those same exponential graphs of growth. A few things are growing at an incredible rate. Its not especially relevant, but lets look at the robot company KUKA and its share price:

Holy fuck. Now one could argue (and I do), that this is people suddenly realizing the potential for future revenue and market share that a long established high quality robotics firm has in a super-accelerating market. But one could also argue that its just the herd mentality, or people buying KUKA because other people have bought KUKA. Be honest…if you have savings you are thinking about it now aren’t you? FWIW, I’ve doubled my investment :D

I remember a long time ago standing in a physical store (GAME) fondling a boxes copy of world-of-warcraft. I was not the target market for the game. I didn’t really play MMO games, I didn’t like fantasy games, I was not excited by the name, description or the videos I had seen. But there I was, holding the box thinking that maybe I should play it too.

Maybe I SHOULD play it TOO.

Bizarrely this is normal, and in some ways primitively rational. if everyone in your cave is only eating the red berries, you only eat the red berries. if everyone else flees from the tiger, you do too. Its a decent survival instinct when it comes to identifying both danger, and a decent source of food. Its absolutely fucking useless when it comes to entertainment.

I saw the comedian Stewart lee live last night, and he has a hilarious rant about people asking him if he has seen Game Of Thrones. I especially loved it, because I dont watch Game Of Thrones, but the SOCIAL PRESSURE to watch it is quite high. I even tried an episode of Westworld (FFS can they squeeze any more sexual violence or rape fantasies into a single episode?) because ‘everyone’ was watching it…

And I admit I am part of the problem. if you haven’t seen Silicon Valley, I will lecture you on how you should, because its awesome, everyone agrees etc…

So how does this relate to games and indie game development? Well basically there is a line, somewhere, and above that line, you go into a positive spiral of awesomeness. More people play your game, so more ‘friends’ see that their friends are playing, and they grab the game too, then steam notices that the time played and the ‘conversion’ is going up, so it gets displayed to more people, so more people get the game, so more streamers notice it and start wondering if they should stream it and…

And there is also another line. below this line, nobody is playing the game. The steam forums are empty because nobody has any questions. Nobody sees their friends playing, and the game is not in any charts. Nobody streams it, because nobody is playing it. Nobody is buying it so the dev earns no money for any PR. No journalist writes about it because frankly nobody is playing/streaming/tweeting about it…and down we go into the vortex of failure.

As a games producer/marketer/business person, your job is to aim for the high line, and live in fear of the low line. Be aware that 95% of indie games are below that second line. How can you fix this? There are basically two systems at play:

OPTION 1:  MONEY

Basically this is ads, and its also stuff like appearing at every show, and getting in the faces of taste-making players, streamers, bloggers and so-on. Appearing at a show is EXPENSIVE and its basically advertising. You do this if you have money. If a show takes 4 days and costs you £4k, then you have to be a pretty successful dev to be worrying more about the time than the money in that case. (Even then you can reduce the burden by hiring someone to go to the show, or only sending 1 team member).

OPTION 2: TIME

Social media is your friend. Hang out on every game forum, every social media site, post about your game, the making of your game, the financing of your game, the support of your game, everything. Reply to every comment thread and every review. make every customer feel special, even the angry ones. Aim to turn every player into a fan, listen to every concern and promise to address it, keep the players informed as to what you are working on. All of this is free, but really time consuming. take this option if you have no money, but are young and enthusiastic, or have a team size > 1.

Also be aware both systems rely on you making the best game you possibly can. That goes without saying.

Me? I tend to choose option 1 because a) I am time-limited, b) I live in nowheresville and 3)I’m not very extroverted. The big question is probably ‘where is the line’. To be honest, I’m not sure, but I know its definitely above $1,000 a day in steam revenue. I have some evidence that $2,500 a day in revenue will be self-sustaining for a long time, but below $1,000? thats not momentum at all, thats just heading into a downwards spiral. YMMV.