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

My 2016. A year in review.

Posted on December 20, 2016

Its not even Christmas yet, but fuck it, I’m typing this now. So how was 2016 for Cliffski/Positech?

Lets start with the easy stuff: Statistics! Oh how I love statistics. Looking at steam, my companies revenue comparing the last 365 days…

Steam revenue is down 19%. Steam units sold are down 16% suggesting not much in the way of price pressure downwards. Income from other channels, like direct sales, GoG, Humble seem pretty steady.

We released 2 games this year: Political Animals and Democracy 3 Africa. neither of them set the world on fire, although D3:A is currently profitable (yay!). PA may break even in the long run. We also released Democracy 3:Electioneering, which didn’t do quite as well as I hoped, but I’m still glad I did it, as I enjoyed making it, and it kind of ‘fleshed out’ an area that was missing in the games coverage of politics in general. Democracy 3 & Big Pharma continue to sell well, as do some older titles.

In other business news, we got a retail deal signed for Big Pharma and Democracy 3 in Poland, which was some cash & some nice shiny boxes for my shelf :D. D3:Africa was my first experiment at trusting someone else to write code that I would put the positech development name to, which was a big step. In PR terms, we were a bit too low key. I didn’t give any major talks this year, nor show any games personally at shows, although Jeff showed off Democracy 3:Africa. There was GDC, and a trip to Steam Dev days, both of which were worth doing personally, even if not really justified in PR terms.

We also invested in new games, notably shadowhand, which will be released soon, and despite being quite late development wise, may prove to be a bit of an indie hit. Its the sort of game that does very well through word of mouth. I have my fingers crossed for that one. Also… I started work on Production Line officially (I had been developing it slowly for ages secretly). Roughly a year ago it looked like this:

It now looks better.

In Business…but not games news…we carried on investing in renewable energy stuff, which gives about a 7-10% return, which is pretty good in these days of low interest rates. Technically my best non-games investment was probably a robotics tracker fund that is up 34% (yay!). I’m a big fan of diversifying investments and income sources, as I hate to be too dependent on just one business relationship. This does mean I now spend more time on the phone talking to banks and accountants than I would like, and I don’t consider either activity to be much fun, but its probably well worth my time.

In personal terms, my usual resolve to be ‘calmer’ each year hasn’t completely worked, although I do get less angry about things than I used to, especially in person. Due to hurting my arm just before summer started I totally failed to do archery this year, but have discovered the joy of casual puzzle games on an ipad attached to an exercise bike, which seems to be my best bet at losing weight. My BMI is 23.5, which is healthy, but I hate having any sort of belly. For years I was a boatbuilder, and we had muscles, not flab.

We raised some money for War Child this year, haven’t got final figures yet, but probably about $14k. We also finally met some representatives from the Cameroon organisation we built that school with. Hopefully we will do more of that soon.

One thing that *is* business related that I started doing weekly development videos for YouTube showing progress on Production Line. So far I have done 9, and I expect that to be more like 50 by the time the game *ships*. I’m well aware of how important youtube is, and how many gamers prefer content to be in video form. I don’t want to be one of those dinosaurs still updating their geocities page in 2016 and wondering where everyone has gone. I’m hopefully getting better at it, despite not having a face or voice for such things.

If I have learned one business lesson in 2016, its to take my time more with games, and to get opinions from gamers early. This was the first year we started using professional player research companies, and I intend to embrace this sort of thing more with a  paid-alpha program for Production Line. The other semi-business lesson I learned was related to the stock market, and thats to set a stop loss when my shares are high, but never sell them otherwise. I am very guilty of ‘banking my winnings’ too early.

If there has been any *theme* to positechs 2016 its been one of holding steady. We have not expanded to a great extent, and we have maintained a fairly constant release schedule and work schedule. Earnings took a dip, mostly due to a lack of a *big-name* first party release. With luck, that will be next year with Production Line.  On reflection, 2016 went very very quickly. It seems like only yesterday I was stood in a car factory in Michigan doing research.

Hope you all had a good year.

 

Production Line video blog: #9 Researching robot upgrades. MORE ROBOTS

Posted on December 18, 2016

Can you believe I have made it to NINE video blogs and still haven’t set up an alpha purchase date yet? Neither can I. Here is the aforementioned bloggage:

Work seems to be progressing quite nicely on the game. I added some placeholder music, fixed a bunch of relatively minor GUI bugs, and now have those floating currency things back (working better), and proper locks on researchable stuff. I also switched from reporting daily sales to hourly, and also to a system where if you don’t produce power it gets purchased for you 9expensive, but necessary at the start).

I’d love to know what people think, and happy to answer questions in the next video even if I don’t do so in the comments.

Cheers

Interim shadowhand update

Posted on December 17, 2016

Just reminding everyone that YES…we are still publishing Shadowhand, the innovative card-game/rpg/visual novel that features a female highwaywoman… Just to prove it…here is a video by programmer Jake Birkett talking about all the various clothing options for the main character…

First World Geek problems

Posted on December 14, 2016

This has been a few days of severe first world geek problems. I am well aware how pitiful my woes will seem to people. I find great humour in the idea of pitying someone for a minor blip in an otherwise pretty cushy life, and find first world problems to be a bountiful well of amusement. I am still slightly amused by this gif, even after all these years:

So anyway, let me tell you a tale of woe, and you can laugh and experience the pleasure of schadenfreude in blog form. Also why can’t wordpress spell check schadenfreude?

Yesterday, when checking my email first thing in the morning, I had no internet connection. This is *no big deal*, as occasionally our line drops. We live in the countryside, our internet is delivered by tiny tiny copper wires over telegraph poles, rather than nice modern fiber cables underground. Do not get me started on how expensive this would be to fix (the current quote is about £50k). Anyway…it normally connects pretty quickly. But this time…it did not. taking note that my usually responsive ISP had not replied top recent emails from me…I used my spider sense to detect something was wrong and phoned them, only to get a distressing message on an answerphone. here it is in web page form:

To pit another way: “Fuck you. We haven’t been paying our BT bill, and now you are fucked. ahahahaha”. Yuip…my ISP apparently went bust yesterday.

So yikes. I immediately phone BT to see just how quickly I can get set up with them “10 working days”. Ahahaha. No thanks. So I call someone else, in this case ‘Zen internet’ who also say ’10 working days’. Realizing this is not a joke, but actually the norm in the UK in 2016 (that of course does not prevent it being a joke as well), I sign up to them. Shortly afterwards I spot another ISP saying they are managing to transfer people from my ISP within hours. I switch to them! And then cancel Zen (this took ages, phonecalls…emails…). Then today I get told by the new ISP that no…in my case it will in fact be ten working days.

Christmas with no broadband. OH MY GOD.

Anyway, during all this, I went and met a buddy for lunch and a chat about games & stuff. On the way home, I take a corner a bit too tight in a car park and scratch & even slightly dent my shiny black electro-beast of a car. I have already got a quote for previous dentage, and reckon in total, I’m looking at a £2k+ repair bill.

Fuck.

My Cool image as the person with the shiny black techno-space-car and the ‘fastest internet in the village’ lies in tatters, with small children dancing around it, jeering like some twisted version of a marillion music-video directed by an angry Tim Burton.

So hmmm. Things going a bit badly on that front. On the GOOD front, I’ve got a lot of work done on production Line, to do with Robots and upgrades, and actual ‘game’ stuff. Its feeling a lot more like a playable game than before, which bodes really well.  My internet is currently running through a usb-dongle to a mobile phone-created tethered hotspot. I do hope I don’t run out of my 2 gig allowance before I  …</end of signal>

 

 

 

 

Why your indie budget calculations are massively, stupidly WRONG on every level.

Posted on December 12, 2016

I see a lot of pitches that contain budgets, I also read a lot of post mortems. Some of them make me laugh, some make me cry, some of them actually make me irrationally angry about how badly wrong they can be. Just in case you are too busy to read this blog, here is the TL;DR:

The cost of your office chair is not contained entirely within your budget for fucks sake.

And yes…this comes from ME the person who famously argued (seriously) that everyone making an indie game should buy (second hand if necessary, mine was ex-display) a Herman Miller Aeron ultimate office chair. (I paid £800).

chair

I see a lot of budgets that look like this:

2 man-years development @ $90,000 per developer.

2 x top-end development PCs.

2 x office chairs

etc…

I don’t reply, but if I did, it would involve swear words and lots of capital letters. Why? Lets look at it like this shall we? I need a new boiler fitted (I don’t…but lets indulge in the willing suspension of disbelief for storytelling purposes). I phone around and ask for quotes from some plumbers. Here is a sample quote:

Quote for new boiler:

1 x New boiler £2,500

1 x plumbers van £15,200

1 x spanner £4

1 x blowtorch £45

1 x plumbers shoes: £65…

plumber

Aha! hold on! we have just realised how totally flipping insane this is haven’t we? Please tell me its obvious…please tell me I’m not the crazy one here? I’m literally begging you. The chair I am sat on typing this is the chair I bought shortly after moving house about 6 years ago. its the chair I coded all the DLC for Gratuitous Space Battles in, also the chair I made Democracy 3, Democracy 3:Africa, Democracy 3’s DLC, Gratuitous Space Battles 2, Gratuitous Tank Battles, and the chair I published Big Pharma and Redshirt from. Its the chair I’m coding for Production Line from. Have I made my point? I hope so. Also its as good as new, I suspect I’m less than half way through this chairs working life. My per-game costs for this chair are probably about £50, of the £800 I invested in it.

Depreciation and Capital Investment are things. If you want a publisher to invest money in you, you MUST at least understand them as vague concepts. Also…fuck publishing, if you are starting in a career as an indie developer (or anything!) you have to understand them. You have to understand investment, you have to understand the long term. It seems a growing number of people are attracted to the ‘romance’ (ha!) of being an entrepreneur, without any willingness to understand what it really means. There are also a LOT of wannabe game developers who think ‘paying your dues’ is something that happens to other people, or only in the movies. While I am annoying and offending everyone, lets go the whole hog and share some realities:

Reality Check #1: You having graduated with a degree in Computer Science does not mean you are gods gift to programming. You will be VERY VERY lucky to get a junior coders job fixing bugs in the tools. Expect to do that for at least a year.

Reality Check #2: Its quite practical to employ programmers on the other side of the planet, even without meeting them. I’ve never met half of the Squeaky Wheel team, and they did a great job. Your competition is global, not the other guys/girls in town.

Reality Check #3: Some cost comparisons:

Consumer Prices in Manila are 59.57% lower than in San Francisco, CA
Consumer Prices Including Rent in Manila are 74.11% lower than in San Francisco, CA
Rent Prices in Manila are 86.59% lower than in San Francisco, CA
Restaurant Prices in Manila are 73.26% lower than in San Francisco, CA
Groceries Prices in Manila are 66.51% lower than in San Francisco, CA
Local Purchasing Power in Manila is 57.87% lower than in San Francisco, CA

Remind me why a studio based in Silicon Valley, made up of young (inexperienced) recent graduates is a better bet for making commercially successful indie games than…I dunno ANYWHERE else on the planet? Oh and by the way, pointing out that health insurance costs are expensive in the US just makes the case for hiring someone from Europe/rest-of-world even stronger.

I know I’m coming across as one of the famous monty python yorkshiremen sketch members..but jesus christ on a bike, why are so many people expecting to walk straight out of college in the west coast of the US straight into a middle class income in a much-desired profession without so much as breaking a sweat? Frankly, even if you DO have skills that are awesome enough to compete with the price differential against coders in other locations, I’d STILL prefer someone who had struggled, and was ‘hungry’ for success than someone who just ‘expected’ it.

I feel that generally there is a vast discrepancy between the income/lifestyle that many recent graduates ‘expect’ and the lifestyle & income they will actually get. I never expected to earn a tenth (seriously) of what I do now, and that’s why I still work as hard now as I did back then. I’m used to expecting to have to work my nuts off to stay in the industry and keep my head above water. Why am I MORE paranoid about competition that many people who are so new to the industry?

 

When I started as a programmer, There was way less domestic competition, international competition was very low, we had little competition from serious middleware (most studios made their own engine), and nobody thought the industry was a path to riches. It was still VERY hard to get a job, and my first job was indeed…tools programming,  and I had to commute four hours a day (yes…four) to get to and from that job, to earn HALF what I’d earned a year before working in IT support. Just because people like me, who have been coding for 36 years (yes really) and released over a dozen games have nice flash cars doesn’t mean you get awarded one on your first day in the industry.

TL;DR: Your salary expectations are very high, and you need to google ‘depreciation’ and ‘investment’.