{"id":165,"date":"2008-12-29T16:03:15","date_gmt":"2008-12-29T16:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=165"},"modified":"2008-12-29T16:03:15","modified_gmt":"2008-12-29T16:03:15","slug":"2008-for-positech-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2008\/12\/29\/2008-for-positech-games\/","title":{"rendered":"2008 for Positech Games"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ll be away for a few days over new year so will not be blogging. So this is the last opportunity to sum up what happened in Positech Land during 2008.<\/p>\n<h2>What I did:<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>I finished and released <a href=\"http:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/kudos2\">Kudos 2<\/a>. Arguably my most polished game to date, although due to the US elections, Democracy 2 is currently outselling it slightly.<\/li>\n<li>I finally changed my game engine to support DirectX9. This was long overdue.<\/li>\n<li>I wrote a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/talkingtopirates.html\">blog post<\/a> that catapulted me onto the radio, slashdot, digg, kotaku and lots of other places, and got me briefly known as the &#8216;pirate-sympathising game developer&#8217;, which is a bit of a miscast role, but it proved to be a fantastic way to get real honest feedback about my games, and also my website from people who hadn&#8217;t heard of me. Also got me my first ever check for writing for a newspaper.<\/li>\n<li>I Switched to a dedicated linux server mainly to prevent the piracy article traffic killing my website. It&#8217;s MUCH more expensive :(<\/li>\n<li>I met up with some fellow indie game developers in Birmingham, got extremely drunk, and then met some of them again in much more local Woking. Finally met people like &#8216;grey alien&#8217; &#8216;princec&#8217; &#8216;papillion&#8217; and the pickford brothers all of which I&#8217;d previously chatted to only online.<\/li>\n<li>I redesigned the positech website, and made it look tons better than it used to. Short of throwing money at a web designer, I&#8217;m not sure what else I should do to it right now.<\/li>\n<li>I seriously considered emigrating, because the UK sucks, and the cost of living here sucks. I&#8217;m still thinking about it.<\/li>\n<li>I changed the blog address to be cliffski.com<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>What I failed to do:<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Make lots more money. The profit for 2008 was a bit below 2007. 2007 was a bumper year thanks to some good sales of the original Kudos, and the fact that Kudos: Rock Legend didn&#8217;t take that long to make. I still make a reasonable amount of money for one guy programming games, so I&#8217;m not complaining.<\/li>\n<li>Make the obscure top-secret game. I have this game idea I keep talking about. It&#8217;s either doomed, or awesome. I just don&#8217;t know yet. In any case, it&#8217;s been put back again. maybe a full year while I do this space thing.<\/li>\n<li>Hire anyone. I&#8217;m still one guy working in a spare bedroom. I&#8217;ve employed contractors from time to time to do art and sound and music, but it&#8217;s still just me designing and coding. I have thought a lot about how to expand the business, but still haven&#8217;t made any concrete steps towards doing it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All in all, 2008 was a pretty good year. Kudos 2 was fun to make, and I&#8217;ve kept the business afloat despite the casual games &#8216;boom&#8217; narrowing to just remakes of about 3 different games, and the global financial meltdown.<\/p>\n<p>Bottom line is, I&#8217;m still here, still making indie games for the PC, not shabby console ports based on movie tie-ins, and there are free demos, mod-support and no DRM.<\/p>\n<p>Happy new year everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ll be away for a few days over new year so will not be blogging. So this is the last opportunity to sum up what happened in Positech Land during 2008. What I did: I finished and released Kudos 2. Arguably my most polished game to date, although due to the US elections, Democracy 2<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-right\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Continue Reading&#8230; 2008 for Positech Games<\/span><a class=\"btn btn-secondary continue-reading\" href=\"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2008\/12\/29\/2008-for-positech-games\/\">Continue Reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}