{"id":3316,"date":"2015-04-15T16:41:47","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T15:41:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=3316"},"modified":"2015-04-15T16:41:47","modified_gmt":"2015-04-15T15:41:47","slug":"the-blog-post-the-day-before-release","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2015\/04\/15\/the-blog-post-the-day-before-release\/","title":{"rendered":"The blog post the day before release"},"content":{"rendered":"

So lets do this. Lets lay out what I’m thinking \/ hoping \/ dreading. And look at how we got here :D. Initially my plan was to do Gratuitous Space Battles 2<\/a> as a nice relaxing project after the mental weightlifting and stress of doing Democracy 3<\/a>, which may look like just a screen with some pretty icons, but is a fiendishly complicated and intricate simulation that is pure HELL to code. Making a nice simple sequel to my space game was sure to be a nice easy ride in comparison, and would relax me.<\/p>\n

Ahahaha.<\/p>\n

That was in August 2013, when I first started talking to the spaceship artist about how to do proper 3D-style lighting effects. Here we are 20 months later. It may not seem like it took that long, because it happened alongside some of the Democracy 3 DLC, and I worked on it for *ages* before going public with what I was working on.<\/p>\n

Back in the early days, screenshots looked like this.<\/p>\n

\"early\"<\/a><\/p>\n

They look a tad better now :D.<\/p>\n

At some point along the development path for the game, things started to balloon out of all possible proportion. I got insanely ambitious with the technical side. I’d never done much multi-threading or multiple-render target stuff before, and fairly limited shaders. Suddenly I was going full-throttle with all that stuff. I bought two 27″ identical monitors purely to test the huge 5160 res possibilities for high-end hardware. I added more and more effects and content, and ended up giving in and hiring people to do a lot of stuff (hulk graphics, sound effects, we design) that I would have previously done myself. The cost went up, and up and up. The game has cost more than double what Democracy 3 cost, and that excludes my time. 20 months work. Yikes.<\/p>\n

So here we are. The game is on sale already through my site<\/a> as a beta but at midnight GMT tomorrow (16:00 PDT) it will go live on steam, humble store and GoG. At some point the next morning, a cheeky little ad campaign will start up to tell the masses about it. I will become loud and annoying on twitter, and become very, very stressed.<\/p>\n

Imagine taking no salary for twenty months, putting a big chunk of your savings in with the salary, and rolling a dice. That’s game development, and it is terrifying. Not just for game one, or two, but for game ten, eleven… This is a very very high stakes nerve wracking game, and at some point between midnight tomorrow and whatever time I drag myself to bed I’ll know if I made a good bet or a bad one.<\/p>\n

I’m eating lots of chocolate to combat the stress.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So lets do this. Lets lay out what I’m thinking \/ hoping \/ dreading. And look at how we got here :D. Initially my plan was to do Gratuitous Space Battles 2 as a nice relaxing project after the mental weightlifting and stress of doing Democracy 3, which may look like just a screen with<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… The blog post the day before release<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gratuitous-space-battles","category-gsb2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3316","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=3316"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3318,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3316\/revisions\/3318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}