Cliffskis Mumblings...

This Blog Has Moved

2008-05-28T20:32:00.000Z

At last...

to here:

http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/

Moving from blogger

2008-05-28T18:21:00.003Z

I'm thinking of moving the blog to the positech site. anyone recommend any decent blogging software I can install easily?

Today I got some work done on kudos 2, then dealt with some crap on the internet. It seems every COD 4 game is full of children being abusive to each other. I also got loads of pathetic abuse from game devs on some forum. For some reason, whole swathes of people in 'the industry' hate my guts and are constantly abusive to me. Interestingly, they act the same way towards Derek Smart. I think the problem is that me and Derek are our own boss, work from home on games we design, love and enjoy working on. There are a *lot* of bitter spiteful people in the industry who hate that, and they deal with it by hurling abuse at us.
Fuck em, I earn more than I did when I did their job, and work at home when I feel like it. Sucks to be them :D I like to keep my customers happy, but the industry can be sniffy at me if they like. I don't need them.

Ho hum.

Optimising for Intel and their ilk

2008-05-26T13:48:00.002Z

I spent most of today trying to speed up the 'choose game' screen' for Democracy 2. This part of the game runs slowly and several people have mentioned it.
The thing is, it runs between 165 and 300 FPS on my machine.
So after a days fiddling it now runs between 250 and 800 FPS on my machine.
I just hope this means it goes faster than it used to on those crappy low end 'cards' they put in laptops.
Text rendering is SLOWWWWWWWWWWWW.
At least the way I do it (with fancy spacing) is.

New Activities (What makes you feel confident?)

2008-05-23T15:57:00.002Z

I'm thinking about new activities to add to the game. Ideally I want lots of variety, but not too many overlapping ones so the GUI doesn't get too full.
So I was thinking of these two:

Sunbathing
Health Spa

I reckon sunbathing is like sleeping, only you get a tan. So boredom is pretty high, but it reduces tiredness. It could increase charisma (nearest I have to attractiveness) and maybe confidence.

health spa could increase charisma, confidence and happiness whilst reducing stress. In fact, would it increase confidence? if not, what does?

What makes you feel more confident?

Why tutorials are a pain.

2008-05-22T14:47:00.002Z

I'm revamping the code that powers the tutorial for Kudos 2. You might think that tutorials are a fairly easy thing to add to a game, but they are not.
If the game is really really simple, it's not a big deal, as witnessed by one famous game's entire instructions:

Avoid Missing Ball for High Score.

But Kudos 2 isn't pong, so it needs more than that. I'm using a similar approach to Democracy 2, which is a tutorial which highlights different GUI elements in turn and presents an overview of the game, whilst getting the player to make a few mouse clicks here and there. In addition, when you first play the game 'Hint' windows will pop up when new things happen to give you more information.

It's hard to code a tutorial without writing 'spaghetti' code. In other words, its tough to stick with the principles of Object-Oriented programming and not have lots of code spread around the place.
A tutorial, by definition, should cover the whole game. It should also prevent the player screwing it up with an errant keystroke or mouse click. In simple terms, you switch off player input at the tutorial start, and on again at the end, but that's not good enough if you want to support mouse clicks and other input during the tutorial itself.
So you end up writing 'hooks' into your input code to let the tutorial define what buttons can and can not be clicked at any point of time. This can get a bit annoying.

Fortunately my engine now has a better scripting system tan it used to, so it's pretty easy for me to 'label' buttons and windows in the code, and then let a script close them, allow or deny them, or highlight them. This means most of the real 'control' is done by scripts and thus easily edited and debugged.
It's taken most of the day to get it working the way I like, and that's without actually rewriting the new tutorial text, spell and grammar checking and so on.
But it's a step towards the far off goal of finishing the game. So hurrah!

Something interesting about the piratebay.

2008-05-21T19:51:00.002Z

Something I found out today when reading a post on a forum.

ThePirateBay is one of these websites that lets everyone steal everyone else's work, whilst selling advertising space. They make a fortune, and pretend to be some sort of bullshit pseudo-communist anti-corporate 'stick it to the man' political campaign. Apparently, we will throw off the shackles of capitalism by downloading DVD rips of Spiderman 3.
Whatever.

But whats interesting is who actually funds them. It's a notorious right wing Swedish political campaigner and millionaire:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/07/pirate_bay_accepted_right_wing_money/

From wikipedia:

""In April 2007, a long-standing rumour was confirmed on Swedish talk show Bert, namely that Pirate Bay had also received financial support from right-wing entrepreneur Carl Lundström. This caused some furor since Lundström, an heir to the Wasabröd fortune, is known for financing several far-right political parties and movements like Sverigedemokraterna and Bevara Sverige Svenskt (Keep Sweden Swedish). The size of Lundström's contributions is unknown, as are his motives. In the talk show, Pirate Bay speaker Tobias Andersson acknowledged that "without Lundström's support, Pirate Bay would not have been able to start" and claimed that most of the money went towards acquiring servers and bandwidth.[9][10][11] Both Pirate Bay and Piratbyrån have since declined to comment on Lundström's involvement.""

Awesome.
So next time you are chatting to some thieving kiddie who tells you he loves the piratebay because they are sticking it to the man, and fighting against "teh evil corporate fascists" remind him (or her) that their heroes are working for a right wing millionaire businessman.

If this wasn't true, you can bet the kids who are put up as the public face of TPB would be out there denying it.
They don't

Why go to the office?

2008-05-19T22:02:00.001Z

Nice blog post by seth godin:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/05/the-new-standar.html

"
I've worked in three companies that had lots of people and lots of cubes, and I spent the entire day walking around. I figured that was my job. The days where I sat down and did what looked like work were my least effective days. It's hard for me to see why you'd bother having someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.
"

Sprucing up the special activities

2008-05-19T18:30:00.002Z

I spent today rejigging the graphics for the 'develop theory' and 'investigate' story activities for scientists and journalists. I need to get a lot more stuff like that put into the game. Hopefully I will be more productive tomorrow than today, when i felt like i coasted through it all quite a bit.

Sales have been quite nice recently, 19% higher than last month, which I'm putting down to lots of advertising I've been doing. Hopefully it more profitable, rather than just more revenue for the same profits.

I have so much admin stuff going on regarding the company right now, with so many old publishing deals, so much potential and existing press, and so much tech support and promotion, that there isn't enough time to handle all of it as it should be done.
Ideally I would train up someone to do it all, although I can't see that happening this year, maybe next.

I think I'd like to be a 100% game designer who never wrote code or did business stuff, or a 100% business man who didn't develop the games. Doing both at once means that neither gets done as well as they should be, which is very frustrating.

Just played COD 4 for the first time in a week. Forgot how l33t a game it was for a while :D

Busy Day

2008-05-16T14:26:00.002Z

Today I had to:

Go food shopping (zzzz)
Feed a friends cats
Argue on the phone with British Airways (grrrr)
Then...
Do a new patch for Democracy adding voter support, update the demo and full versions, upload them, post on the forums and update the server version check code.
Then...
Fix a crash bug in Kudos 2
Add some new text and code so the diary entries for when you have a dog, or a dirty house comment on this fact
Check the code for (and fix it) regarding coming home to a dirty house
Buy two new bark sound effects for the dog.
Chase up a publisher, then recommend a new potential publisher to my agents.
Reply to emails, and deal with website forum posts.
Check the frame rate of the new GUI for Kudos 2 using FRAPS. (seems very fast).
Install and play the Sims 2 for a bit as a way of seeing how it compares to kudos (big and slow, and a bit irritating, but lots of content).
It's only 3.30PM. I have vague plans to do some decorating later.
bah!

"Jesus is pessimistic"

2008-05-14T16:23:00.002Z

To make sure I got an accurate spread of forenames, I found some site with the top few hundred names in the USA, and pasted them into the names files.
Whilst testing some fonts, I suddenly discover one of my friends is called Jesus.
Not only that but apparently 'jesus is pessimistic' and 'spending time with him brings you down.'

Hmmm.

I think I'll remove that name, people will get upset...

Fiddling with the Gooey

2008-05-13T16:28:00.001Z

I knew deep down that the art style of my interface was a bit of a kludge. Basically the character art doesn't look right alongside the dialogue boxes and similar bits.
It clashes.
So today I've been reworking it, making it simpler, cleaner and more line-art cartoon drawn style thing.
I think it's getting better.

last night I went to the theatre, and walked out after 30 minutes because it was BAD. Some people just are no good at what they do. if you play night after night to a near empty theatre and people often walk out, you probably suck.
Know when you are no good at what you do. Switching careers may help. I'm currently on career #3, and doing WAY better at it than career #1 (boatbuilding) and #2 (music).
I'd hate to have retired a penniless, crap boat builder.

Kudos 2 screenshot

2008-05-12T12:45:00.002Z

As promised. The friends portraits are placeholders right now:

Click the image to see full size.

New Voter Groups

2008-05-11T15:51:00.002Z

I've revisited Democracy 2 this weekend. Playing GalCiv 2 reminds me how cool it is when an existing game gets added to and improved to make it better, so I took a look at the Democracy 2 modding forums to see what people would like.
One of the loudest requests is to get moddable Voter Groups.

the game ships with 21 different voter groups, which covers a LOT of ground, but doesn't cover some vital ones such as:
Young People
Ethnic Minorities
Atheists
Gay
Drug users
etc...

Modding the actual code to support more voter groups through modded text files is easy. Modding the GUI to seamlessly allow n extra groups where n is a variable isn't.
I think I'm going to stick (for now) with the option of adding in up to 3 extra groups. the game may get unwieldy with more anyway. This has entailed all sorts of fidgety code changes, and I was originally hoping to get a setup where you can add new voter groups entirely without touching the games main data directory, but that is proving tricky.
It's all worth doing anywya, an I'm throwing in a new country (USA) as well.

Behind Schedule

2008-05-08T20:43:00.002Z

I was planning on releasing some kudos 2 screenshots this week, but it does look unlikely right now. I've wasted some time, got distracted, and basically not got around to it.

When I started work on Kudos 2, I was planning on it being a quick game, targeted squarely at the casual games portals. Now I've really got into it, its turning into quite a major game. It's probably more aimed at the Sims crowd than the 'diner dash' crowd.
I still plan to sell it through portals, so I'm hoping that the finished game will come accross as being really content and feature-rich, in comparison with the normal point and click games on those portals.
Ideally, I'd get them to sell it for $22.95. $19.95 really isn't a good enough price for a game that has so much more in it.
Ho hum.

Game pricing and individual utility

2008-05-06T13:29:00.002Z

What is the right price for an indie game?

$22.95? $19.95? $9.95?

maybe it depends on the game? A simple shooter is maybe cheaper than a Civ IV style game?

I don't think that matters at all. The genre, the budget, the production values are all irrelevant. What matters is the customer. the INDIVIDUAL customer.

I know people who would rather stick razor blade in their eyes than listen to Yngwie J Malmsteen, but I'll pay money to hear him. I know people who would rather gnaw their own legs off than watch a BBC costume drama, but I love em. What am I trying to say?

PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT.

but WAY more than that, peoples perceived value in a piece of entertainment varies massively. In an ideal market, you would extract the exact amount from each customer that matches the utility they get from the product. Some people LOVE democracy, and I'd like them to pay me $100. Others think its pretty cool and I want $22.95 from them. Some think its fun for 20 minutes and I want $1 from them.
A lot of companies do this, by having 'collectors editions' and 'value' versions and 'gold' versions. It's just an elaborate way of segmenting the market and preventing the real fans getting the casual browsers price. Cheap afternoon cinema tickets are a classic example.

I sometimes see people panic about games prices because "There are tons of cheaper games and some of them are really good". This will not work as a pricing strategy. The value of a game is unique to each buyer. it doesn't matter that Halo 3 looks better and cost more and lasts longer than Cute Knight. I got more fun out of Cute Knight, so it's 'worth' more to me.

Indie game devs should not try to compete on price, but on gameplay, quality and innovation.

DROID ASSAULT

2008-05-05T13:33:00.003Z

I'm pimping a new game. Not one developed by me, but by a fellow developer. It's an arcadey space shootey robot maze blasting transporting capturing beaming thing called droid assault that looks like this.

Here is the full info:
http://www.positech.co.uk/droid/index.html
The developer is insanely generous and selling it for just TEN DOLLARS. Buy it quickly (there is a demo) because it can't saty that cheap foerever!

mouse update

2008-05-02T14:00:00.001Z

The store only had this:
habu mouse link
but holy smoke its cool :D

Flickery Mouse nightmare

2008-05-02T10:56:00.002Z

I think I need a new mouse. My mouse input has been unpredictable for a while. Normally, this manifests as the mouse pointer skittering over the screen like a spider on LSD with the ability to teleport. The cause of this is invariable a cat hair from Jadzia, which is all crinkly like one of those chips, and causes havoc with the amazing laser tech.
But not this time.
This time, I think the actual mouse chip hardware doo-dads are 'not operating within normal parameters', as people in star trek would say.

In any case, I can't code, or indeed play games with random double clicking going on. So I better get out there and get a new one. The chances of PC World having a wired intellimouse explorer are not great.

In other news, I am off up London to this games thing tomorrow. Its a bit of a trek to get there, so hopefully it will prove worthy of the journey. I have no idea what to expect, but I know at least 2 people (vaguely) who claim they will be there, so that's good. Then in the evening I'm going to a nice local restaurant for a mates birthday, so that's all good stuff.

I am THIS CLOSE to having screenshots of Kudos 2 to show to you...

GameCamp

2008-04-30T17:28:00.002Z

Anyone going to this?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamecamp
I should be there. Post here if you are going.
I can't get anyone tickets for it, sorry!

GTA vs Wii Fitness PICK YOUR TEAM!

2008-04-28T16:02:00.002Z

On Friday Wii Fit was released in the UK, My copy turned up today. On the plus side, I'm apparently ideal weight. On the downside, my wii fitness age is 49 :(
Tomorrow GTA IV is released, let the orgies of violence and crime begin!
so...
Get fit and healthy, or shoot people and run people over. Which will you be doing? (I played GTA 1 and 2 but went off it then, I'm a wii fit kind of guy).

Town names, cats and Articles

2008-04-25T15:16:00.002Z

If you want your town name to be one of the random town names in kudos 2, email it to me. (cliff AT positech blah blah).
here are some new cat pics:
http://www.positech.co.uk/cats.html
And here is an article thing I wrote:
http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2008/04/24/making_gaming_better/1
http://digg.com/pc_games/Making_Gaming_Better

Movies in Kudos 2

2008-04-24T10:33:00.004Z

Apart from other stuff, today I'm doing some of the new movies you can see for Kudos 2. I'm trying to make it so that all of the 'content' in the old game is replaced with newer stuff, so people don't feel like they are getting the old stuff again.
One change I'm making is to give watching a movie more varied effects.
In the past, all thrillers were the same, all comedies the same etc. Some would be better or worse quality (the movie guide told you which) so you had that, but you didn't really care about the movie descriptions and titles, other than hopefully finding them a bit funny.
This time, the movie title and description is a clue to the more complex effects of the movie.

So if you invite some friends to go see "The happy puppy" ' a hilarious tale of animated dogs and the fun they have!' Then the film is likely to make you happier. whereas if you go to see "Vladimirs funeral" 'three hour epic telling the tragedy of the potato famine in cold war ukraine", then it might make you less happy, and maybe bored, but also raise your culture and knowledge.
Some films will be boring, others exciting, some will make you pessimistic, or optimistic, or even help you learn a bit of foreign languages.

I like it when games give you clues as to what the consequences of your decisions will be, without waving it in your face like you are an idiot :D.

Hating the industry, loving the job

2008-04-23T18:22:00.002Z

Last few days I've got nothing but grief from people in 'the industry'.
Frankly I'm sick of 'the industry'.
I love games. But I hate some of the idiots working in the same industry as me. Thank f**k I don't have to work with anyone else any more who I don't get along with.

I like chatting to my customers about my games, and people doing the same thing as me, but there are far too many idiots making games in the 'big budget' industry that just wind me up. If you are passionate about games and thinking of going to work for a game developer, don't bother, you will hate it. Unless you thrive on insults and testosterone and bargging about how much unpaid overtime you all did. if you enjoy that, then go for it!

Bah!

Why My games have demos

2008-04-22T20:54:00.002Z

Every positech game has a demo. Every single one. And I've done more than you think. Maybe a dozen. Most of the older ones are a bit rubbish and not even linked form my homepage.
Anyway... I got into a massive argument today (on the web) about why a 'triple a' game didn't have a demo. Apparently making a demo was too much work, and not worth doing.
I never believe that.
Unless you want to sell through

a) hype
and
b) previous customers only

Then why would you not want people to try your product first? It's like making a movie and refusing to do a trailer for it, or recording an album but not letting them play tracks on the radio. It's mad.
I do demos because

a) I want people who aren't sure about buying the game to give it a try
b) I want people to be confident that the game will run on their machine
c) I want people to know what they are getting when they pay me.

I think that's just playing fair. I think ym games are GOOD. If i didn't, I'd keep working on them till they were. I have no publisher deadlines to meet.

It's amazing how angry the idea that demos should be available for triple A games makes some developers. I got one idiot saying "The game I worked on sold 6 million copies, how many did your last game sell?"
Well let's see, he was probably on a team of 100 people for 3 years. My games take one guy about 6 months to a year, or roughly 300 times less work. Without dedicated office space, its more like 500 times less. So I guess I need to sell 12,000 copies. Hold on, I get 90% of the money, so that means probably 3 times as much a royalty cut, so that means I need to sell 4,000 copies.
Given that the last game took more like 8 months, its closer to selling 2,600 copies, to get the same equivalent return on investment.
Interesting :D

Big Crowds Bug

2008-04-21T11:48:00.002Z

It seems kudos had a bit of a design flaw. If you invite bob out for a beer and he is entertaining, he has a +10 entertainment effect on you.
If you invite bob AND dave out, and maybe dave has a +10 IQ effect on you, bob STILL has the same effect.
It stands to reason that with the three of you, the entertainment value of bob needs to be diluted more. In other words, if you really want to be entertained, hang out just with bob. if you invite other people too, the effect won't be so strong. I just fixed this, as I revamped the code to accommodate up to 2 personality type per NPC.
I also need to check that your avatar gets bored if it does the same things too often, because I'm not sure that is true either (yet).

Affiliate deals

2008-04-20T13:52:00.002Z

Went away on holiday for just a day and a half. My god it is windy in the peak district.
Back today and doing some code housekeeping stuff. I now have 3 people who are potentially affiliates for Democracy 2.

What is an affiliate?

An affiliate (in indie game terms) is usually another game developer, who sells games similar to your own. Because we take 6 months to a year to make a game, there is very little 'news' on our websites, so between games we may sell other peoples games on commission. If you check www.positech.co.uk you will see I'm selling Lux. Sillysoft made lux, not me, but it's game that appeals to my customers, and Sillysoft cut me a percentage of any sales through me. In the same way, a few other game devs sell my stuff.

Affiliates are preferable in some ways to regular publishing deals, because
a) the people making money from your stuff are fellow struggling game devs
b) you still actually process the sale yourself, get the customers details for tech support purposes etc
c) you can change or cancel the deal at any time.

Affiliates are like the friendly, low-hassle community-based version of a publishing deal. They can be more lucrative too, because there is no extra layer of middlemen, just you and the other developer.

So don't be scared if you see some other dev selling my game, or me selling someone else's games. nobody is getting ripped off :D.

Personality Types

2008-04-17T16:30:00.002Z

I have a minor dilemma in Kudos 2.
I have more personality types than before, and up till today I've been thinking it was nice and simple and easy if each NPC only had 1 characteristic.
So Jack is Dull, Bob is Clever and Sally is Charismatic.
The thing is, you maybe only know 4-8 people at any one time, so its unlikely you will cover all the personality types, so the part of the game dealing with associating with positive personalities seems a bit lucky dip.
I can introduce you to more people (co-workers etc), but I know the best solution is to have people go back to having multiple types, like they did earlier in development.
So Bill is now Dull but Clever. Sally is Charismatic but dishonest. Lane is optimistic and friendly. etc etc.
This means a lot of GUI changes, plus code to ensure that only sensible groupings go together. (no optimistic + pessimistic people, lots of optimistic and charismatic ones etc etc.).

I want the game to be simple, but I want it to make sense too, and have people feel that their NPC friends are lifelike. I guess I need to change it.

In other news, olympus will repair my broken digital camera and mail it back for just £42. That's quite abargain, as I didn't really want to buy another one. Hurrah for olympus!

Took the other cat

2008-04-16T11:35:00.001Z

Jadzia *resisted* again this morning. we never even got close, she knew something was afoot and hid.
So we grabbed Jack and stuffed him in the vet-provided box and took him instead, so at least he has had 1 initial jab. That's 1 jab down, 3 to go, as they both need two. I ordered a new big cat box because that one seems much better than the tiny thing we try to stuff them into.
My arm is still covered in scratches and severe cuts :(.

back in game-dev land and I have finished off the revamp of the 'evening classes' GUI code this morning. It looks much nicer than before, which a cool blackboard effect, rather than a plain windowsy dialog.
This afternoon I'm going to have a look at improving some front end stuff. I'm keen to get some new avatar art in to the game so I can start showing people some screen-shots of the blasted thing.

Cat Scratch fever

2008-04-15T08:58:00.002Z

So... One of the possible long term plans is to emigrate somewhere nicer and cheaper. And one of the requirements for doing this is that you have up to date injections for your pets. 2 cats in my case.
Neither cat is up-to-date because they both have high resistance to being put in cat boxes to take to the vets.
99% of the stress of the vet trip (which is in the same road) is getting them *in* the box.
This morning we were prepared, we lured jadzia into the kitchen with food, and blocked off two doors, and placed a bin in front of the catflap. The cat box was already in the room opened. As she was eating, I grabbed her and stuffed her backwards into the box.

in theory.

In practice there was lots of screeching and whining, followed by her getting out of my hands and trying to escape, eventually somehow getting through the cat flap. I haven't seen her since.
I, however, look like I've been wrestling with Freddy Krueger, and have 18 separate incisions and scratches on my right hand. The blood loss alone was considerable.

So we now have borrowed a much bigger cat cage from the vets which opens at the top, and have been advised to pick her up using a towel. She is booked in again for tomorrow at 9AM. My predictions for success in this endeavour are very poor.

Tune in tomorrow for the results.

Faster Text Rendering

2008-04-13T18:56:00.003Z

I spent a chunk of today speeding up text rendering for Kudos 2 (and all future games).
If you are an beginner games coder you may be used to rendering(drawing) text like this:

WorkOutWhereToDrawText
SetTheCurrentFont
DrawText
WorkOutWhereToDrawText
SetTheCurrentFont
DrawText
etc...

But that doesn't cut it if you want to run really fast and lower your system requirements. Even with ninja video cards actually *drawing* anything is very slow. You don't want to tell the card to actually 'commit' any pixels until you:
a) know they will be seen and
b) have enough pixels ready to draw that its worth interrupting the card to give it more data.

Rendering text isn't a simple matter. If you have a block of text that needs word wrapping there are tons of calculations to do. How much are you scaling the text? what character equates to what part of what image, where can be break words in half? how wide was that last character, have we applied any kerning or leading to the current font, or alpha blending etc etc etc.

Because text tends to not change 60 times a second, it makes sense to 'cache' this stuff. That means that you do all these calculations, work out the final data, and then store it, for use later on. It's like preparing a quick and easy script for the video card so it knows what to do without lots of tedious re-calculating of stuff that doesn't change.

Of course *some* text is changing more often, and some windows appear in front of others, and some groups of text share the same font, and some don't... It all ends up a hideous spiders-web of code that looks a bit of a mess, but is in fact quite cunningly designed so that the amount of 'on the fly' calculating of what goes where is minimised. The player doesn't know any of this, its all transparent and hopefully just *works*. But that doesn't mean it doesn't take hours of fiddling, and measuring, and more fiddling, to get it all right.
Som coders render text out to a separate texture and just 'copy;' the finished text to the screen every frame. I have found that this works great on 95% of video cards. The other 5% just crash, without warning (cheers intel). Like most games coding, you spent 50% of the time catering to the edge cases of 5% of the hardware setups. That's why coders love consoles.

Online Activation is Inevitable and safe.

2008-04-11T15:17:00.003Z

I just had someone ask me if one of my games used online activation, saying they would not buy it if it did. I think this attitude is pretty rare, but I have never understood it. here is why:

1) Online activation is essential to prevent piracy.
Yes I know there are ways around it, but generally they are harder than bypassing a disk check. vital code can (in some systems) be kept on a server and never released into the hands of gamers. Piracy IS killing PC gaming, and pretty much every developer is using some kind of online integration or activation now. It helps kill casual piracy, which is the main concern.

2) It's no different to retail
If you buy clothes in a store, they come with a big bulky security tag that you cannot remove. the sole purpose of the tag is to prevent you stealing the clothes, and every exit from the store has technological systems in place to check everyone leaving for stolen goods. They don't even hide them. Yet somehow this is just fine, yet doing the same check online is 'treating you like a criminal'. hmmmm. The stores have security cameras and guards too...

3) It's as safe as anything else you run online.
You might not trust positech games to run any code that connects to the web. But there are two reasons why you should. Reason 1, is that we have sold games for 11 years. we have a reputation and we aren't about to risk losing it. Do you REALLY think that there aren't a few geeks who run packet sniffer software telling them every single byte of data that our games send to any server, and every byte that comes back? (we only use online activation for 1 game - Democracy 2 and it's a one off thing when registering). If we were snooping your hard disk and copying your emails to our server, it would be splashed all over the geeky websites within 24 hours and our business would collapse. We know that. (besides which we would consider that a gross invasion of your privacy, obviously, but assume we are rational but evil for the purposes of argument).

The second reason, is that there is nothing magical about anti-piracy activation systems that mean they should be less trusted than your web browser, your messenger client, your email client etc etc.
How do you know that MSN messenger isn't logging every conversation and every image you send with Microsoft? Ditto firefox, ditto vista itself... Even if all your apps are open source have YOU looked at the source? EVERY line? are you SURE that source really is that exe? did you compile it yourself (with an open source compiler).
You don't, and yet you trust these applications every day to send personal emails, surf websites and even bank online.

Online activation of games is probably one of the least invasive, most trustworthy situations in which you trust someone with your computer. If you won't buy a game because it needs to send a serial number over the internet, I STRONGLY suggest you give up internet banking, shopping, web browsing and everything else. Unless you want to learn HTTP and run a packet sniffer on everthing that leaves you PC.

I'm never fussed by on-line activation of games. If it lets me play the game without needing a CD, then I'm extra happy.

I'm GOING TO DIE

2008-04-11T11:20:00.001Z

Seriously, the storm over my head right now is like something out of a movie. I felt my chair move with the latest thunder and the web keeps cutting out.
If I should die, someone do sequels to my games, keep the dream alive etc...

DEMOCRACY comes to GAME

2008-04-08T14:00:00.001Z

S0 there I was buying a new frying pan, and thus in a big 'mall' (for you Americans) and I thought I'd pop in GAME and see what was new in PC land, and right next to Company Of Heroes was at least 4 copies of the retail Democracy 1. I was pretty excited. I'd have taken a piccie if my camera worked (which it doesn't :().
I feel quite proud. I wonder how well it will sell?

Teaming up with Indie Comics

2008-04-07T16:01:00.001Z

I have a character artist:
Check out the full story:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1490
and feel free to vote it up here:
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=612214

Right now I'm adding extra job events to the game. I have a horrible feeling I need several hundred :(

My mouse is sub-prime

2008-04-05T11:14:00.003Z

Normally, a mouse is just a mouse, but for FPS PC gaming, a mouse is like your trusty rifle. Its your steed, your wheels, your partner, your companion, its IMPORTANT.
I always game with one of these. I think they are the best mice ever made. All other mice feel like a weird shaped clunky piece of crap that looked just LUVERLY on the screen of the imac-wielding buffoon who knocked up the design straight out of art college, but does not actually fit nicely in your hand.
Saddles are that shape because your buttocks fit in them. And so it is with mice.

However...
My problem is that my mouse has been sluggish to respond with right mouse clicks. The 'clickiness' of that vital button is sub-par. So I have spent the last day or so carefully unscrewing it, cleaning it, screwing it back together and experimenting.
I just can't get both left and right mouse buttons to be as clicky as I like. I need instant responsiveness dammit. I've found that by experimenting with the amount that I screw in the top two screws, I can tweak it, but it's still not perfect goddamit.
If you managed to hit me in a COD4 game lately, this is why. Either that or you were sniping me when the man from BA was on the phone pretending they were going to deliver my luggage.

Off to Birmingham tonight to get drunk with game developers. yay!

Rock legend on the MAC

2008-04-04T14:48:00.002Z

Recently I released the mac version of Kudos : Rock legend. It's handled by a 3rd party, who port the code, host the files and take the orders, I just get involved to count my share of the money :D. The game seems to be selling pretty well. I think this is down to three factors:

There aren't THAT many mac games, so there is less competition.
Piracy on the mac is lower
Lots of mac-owners are musicians, and probably more likely to be into the games subject matter.

Regardless of the reasons, I'm not complaining, coming as it does right at a recent slump in my own sales :(

Work continues on Kudos 2, I've spent part of the day doing a new handwriting font for the diary-entry parts of the game, I did a bit of final work on the crossword GUI (including totally new clues for both versions), and also some new asset graphics. I'm currently experimenting a bit with what parts of the game look better with the handwriting font.

I plan to really take my time with this game and make it as polished as humanly possible. It already looks better than any game I have made before, and I am hoping it will look and feel better too when I release it sometime this year (hopefully).

In other news, I added a new affiliate-sold game to my website. Called LUX. Check it out:
http://www.positech.co.uk/lux

Getting back into code mode for 2 days

2008-04-03T10:00:00.002Z

So there are no excuses today, I've been back off holiday over 24 hours now. Yesterday was partly spent dealing with a ton of email, and looking for a new artist. I also had lots of tedious business stuff to do, like paying my monthly expenses yada yada. I nearly got caught by some fairly convincing google adwords phishing too.

My holiday has just left me with more non-work bullshit to deal with, such as recover my luggage, claim compensation for the luggage, get my camera repaired, claim on holiday insurance for broken camera etc etc.
In between all of this I have been talking to potential artists and drawing up asset lists, plus trying to remember where I was in code and design terms. Plus there is a possible bug in Democracy 2's voter code, and discussions regarding renaming and branding the game for a re-release in September for the US elections.
And with all this going on, the Mac version of Kudos: Rock Legend has been released.

If I had just a bit more stuff like this going on, I could actually just handle the business, and not have time to code or design. I could do without the coding (which can be dull) but I'd miss the design side.
And I only have 2 days work until I head off to meet some fellow indie devs for a sort of pizza/gathering in Birmingham.
busy busy busy

Looking for an Artist

2008-04-02T12:28:00.002Z

Just got back from holiday in Switzerland, sadly without any luggage, which is probably gone forever. grrrrr

I need an artist. Here is the official ad:

I'm doing a sequel to this:
http://www.kudosgame.com
And need a character artist. Its 2D stuff, and more casual-friendly than my previous art. In the original game I used poser characters, but I want hand drawn art this time.
I won't be having the full screen face close-up images, just the 512 pixel high avatars.
If you haven't seen the game before, think of a 2D, turn based version of the Sims.

So basically my requirements are for someone who can do
a) layered avatars, with customisability, in a paper-doll style like this:
http://www.stardoll.com/en/dolls/595...Lavigne_3.html
with the possibility of applying RGB tints to each layer

b) small portrait images for the main characters friends. just simple 2D portraits.

Ideally I want someone who
a) Has art in an existing, published casual game
b) Can start work fairly soon.

Rates to be negotiated

Its a short term contract obviously, I'm not hiring anyone fulltime.
I don't care what country they are from as long as their English is good.

Know anyone?

WARNING - Do NOT attempt social commentary

2008-03-24T11:03:00.003Z

So.............
It's time for me to go through all the buyable stuff in Kudos and decide which of it goes in Kudos 2, and what gets added.
I just ditched the lottery ticket.
Why?
Because people kept asking me why they never won. they asked me how many times to buy a ticket before I won a prize.
Here is the confession:

THE LOTTERY TICKET IS A WASTE OF MONEY.

It was a joke I put in. There is NO chance of winning. There is no code for it. It is deliberate. I find lotteries to be exploitative and wrong. the chances of winning are very very low, and yet they are marketed at people who have very little money. Some people on the minimum wage spend a noticeable chunk of their income on lottery tickets, hoping for a sudden win and a way out of poverty. Statistically, that money is better spent on buying books to learn more profitable skills, but people don't want to hear that. it sounds like hard work, and a celeb and talent-show obsessed media fuels the nonsense that you can be an overnight success and a millionaire.

Lottery tickets in real life are a waste of money. you will NOT win. I've met quite a few millionaires, and every single one of them got their money by working hard. The percentage of people who became rich (and stayed rich) by gambling is insignificant.

I guess the conventional 'casual game' wisdom is to be optimistic, and fulfil peoples dreams, but I'd rather fulfil dreams of working their way to fame and success rather than just getting lucky.
Earning money is way more satisfying than winning it. It has real value then. Something you get for nothing often feels worthless.

Phones, Pizzas, Meetings...

2008-03-19T17:56:00.001Z

Oooh it's suddenly very busy. I leapt into work straight away today doing a few more of the books for Kudos 2, then got some new artwork for menus (hurrah!) which took some fiddling to put into the game (half done). Then I had lunch with a pal, and beat him at wii tennis 9and lost at wii bowling), then it was back to work, firstly booking a train trip and hotel for an indie developer meeting thingy, then I started work on the new interface for mobile phone messages in Kudos 2.
Tragically today has been really BAD for sales. Why does that always happen just when I've spent some money?
Bah!

Take The Test

2008-03-18T17:45:00.001Z

You need to hear the audio...

Thanks to seth godin for spotting this.

Movie titles

2008-03-16T19:20:00.003Z

It's sunday, so in traditional style I'm trying not to spend *too much* time working today. Although one thing I got started on was new movie titles and taglines for Kudos 2. The movies are all supposed to have slightly silly tongue in cheek names and descriptions such as:

Royal Icing
Romance
Princess stephanie hates the pressures of royal life, until the new cake expert starts work at the palace.

Hive Mind
Action
When mild-mannered beekeeper edgar scott wins the nobel prize for mathematics, it's just the start of his adventures.

etc etc. I know they won't win any comedy awards, but its good to have something slightly entertaining, rather than deadpan crap that looks procedurally generated.

On my list of things to do today are to
1) eat a creme egg whilst in the bath. I've never done this before and have slight suspicions it may be the most awesome experience imaginable.

2)reassign some money at www.kiva.org. My first loan got repaid yesterday, so it's time to go help out another entrepreneur. If you can spare $25 for a year, you should check it out.

Optimising, Music and More

2008-03-14T16:44:00.002Z

A busy day today. From the very start I leapt into action on the optimisation front. Just running a fullscreen release build using fraps meant I could pinpoint some parts of the code that were too slow. I added a switch to my engine to turn 'vertical synch' off, which lets me see the 'real' frame rate my card could achieve. I have a Geforce 8800 GTS, so I need it to run like the clappers on my machine, in the hope that people with less cards can run the game ok. Its a fairly static, GUI game, but that's no excuse for clunky coding, and besides I might want to add some particle stuff later.
basically, despite concerns about overdraw, its my text rendering code that's a bit slow, especially when I draw lots of different pieces of text in one frame.
I'd already coded a sort of 'buffer system' for text, which lets me pre-compute all the slow stuff for drawing some characters, then just re-draw it the next frame. It was a case of tidying up (and improving) that code, and using it in some of the more immediately vital areas. I raised the frame rate in my worst case from 65 to 91 eventually, so that's a good start.

Once that was out of the way, it was time to listen to the 'final' passes of the games music and stick it in. Some of the music I love, some of it I'm not sure fits in with the game as well, but there's a long way to go yet, so it will probably involve a lot of trial and error as to where to put things.

My GUI artist is away, and un-contactable, which is a bit of a pain as I have lots of stuff I need him to do. On top of all of this fun and games, there is the fact that I'm supposed to be doing some decorating with the medium term view towards selling the house. Oh joy. At least I could console myself with a sausage sandwich.

Job Adverts

2008-03-13T15:07:00.004Z

For the last TWO days I've been doing code for formatting job ads for Kudos 2. The old job ads in the original game were horridly dull, looking like windows error messages (as did the whole game):

The new ones will have individual frames, layouts and font selections, and look more like this: (The text isn't for this advert, I haven't done job specific ad text yet)

It's entirely cosmetic, but people *do* like a brighter, nicer looking game. This isn't the final look, but its getting there. There is SO MUCH to do.

Todays code

2008-03-11T11:38:00.002Z

Some stuff I've got done so far:

Added new solo (not sure about this) activity for Sundays -> Go To Church. this is a way to raise honesty (there are other ways). Considering that honesty in the game is more about being law abiding, I think i can get away with this. Its very debatable. i could say that it reduces your 'reasoning', but I'd get attacked for that. hmmm.

Persuasive ability is now part of NPCs deciding to accept social invites, as is the extent to which they are introverts or extraverts, and their liking of the proposed activity.

Law enforcement jobs now have honesty as a criteria for applying.

Optimism is now a factor in your characters happiness.

I'm just doing the code for job applications being affected by persuasion.

Making More Complex People

2008-03-10T11:46:00.002Z

So today what I've started to do is to add greater variety to the personality bit of Kudos 2. In the old game, you had this list of 13 different 'attributes' for your character. And there was about 8 different friend types.
The new system is more complex, but I hope, understandable.

In the new system you have lots more attributes, maybe 25, but only 13 of them get shown at any one time. The system shows you the highest value ones, plus there are some (like happiness or tiredness) which are always shown regardless.
So one day the game might show you a strip of GUI that says "optimism 66%", but a few days later it might be replaced with "Dishonesty 71%". I'll probably add some button that expands it to show you everything for people wondering about values they spotted earlier. My only concern is that the sytem won't be obvious to people who wonder where certain values have gone.

In addition, the NPCs will have much more variety of personality. Some will be dull, some extraverts, some pessimistic, some others will be persuasive, honest or charismatic. As with the first game, spending time with these people will let these effects 'rub off on you'.
So if you hang out with lots of dishonest, dull people, you will also become a bit dishonest and a bit dull, blowing your chances of a job as a policeman or a tv presenter :D

It's all good fun to work on anyway...

The kids have no money

2008-03-08T10:16:00.002Z

So the worlds youngest billionaire is the guy who invented facebook. Companies every day fight over access to sites like myspace and facebook.
Why?
AFAIK, the appeal is that "that's where the kids are".
But this is outdated for two reasons:
1) Kids are getting used to stealing stuff anyway. this does not make good customers.
2) Kids are generally broke, even UK students now face university fees
3) With the global credit crunch, kids aren't likely to be able to get access to cheap credit to buy stuff they way they used to.
In short, the teenage market is crap. Why sell to them? Retired people often have more money, and the 40-50 age group are rolling in cash, because they are at the peak of their careers, and the kids have left home.
Why try and sell to people with no money?

Todays achievements so far

2008-03-07T12:27:00.002Z

Bit of a worklog here, to keep me achieving stuff..

1) Replied to emails from publisher, journalist and my character artist
2) Added new code to support tool-tips for windows tabs
3) Changed code so that NPC interests are hidden from the player when they first meet, and gradually revealed as you spend more time with them
4) Removed lots of old code that wasn't used, relating to naming people based on social classes.

hopefully more to come this afternoon.

KUDOS 2

2008-03-06T11:53:00.002Z

So here I am working on Kudos 2. the game is progressing in both code and art terms, and even in music, but I am still struggling with some aspects of the design.

What I'm trying to avoid is the game being this:

Kudos 2 : The same but shinier

Which is what it might appear to be, if it doesn't have a definite direction. Now with most 'casual' games, the game mechanic is very one dimensional, and the game is easily 'themed'.
(Shop Management XIII - Now in a different town! etc...).
My problem is that Kudos 1 covered LIFE. So what exactly does Kudos 2 cover?
Something I'm currently working on is the idea that you have a target in Kudos 2 that is imposed by someone else. basically, a wealthy relative will leave you $1,000,000 at age 30, if he judges you have led a 'worthy' life up to that point.
So the game is about 'doing the right thing'.

It's the same game style as before, make friends, get a good job, stay happy etc etc, but there is a subtext of making sure you are a good person. So becoming an alcoholic is a no-no, snubbing your friends is a bad thing, making people happy, doing charity work, having a worthy job (surgeon or 'good' lawyer or police officer), is all very positive. I am thinking of making Kudos not something you get for being hip or different, but for doing worthy stuff. Catching a mugger is no longer about bragging rights, its about making the world a better place.
This is my current direction. I am still not 100% decided. Once I am, it will be full steam ahead in code and content terms.

Future Plans

2008-03-01T21:52:00.002Z

Occasionally I think about what to do with Positech Games in the medium to long term, like 2009 onwards. I know I'm doing a sort of Kudos 2 this year, but what about further on?
I have thought about a few possibilities...

1) Carry on doing the same sort of thing. I have a t least 2, maybe 3 good new game design ideas I can work on. One of them at least should sell ok, so that should keep thing going along as they do now.

2) Attempt to move onto consoles. Maybe do a wii game on XBLA. Possibly this would earn more money, but its almost impossible for a one man dev without *connections* to get this opportunity.

3) Move into doing online-enabled games. Maybe not quite an MMO, but a game with a lot more on-line integration. That eliminate a lot of the piracy hassle.

4) Stick with what I do best. Kudos and Democracy. there is a market for them, and I know what I'm doing, so do regular yearly updates and expansions and sequels, or maybe just keep patching and fixing the current versions in order to make them more attractive to buyers.

I guess once K2 is finished I'll have more information on what to do. I'll have long term sales figures for D2, the dollar may be weaker or stronger, and piracy may get worse or better.
It's good to think ahead though...

Rejigging the workplace events

2008-02-27T16:45:00.003Z

The original kudos game would have a very generic description of your day at work. basically, you randomly had a good or a bad day, and it just said "it was a bad day, and you got these tips, and hey, you got promoted".
The new one will be much better, in that it will reference your actual job, and the text will be job specific.
That means it will say "Today at the happy snacks restaurant, the customers were really friendly and you had a great day", and then that day at work will have carefully tailored effects on you, so the good days make you feel good and the bad days make you feel bad, but also, you can have stressful work days, boring work days, etc etc.

This has required some re-jigging of the way things are done, with new 'workplace events' which are basically different potential work days depending on your career. I'm also having some meta-categories, such as 'office job' where some events will apply to all of them, like boring meetings. When the whole system is in place, I'll be in a position to just sit there and write out a whole bunch of text that hopefully helps in a small way to make people feel like their characters life is different if they chose to be a helpdesk technician rather than a top chef.

Some people say that kudos shouldn't concentrate too much on work, as that's not a fun part of peoples lives, but I think pretending to have a different job to your real one is kind of cool, and not many games have a main character who is a biochemist or a human rights lawyer.

Keep Fit Code

2008-02-26T17:27:00.002Z

I thought I had a horrid bug in kudos, uncovered as I reworked a lot of the games work-related stuff to be script, rather than code based.
But it turns out the sim is just a big cleverer than I recall. I wondered why when I applied a certain value to the characters tiredness, they didn't get that tired, but it turns out that tiredness is modulated by the level of fitness. People who go to the gym aren't so tired if they walk to work etc.
What's a bit bad is that people who have tiring jobs aren't getting fit from them, which presumably, you should do.

In any case, getting the game to be more scriptable is a good thing. Whereas previously the effects of each job came froma spreadsheet, now they are individual scripts. This means a LOT of scripts, but I auto-generated them from the old data, so it's no big deal.

Overthinking the design

2008-02-25T17:16:00.003Z

I'm trying to get a 'big picture' design for the new version of Kudos. I'm aware of the fact that I have no specific 'direction' for the new game. It currently seems to be 'Kudos, but way better looking'.
That will probably help it to sell, but I want it to be more than just a polished revamp. I want the game to be better and more interesting, and more accessible.
This isn't proving easy.

It's tempting to just junk big sections of the game and concentrate on a smaller subsection for the sake of making it easier to learn, but I'm not sure that's the best approach. I'm currently toying with making the game more about dating and romance, or more about socialising and night-life.
At the end of the day, I shouldn't get too high brow about it. It's a game where you pretend to be someone else and choose different options to see what happens. It's a strategy game, not a large hadron collider.

As I stroke my chin and consider what to change about the game, I'm fixing some GUI things and improving some of the interface bits. I know I'll probably junk the 'social kudos' screen, as it was a bit out of place anyway. I might also junk a few of the more esoteric purchasable things, such as the bow and arrow.

Code Snippet of the day:

2008-02-22T15:33:00.000Z

from kudos 2:

bool SIM_FoodMemory::IsBoringChoice(std::string foodname)
{
//return true if we ate the same food more than once in the last 14 days
int recentmatches = 0;
iter it;
for(it = Items.begin(); it != Items.end(); ++it)
{
SIM_FoodMemoryItem* pitem = *it;
if(pitem->FoodName == foodname)
{
int diff = SIM_GetSim()->GetTurnCount() - pitem->TurnConsumed;
if(diff < 14)
{
recentmatches++;
}
}
}

if(recentmatches > 1)
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}

Printscreen can make you look a dork.

2008-02-21T19:37:00.002Z

And today I notice someone posting screenshots of what he claims are a bug in democracy 1 (a VERY old version of D1) on my forums. Turns out his desktop sized screenshots clearly show the link to a torrent of the game on his desktop. What a dork.

A quick email search shows he certainly didn't buy the game from me.

His only other forum post was a review, presumably written by him, giving the game 5/10.

Account deleted.

WTF is wrong with these people? I don't give it a damn if my game isn't running perfect for you if you have a pirate copy. the chances are, its bundled with all kinds of crapware that I know nothing about. you might as well go complain to rolex about the quality of the dodgy watch you bought from a bloke in the pub.

It amazes me that people can't see that if they steal a product, they have lost ALL ability to influence the business that makes it in any way whatsoever.
Pirates are commercially invisible. your desires, opinions and likes are totally irrelevant to people. We don't make stuff for you, nor will we ever do so. We spend our time dealing with those honest people who buy our stuff.
My next game, and all future projects, are aimed at the 30+ audience. I give up on 'da kidz'. I hope they enjoy pirating the few games still aimed at them.

*sigh*

Crazy Support Request

2008-02-20T19:05:00.002Z

A day or two ago, I got an amazing email along these lines:

"I pirated your game from a torrent site. The patches on your site do not seem to work, and I think I have found a bug [bug details]. is there a patch for this?

What a moron.

My answer was just to tell the guy to sod off. But apparently this was a bit too vague, as he emailed me again asking if there was any chance of tech support.
In case he is not alone, and some other people have not got this through their heads...
Pirating a game is NOT POPULAR with the people who make that game for a living. We do not 'understand your reasons' or 'turn a blind eye', or 'appreciate that you liked the game and might buy the next one'.
If you shoplifted, and the shoplifted item was faulty, would you go back and complain?

I dread to think how this guy will get on in the rest of his life. Such a sense of entitlement, without any concept of right or wrong makes someone totally unemployable. Thankfully, most people are honest, and *do* buy my games when they like them.
A big thanks goes out to all those honest people who have kept me in business. I really appreciate it.

Another digg needed

2008-02-19T11:30:00.002Z

It's that time of year for press!
http://digg.com/pc_games/GamingShogun_reviews_Democracy_2
All diggs appreciated :D

Something Missing From C++

2008-02-15T17:06:00.002Z

One feature I'd like to see is some way of declaring some data as being readabale by anyone but not writeable. Something like the 'friend' thing.
So if I have some thing called 'NPCHappiness' I could declare it read only, and anyone could get at it from any class, but nobody could change it.
As it is, we need to bung it a tedious 'GetNPCHappiness()', and make it private.
I know stuff like visual assist makes this easier, but its still untidy to my eyes. Am I missing something?

Work History

2008-02-14T11:45:00.002Z

Stuff done today:

Redid the post-it sticky notes for kudos 2 (working title)
Tidied up some of the Crossword code to make it look less awful.
Brightened up the end of day message dialog.

DIGG it dude

2008-02-13T15:05:00.001Z

I wrote this article for bit-tech:
http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2008/02/13/the_curse_of_genre/1
And naturally I think it would be l33t to get people reading it :D, so if you have an account at digg, feel free:
http://digg.com/pc_games/The_Curse_of_Genres
Much appreciated :D

Now I have much work to do...

Kylotonn and Frogster

2008-02-09T11:32:00.000Z

I don't who who the fuck these companies are, but they are NOT the developer and publisher of Democracy 2, contrary to what page 125 of PC Gamer UK magazine says :(

I AM THE DEVELOPER AND PUBLISHER OF DEMOCRACY 2

In fact, right now, the ONLY way to get this game is direct, through me. If anyone else is selling it, they are thieves, please tell me.

Sigh.

Just read some of the most retarded embarrasing juvenile bullshit on slashdot I've read for a while. How is it that kids apparently intelligent enough to operate a keyboard are incapable of realising that taking stuff that inst yours and you haven't paid for is wrong, and that colleges not wanting to have their networks used for piracy are not TEH EVIL CENSORSHIP FASCISTS!!!!1111.

So what is NLP Then?

2008-02-07T09:06:00.000Z

In reference to an earlier blog post, NLP is Neural Linguistic programming. It's used a lot in therapy, but it can be used in all sorts of ways. basically its a way to communicating information, interpreting peoples emotions, controlling your own emotions, and giving out information by means of indirection.
If you have ever watched Derren Brown seemingly read peoples thoughts or persuade someone to do something weird without any effort, that's NLP (he is awesome at it).

Amazingly, I do not use NLP to hypnotize people into buying my games. (It's an interpersonal real-life thing anyway, not something you can do using HTML). The way I use NLP is to (try to) control how I feel. Anyone who knows me in real life who thinks I am a completely hyper arrogant confrontational git, should have known me before I started reading about NLP :D.

It takes a while to really 'Get' NLP, and its easy to be very sceptical of it, but the simplest and easiest principle of it is that the way you look, sound and stand/sit are a reflection of your emotions, but you can reverse the process. In other words, if you are miserable, adopting a happier posture, expression and choice of words when you talk etc, can actually have the effect of changing your emotional state.
Simply put, it's hard to stay miserable when you are smiling :D. Once you have done it a bit, you realise how its entirely a matter of choice how you feel. Nobody can make you angry, they can only give you excuses or justifications for anger.

NLP is very useful. It has some interesting techniques such as 'anchoring'. Anchoring allows you to tie emotions and memories to a physical action. I can rub my hands in a certain way and effectively be back on a balcony at a breakfast table in Costa Rica.
I used to do it a lot in meetings :D.

NLP

2008-02-06T17:53:00.000Z

Some days, when you read some of the insulting abusive bullshit that gets hurled at you for being anti-piracy, you can be so glad you know a little NLP.

The funniest thing is, the people who get on my tits probably have crap jobs they hate, and which they work long hours in :D
I have no boss, no schedule, no annoying line managers, no commute and can work when I feel like it.
I had a long pub lunch with a mate today, then played an RTS game all afternoon.
And when I came back from lunch, I'd sold 5 games.
*contented sigh*

Alpha Channels and File Sizes

2008-02-02T17:37:00.000Z

Danger! Geeky programming talk ahead...

I finally got around to taking a look at using a different file format for the images I use that have alpha channels. Alpha channels are basically an extra 'invisible' layer of information in an image (like a picture of a character) that tells the video card how transparent each pixel should be. You can have 1 bit alpha (show it or hide it) and variable alpha (for partly transparent stuff). The trouble with variable alpha is it uses up a lot of memory.

When you make downloadable games one major concern you have is the installer size. You don't care that much how big the installed game is, nor do you care how much video memory you use (within reason), but anything over 40-50 MB can get expensive to host yourself. (I just hit my 500GB/month limit for the first time this month). If you think you can get **unlimited bandwidth hosting*** for just $9.99/Year!!!11111, then you are wrong. Those sort of adverts aren't for proper, reliable, fast server hosting like a games website really needs. Bandwidth hosting for a site like mine is hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year.

So... we need to store our character images in a format that is small when packed into an installer, so one which compresses well. JPG compresses very well for photo-style images (using lots of colors). BMP can also compress well if you have less gradients and lots of blocked out areas of color. PNG is a popular format with great compression.
The thing is, although JPG compression is great, its 'lossy' meaning it can be blurry. The compression I used to use was DDS, which is also lossy, and also blurry. Now... with a photo style image, this isn't very visible, but if you start to blur alpha data it can get very very horrid, with black or white or wobbly outlines around images where they look especially crap.

So......... The solution seems to be to load in a JPG (or PNG or DDS) with the actual color information in it, and then after the event, load in the alpha data totally separately and squash them together in video memory. This is what I finally got working today. Effectively the code does this:

CreateTextureForCharacter()
LoadInTheJPGFile()
CopyJPGDataIntoTexture()
LoadInTheAlphaFile()
CopyJustAlphaBitsIntoExistingTexture()

It seems a bit complex, because if you are normal retail-based or console based game coder you probably think 'sod that' and just use the same format with built in alpha and just zap it straight in. I guess its one of those bits of fiddly code that you only need to do for downloadable games.
I'm off to try it on Democracy to see if I can shrink the demo size. These bandwidth bills aren't funny...

Is this the best they can do?

2008-01-29T09:32:00.000Z

There isn't really anyone out there trying to compete with the main game that I make (Democracy). There was a 'window of opportunity' for someone to take the idea of the first game, do a better-graphics and better-marketed version of it, and whip it out there about a year ago. But for some reason nobody did it. they were all busy making clones of Wild West Wendy.
But hey, you missed your chance now, because the new ones out :D.
However, it seems I do finally have some competition...

http://www.dewmocracy.com/overview/default.aspx

or do I?
I don't think I should be worried. Some 'game' that revolves around you marketing a soft drink for a billion dollar company isn't what modern gamers have been crying out for methinks...

Still hanging in there

2008-01-26T12:54:00.000Z

I read a forum post recently by an indie gamer who is depressed and considering going back to full time employment. I can't say I'm surprised.
Most indies sell less games than I do, and take longer to make their games. Some of them have kids, and thus need more money anyway. The chances of a random selected indie gamer being able to survive comfortably from making PC games are very low.
Added to that, the lifestyle of the indie sucks big time. I work with people in the USA and Australia, which means just as most people have finished work for the day, I'm dealing with new emails and discussions about work over msn.
Sure, I work from home, with no boss, no commute, and no co-workers, but I also cannot physically get away from my job.
But just as I hear about one indie leaving, I realise that another team of indies are doing a hell of a job. Check out this game:

http://www.taleworlds.com/

Its a pretty unpolished and unfinished RPG, but forget all of that and play the 'quick battles' on horseback. That bit is truly excellent. I wish them every success.

Slowly drifting into a new game

2008-01-23T13:24:00.000Z

I'm generally still handling Democracy 2, promoting it, advertising it, checking out bugs etc etc, but I have also started very rough initial work on the next game.
I'm basing it on one of my older games, but I'm hopefully going to do more than just an update, more like a total re-designing and overhaul to make it better than before.
When I first started red-doing Democracy 2, I imagined that the main interface for the game would change a lot. I did a few mock-ups and spent a lot of time doodling and trying to lay things out better. But in the end, I stayed pretty much the same as the original game.

Right now, I am fiddling with the interface for this new one, thinking about what I have on the screen and if I really need it there, and generally simplifying things. My games tend to look more complex than they are, and they also tend to look pretty dark and gloomy. Democracy 2 was a step in the right direction, in that its still a damned complex and deep game, but has a more friendly 'why not give it a try' look to it.

The next game will hopefully take it a bit further. Just by using bigger, friendlier fonts and lighter interface colors, the whole thing already looks much more welcoming.

Once I really get into the game, I'll get more excited about behind the scenes stuff such as a lot of gameplay/AI changes I would like to make, but right now I'm being shallow and concentrating on looks :D

Black Font White Font Black Font White Font

2008-01-17T09:57:00.000Z

So.............
One major thing I have learned today is that windows renders (draws) fonts totally differently depending if you render white on to black or black on to white. You might think that its just a matter of inverting the colours, but NO! it does it totally differently.
I've always done dark moody serious depressing games, so I've tended to use light colour text on dark moody backgrounds.
Then I did Kudos, which was a bit upbeat. But in typical cliff style, I used miserable black backgrounds and carried on as before.
But Now I'm experimenting with lighter GUI with dark text and it looked BAD. I tried all sorts of fixes until some kind genius pointed out that if my font drawing code took as its source windows rendering of white on black and swapped it, I'd get poor results.

My text engine basically uses a bitmap cut into chunks and tints the colour to my liking. But now... if I want black text I need to use a different source bitmap to if I wanted to use white text. It's no big disaster, as I'm likely now to only use black text, but it was well worth discovering.

Ooops, seven thousand pounds overdrawn

2008-01-11T10:44:00.000Z

Sooo... I get a call from the bank, and the bank says you need to check your account, and when I do, I see why. I appear to be seven thousand pounds in the red.

ooooops.

But thankfully it's not another Jeremy Clarkson incident. But happily, its just a silly mistake by the accountant, paying my yearly income tax before I had put the carefully set-aside money in the right account.
doh!
Happily, despite having a £500 limit, and going over it by a factor of 14, my bank were happy not to charge me a penny for doing so. Would your bank do that?
Mine is www.smile.co.uk

Of course this all comes in the same week that I needed my car fixed, and to tax it for another year. Combine UK car tax levels with UK income tax and you wonder how the hell you are supposed to make a living doing this stuff.
Bah.. :(

I'm busy fiddling with some older code in possible preparation for redoing an older game, following indecision as to exactly what to do next. Ho hum.

Can entrepreneurs relax?

2008-01-02T22:23:00.000Z

I make my own games. I do the coding, the design, the marketing, yada yada. In some ways I consider myself primarily a game designer. In other ways I consider myself an 'entrepreneur'.
A friend of mine runs his own business and I'm always yakking about his business to him. My favourite TV program is Dragons Den. I love books on marketing and business. When there is a TV program or newspaper article that says how much business X makes, or what their costs breakdown is, I LOVE it. I'm a bit sad like that.

I think that;s why I've managed to make a living as an indie game dev, despite living somewhere so expensive (England). Most indies I know are coders first, everything else second. they hate self promotion, and they really loathe the business side. I'm lucky that I enjoy this stuff, it means I put more time into it, and my business probably benefits as a result.

But being an entrepreneur also has its downsides. I get the impression that most of us find it difficult to relax. My one guaranteed time to relax is if I'm on holiday in another country, and I know we have nothing planned for that day. I spent 10 days in the Caribbean once, most of it reading on the beach, and it was awesome. But even then, I found myself mentally adding up the income the hotel must bring in, and guessing it's costs and likely profitability.
I'm not sure if entrepreneurs are happier than everyone else, but I think we are more anxious and more fidgety. Maybe thats why most business people seem relatively thin?

A Christmas Bug Tale

2007-12-26T14:47:00.000Z

So here I am on boxing day fixing bugs. It's my own fault, I can't relax knowing there is a bug in the game I haven't tracked down. Luckily it wasn't *that* evil.
The bug symptom was this: If you reduce the number of smokers to zero, you still earn the same amount from tobacco tax!

Why?

Well the way it *should* work is this -> The income from the tax is set by the player moving a slider. This gets multiplied by various values, such as a global 'wealth' modifier for he whole country (USA vs Belgium in terms of size for example). it also gets multiplied by a special 'neuron' called Tobbacotax_income. This 'neuron' (everything in the game is a neuron) had just 1 input, and that input was from another neuron that stores the size of the smokers group. The input is an equation which in this case just simply sets the multiplier to be the same as the size of the group.

Cool.

But it wasn't working. Stepping through the code, everything seemed ok. The voter group each turn worked out how big it was, and would tell its 'percentage' neuron that value. later, the finance code would ask the tax how much it earned, it would look at the slider, and ask the income neuron how much to multiply it by. And here was the weirdness. The income neuron would be set at the right value, but the 'effect' acted as its input was still containing a wrong value. In other words, all my brain cells worked, but the wires had the wrong data in them.

It turns out that in the blanket code that gets every neuron to recalculate itself, that pesky 'percentage' neuron was doing its calculations, and just setting itself to its default (it has no inputs, and gets told directly what value to be). It then told all its outputs this value and forgot about them. The voter group code then trundles along and says "forget all that crap, here is your real value mate!" Which is fine, but the wrong data is still stored in the percentage neuron's outputs. Ironically, the system automatically propagates the right value out next turn, but before that happens, the value will get reset again in the same way...

Anyway................ All I needed to do was change the code that said "ahoy there percentage neuron your value is 0.12" to say "Ahoy there, your value is 0.12, and maketh that your flipping default value as well, so there are no mistakes if you think about recalculating yourself".
And all was well...

I need to do some playtesting before releasing this, because it may have caused balancing nightmares...

Still here

2007-12-22T17:36:00.000Z

But been very busy...
There are still some issues in Democracy 2 that need fixing, but I've been working away on improving the game, fixing small niggles, and bugs that nobody spotted yet. Hopefully I get to release an update tomorrow, and that will be the last one till the new year with any luck. I need time off!
I spend a lot of time these days dealing with email, publishers, accounts stuff, artists, advertising and marketing etc etc. I find that less and less of my actual total work time is spent coding. This doesn't mean its taking me longer to develop, because I'm just working more hours.
bah!

Advertising Experiments

2007-12-18T15:49:00.000Z

Partly because Google took forever to set up my new Ads, and still haven't set them active, I have been looking at other ways to promote and market Democracy 2. One thing I did, but I'm not sure it will be much help, is to put together some little advert banners that I think work as forums sigs:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1391

I guess that might help. Another thing I've done is take some time to tweak the settings on my existing google ads, and I also signed up with yahoo search marketing today. I now have accounts at google, MSN and Yahoo, and the vast majority of my monthly company expenses is adverts.
I'm generally paying about 10-12c per click, assuming that I might get a sale in every 50 clicks, that's costing me about $5 to sell a $20 game, so it makes sense.
Some people want to charge frankly hilarious rates for advertising. I saw a webpage wanting £30 CPM today. That's $60.00 for showing an advert banner a thousand times. Assuming 1 in a hundred people clicks it, and assuming a 1 in 50 sale from that, this means I need to display 5000 ads (costing $300) to sell a $20 game. Unless you are selling rolex watches at astonishing markups, who the hell pays that?

This leads on to my pet hate, and that's false advertising rates, or 'negotiable rates'. Don't mess me around. tell me your price. its a free market, don't be shy. If your rates have to vary often, have an RSS feed for them , or whatever, I'm fine with that. But don't set your products price as

"what I think this mug will pay once I speak to him on the phone".

I don't force my customers to haggle. If you sell advertising, don't force YOUR customers to haggle either. Google don't haggle, and they do pretty well.

PHPBB 3

2007-12-14T19:46:00.000Z

So today phpbb3 came out, the latest upgrade to the free forum software I use. I have been bitten twice in the past by having forums wiped out by ahckers, so i was determined to ALWAYS be up to date with forum releases 9to patch security problems).
I had assumed that it would take a few hours to sort everything out but in fact it took all day and involved copying stuff locally, installing a local php server, yada yada. At one point I had both versions running and neither of them working. Bah!

But yay! in time, all ws good with the world, and there came a magical moment when I realised that I had a new phpbb 3 install with all my old data intact. Twas a glorious moment, even if it basically took all day to get there.
So since then I have been bug fixing. Tragically Democracy 2 STILL has some bugs in it that i *should* have caught before release. I think I've found and fixed them all now, but I need to do a good day or so's play testing at the weekend before I upload the latest (and hopefully last for a while) patch to the game.

Google still can't be bothered to reply to me. What gits.

Adwords are STUCK

2007-12-13T15:20:00.000Z

I've been a long time user of adwords, for both text and banner ads, but my attempts to start a new banner ad campaign fro democracy 2 have just failed badly. No matter what I select, what numbers I pick, and what I do, my campaign just sits there and shows zero impressions. I have emailed google twice to ask for help and been ignored. You would think an email from someone spending thousands of dollars a year as a customer would at least get read? Google do a good job generally, but they make it impossible for you to contact them and are very slow to reply. Crap customer service, despite their geeky trendyness...

I released version 1.02 of Democracy 2 today. fixes are:

Fixed bug where election was seen as imminent on reports just after an election was won.
Changed election text to not say 'years' in case 1 year term was selected.
Changed the description of violent crime.
Fixed bug where save and resume buttons dissappeared if you had started by loading in a saved game.
Fixed crash bug when banning tobacco adverts.
Changed load game screen to use last modified time rather than creation time.
Fixed bug where some simulation values could go below 0 when they were supposed to have a 0 minimum.
Fixed bug where the values of some taxes could be scaled wrong the first turn after loading a game.
Added new option to browse potential ministers without firing someone first.
Fixed bug where slider values could be wrong with sliders that have discrete notches in them. (also loading in invalid values)
Added support for new names files, and added russian and spanish names to existing missions

You don't believe the government?

2007-12-11T14:12:00.000Z

Sometimes, amazingly cynicism will take root among voters. And lo! this is modelled in Democracy 2. It means I came across something that looked like ab bug but wasn't.
I had a player whose entire party membership deserted him overnight. it turned out that they were all planning on voting for him, but NONE of them wanted to be party members. why?
Cynicism.
Raise taxes just after an election, or cut them just before and the game rumbles you. The level of cynicism among the voters had grown so high that the amount it cut off from their approval was just enough to put them all under the threshold of joining the party. Hence everyone left!
I plan to change the game in the future so that each voter has a slight tendency to gullibility or cynicism, so that you get more fuzzy and less clear-cut results in such cases. Still... it was fun tracking it down.
Sales are quite good, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get everyone you know to buy a copy!

Democracy 2 patch under way

2007-12-10T11:24:00.000Z

No sooner do you release a game than you need to patch it. My games historically have had a few bugs on release, but I tried extra hard this time, and think I did pretty well. There are a a few niggles, but tbh, the patch will be mostly new features rather than bug fixes.

Sales have started well, considering I haven't told anyone about it yet. that starts today, when i send out my emails the minute the patch is up and running. So it will then be time to do emails to editors etc etc.
I already submitted the game to 60 download sites, only takes an hour or so to do it. And some of them take forever to list stuff. Tucows is delusional if it thinks I'm paying for a faster listing. I'm sure its not vaguely worth it. Take your time tucows... all you are doing is ensuring your site is known as the best download site for last years products...

Of course all this hard work means I'm not getting enough time to advance my Call Of Duty 4 Rank (currently 40). Bah!

Democracy 2 is ON SALE

2007-12-07T16:02:00.000Z

Only just put it up there for sale. I'm so knackered. i hope some people buy it...
http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy2

Vote for Kudos: Rock Legend!

2007-12-05T23:47:00.000Z

Hey! Do me a favor and take 2 minutes to vote for Kudos:Rock Legend at the game tunnel awards here:

http://gametunnel.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=1137

(You need a free forum account to vote)
One year I'll actually win! (maybe).

Labour Laws

2007-12-05T16:21:00.001Z

I just did a play-through of the game in the religious country, and it was pretty cool. I managed to turn the economy around (on my second try) and win with 61 million votes vs 60 million, so it was darned close :D.

I thing I did notice is that productivity is not affected by union laws. My gut feeling is that it should be. If your legal set-up is pro-union, that probably includes strict de-markation and making it hard to fire people. This, (my opinion) is bad for productivity, although great for the union workers with cushy jobs :D.
I think I'll add a slight negative effect to productivity, scaling to a positive effect as you go from pro-union to pro employer.

The game does a pretty good job of automatically simulating real world phenomena. Trade Unionists may be upset by the anti-union policy, but if it increases productivity and boosts GDP, that will raise more tax and enable the govt to lower tax rates and improve public services, which will please that same person :D. The problem (as in real life), is preventing those same union members from going on strike in the interval between crushing the unions (Thatcher) and reaping the rewards of an economic boom (Blair). You could say that in the UK, the conservatives (Thatcher) did the legwork of breaking strong unions, but couldn't keep things together long enough for the positive effects to trickle through to the economy. Or you could disagree and say it was sleaze, or the poll tax. ho hum.

I'm actually fairly pro-union in many ways, and anti-union in others. I think that workers have rights which need to be strongly protected and enforced by an organisation not related to the employers, but I think if someone is a crap worker it should be easy to sack them. Discuss :D

Polishing and Fixing

2007-12-04T16:41:00.000Z

I'm rubbish at polishing and bug fixing. Many of my previous games have suffered from a few bugs on the day they get released, and I'm determined for that not to be the case this time. I would normally have released it last week, but I've been taking extra time to triple check all that stuff I normally don't even double check!

So I'm doing stuff like grammar and spell checking everything, checking it runs on a limited Vista account, checking for laptop and XP support etc.

It's getting there. No game is ever really finished ever, people just run out of budget and stop working on them. I have no delusion that the games code is now final forever and ever, and this is the first game of mine where people can click a button in a menu and check the version number against a web server check, so it's even easier to push updates out to people.

I'm already mulling over in my head which game to do next. There are 2 serious contenders. One is really commercial. One is really niche, but i think it's a cool niche. Can't decide...

Why fictional countries?

2007-11-29T17:32:00.000Z

A few people have asked why Democracy 2 has fictional countries rather than real ones. Here is why...

1) Democracy 1 has real countries, and it will still exist, so I would prefer to have a different approach.
2) I got a LOT of people complaining that the real countries did not cater for all the real-world issues in that country. Plus people saying they lived in country X and country X does not have inheritance tax, and in fact it does have a high level of technological capability, and that they don 't have street gangs, and that clearly I was some evil foreign devil who just hated country X.
3) Having fictional countries lets me have more radical things happen. For example, your country controls an island that can be invaded by foreign armies. This just doesn't make sense for a lot of real world countries, but with virtual ones, I can go mad.

Those are the main reasons I'm doing it this way. Flexibility basically. Hopefully people will not be too sad that their favourite country isn't in the game . I guess some people really enjoyed making Canada a patriotic militaristic empire...

The game is shaping up really well. I haven not gone a whole day of playing it yet without spotting something to fix, so it's not releasable yet. But now its minor things, like text needing correcting, or some minor visual tweaks, support for swapped mouse buttons etc.

NAME THAT COUNTRY!

2007-11-28T15:14:00.000Z

I need country names for Democracy 2. The ones I have picked are rubbish. They need to be fictional, with no accidental clashes or mean anything dodgy. but they need to sound like countries. Any ideas? You don't win anything :D

Title screen

2007-11-25T20:48:00.000Z

I didn't like the American flag in the old version, and beta testers have agreed with me. the game isn't set in America, so it seemed wrong. What do people think of this? It's a flag made up of a montage of classic election posters, with a color hue on it.
Opinions much desired.

Worst Bug of the Year

2007-11-23T16:35:00.000Z

I recently encountered a bug during Democracy 2's first beta test that drove me mental. It took me two and a half days to fix. Here's the details...

The game would crash on shutdown. Not in debug, not in release-mode if run from within visual studio. But if I just clicked the exe and ran it, I'd get an exit crash.
Everything everyone knows about release-mode only bugs says this is a variable that I had not set a default value for (debug will do that for you, and even release-from dev studio does it).

I spent at least a day looking for such a variable, and found none. Bah...

So I try allsorts of tricks to see WHERE it crashes, running 'release with symbols' which still crashes but lets me see where. It's in the code where a dilemma is being freed. Aha... I must corrupt the heap somewhere during the game right?

But no...
because not only is ALL the dilemma data fine, if I run heapCheck() JUST before the memory is freed (in the destructor), it says it's fine. Everything seems ok and the memory seems fine right up to the picosecond where it clearly isn't and the game crashes... On top of that it happens in the 34th dilemma. If I remove #34, it happens in the next one, so the data must be fine. how weird...

Day 2. In a co-incidence, I realise it runs fine on my laptop. that's Xp,not vista, but I have XP testers with the bug. how strange...

Day 2.5... I am experimenting and realise to my amazement that if I exit from the quit button, its fine, rather than just alt+f4 or using the windows X button. Why could that be? I step through the code...

Holy cow, in the quit button stuff I release all my game data then do this

PostQuitMessage(0)

nothing wrong with that. but in the code for WM_DESTROY I do this:

PostQuitMessage(0)
GetGame()->ReleaseData();

Holy crap. I see the problem and its fixed. On a single-core PC I think this is fine, but on multi-core, it looks like one core does the PostQuitMessage() while the other starts freeing my data. The PostQuit() stuff (which is part of windows) finishes and terminates the process while the other core is still deleting the dilemmas, and in code-terms, pulls the rug from under the other cores memory.

Somehow in debug, this isn't allowed to happen.

Lesson learned kids! Always ensure you don't do bugger all code after PostQuitMessage()!

Now back to the fun stuff.

Kotakoooed

2007-11-21T15:14:00.000Z

So apparently the copy protection blog post made it to kotaku. Some reasonably intelligent debate followed, which makes a change, although I got a lot of blog comments that just had a go at me, or told me to go get another job etc. ho hum.

To clarify:

I don't like DRM and have historically not used it
I totally understand and sympathise with honest gamers who are inconvenienced by on-line
checks
I don't want to spend any time on this, or inconvenience anyone
I don't feel entitled to earn a living from my games, but if people like them enough to play beyond the free demo, I feel i have earned the right to charge them $22.95 for it.

I will probably go ahead with on-line one-off server validation, to prevent casual piracy. I will also almost certainly remove that with a free patch within a year. The chances of 'me going bankrupt' and leaving people with games they cannot play is zero.

People get very upset and angry if you say you are going to do something about piracy. The thing is, those people almost never make their living from developing digital content. Working your nuts off for a year to create something original, and then seeing it being given away by other people for nothing the day it goes on sale is totally soul destroying. Especially when the idiots doing this get upset if someone does not 'thank them for their work', meaning their forum post with a rapidshare link.

Something has to be done about piracy if we expect to still get anything but half-finished amateur content in the future. piracy is getting too bad, and the PC market is already falling to bits. Who really expects people who want to keep making commercial PC games not to try and do something about it?

Donnie Darko

2007-11-17T19:16:00.000Z

Donnie darko is on uk tv tonight. That film was the original inspiration for kudos.
Yeah.. the design changed a lot. The main game mechanic used to be keeping your character sane.

MSN Ads

2007-11-16T18:22:00.000Z

I'm trying out advertising on msn for a while, as google isn't paying off right now. I'm not sure why I bother though, increasingly everyone on the net just pirates everything and tries to put small devs out of business. At this rate I'll give up game dev and have to go work writing databases.
Grrr.

Democracy 2 Website

2007-11-15T14:32:00.000Z

It's not vaguely final, but I like to work on things in bits and pieces so my work day isn't too tedious:
www.positech.co.uk/democracy2
I'll probably have a new redirecting page at www.democracygame.com that links to both the old and the new game, once I'm ready.
I'm bugfixing and tweaking still. two days ago I went clay-pigeon shooting. I'd never held a gun before in my life, so it was a bit weird. Still, I got well into it, I even hit 8 in a row at one point. Ph34r me, you clay nemesis.

Copy Protection

2007-11-14T14:19:00.000Z

I've done most of the code for Democracy 2's copy protection. The original game was a full install exe that when bought, you just installed and ran. In any sane world, that would be fine. But todays world is sadly not that idealistic .(I even had one scumbag of a customer buy the full copy of one of my games, then post the download link on a warez forum. This person didn't think they were identifiable, but in fact I have her home address and phone number. If I wished to do so, it's an open and shut case for prosecution.)

I don't live in a box, i know about warez, and I know when my games get posted.

Sadly, I need to do something to prevent the rampant casual piracy that is becoming the norm in pc gaming. The industry seems to have 3 solutions right now:

1) make MMO games exclusively.
2) ad-supported games which are free
3)on-line validation by a central server

I'm not about to do 1) and I hate 2), which leaves 3). So Democracy 2 will need to be validated on-line. It should be very quick, and very painless, and there's no spyware or rootkits or other nonsense. Just an on-line serial number check before you can run the game for the first time. And it-s a one-off thing.
This means that if you want a friend to buy the game, burn it to a disk for you, so you can play it on your machine that has no internet access, your fucked. Sorry, but that's the inevitable downside, and I suspect 99.99% of my customers have web access, as I am pretty much an on-line company. Don't buy the game if you want to play it on a machine that never has web access.
You will still be able to install it on multiple machines (but not dozens!), you can still backup the installer, you can still get the game again in 5 years time if your house gets blown up by terrorists etc etc.

I wish I didn't have to take time away from game development to do that crap, but as usual in life 1% of people are screwing it up for the other 99%. People who pirate games might as well wear a T shirt saying " I hope PC gaming dies", because the number one reason for that right now is people not buying the stuff,

Feel free to say what you think about all this.
BTW, the game is going well, only a few weeks still to go before final testing starts,

DIGG ME!

2007-11-07T17:08:00.000Z

you know you want to!

http://www.digg.com/pc_games/Democracy_Game_Launches/

yeah its plugging the retail release, but every bit helps right?

Phone Line Fixed

2007-11-07T12:00:00.000Z

W00t. A dodgy terminal at the top of a telegraph pole apparently. Just in time for tomorrow's release of Call of Duty 4.
HURRAH!
I am in the final testing stages of Democracy 2 now. Screenshots and maybe a limited beta test coming soon.

Ministerial Decisions

2007-11-06T09:50:00.000Z

Just fiddling with the code for ministers a bit today. I did a playthrough which seemed ok (won the election just about, but I hit the debt ceiling just afterwards and got booted out...), but the ministers are more of an annoyance than a fun element. I came to the conclusion that they must be calculating their loyalty wrong. Basically what they do is have two voter groups whose opinions they acre about, say commuters and socialists. If I treat those groups badly, the minister will be upset, his loyalty will drop, and the amount of 'political capital' I can get from him to further my policies will fall.

The problem is, I had not set the ministers 'calculation mode' right. So they were adding the two groups opinions rather than taking an average. This meant a lot more annoyed ministers than were justified, so it meant less political capital and too many resignations. Hopefully that's all fixed now. Back to playtesting

Recruiting Terrorists

2007-11-05T15:51:00.000Z

I decided to ignore what the game looks like today and concentrate on gameplay. I've tweaked the visuals a lot lately.
Anyway, met all kinds of bugs and problems, mostly fixed, but my main problem was terrorists. The number of people joining the groups was too high (easily tweaked) but the problem is it seemed counter-intuitive.

Lets say you have a green terror group.

As a devoted environmentalist, I may be quite happy, because the govts policies are ok, but as a poor, socialist trade unionist, I may dislike them intensely. So I end up joining a green terror network, to vent my frustration at other issues. Obviously, I join those terror groups too, but that's not the point.
If greens are happy, there shouldn't be gren terrorists, however much the members of the group may have other legit grievances.

So I'm changing it so that each terrorist group has a 'key voter group', and its only open for recruitment if approval within that group drops below X.
That should sort it.

dodgy router

2007-11-03T22:08:00.000Z

so after a lot of testing, and a visit from a BT engineer, I'm now convinced by D-Link DSL-G624T ADSL router is crap, and generates static line noise that drops its connection and rumbles in my phone line.
So I've ordered a new linksys router/adsl thing. should be here in 3 days.
Grrrrr. ALL ADSL/Routers are CRAP in my experience. they just DIE.

Someone make a reliable ADSL router. every existing one sucks. Charge twice as much for it. people will buy it. we are all sick of buying cheap disposable crappy electronics with a 6 month lif expectancy.
You get what you pay for. Never be afraid to make a better product and charge more, whether its a phone, a TV, a leather chair, a computer game or a pizza.
Grr, it even died during this blog post....

Spending boasts

2007-11-01T10:40:00.001Z

Check this out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7072584.stm
lots of boasts about how much money is being spent. People do this a lot in the Uk. often when you see roadworks there is a sign that says "new £4.2 million underpass project". This bugs me. It's like the more money that is spent, the happier they are. Lots of politicians boast about how much public money is spent on X, where more == good.
More is NOT good when you spend MY money. Less is good. Tell me how much better the health service is despite reductions in the amount you spend. Don't boast about what things cost unless you are boasting about how little they cost.
They same is true in the private sector. I care not how much your Movie / TV series or game cost to make. This does not affect me. What matters is how good it is. I don't care if Call Of Duty 4 costs $4 million or $4, but i *do* care how good it is.
People should stop boasting about costs, and start boasting about efficiency and quality.

By the way, my games are made by one full time and a few part time people and do not cost much to make. They are still awesome :D.

Back at work

2007-10-31T11:48:00.001Z

So... I went to Nottingham to meet some fellow indie devs, then went on holiday around my birthday, now I'm back home but veyr ill, so there has been a delay in working on Democracy 2 lately.
I went to the 'worlds biggest tank museum' whilst on holiday and it was pretty l33t. Those old fashioned WW1 tanks are HUGE and a complete nightmare on the inside (you can climb in them and even play with the guns.)
One bad thing about being back is my DSL connection has gone VERY flaky. bah.
I'm teetering on the verge of doing some playtesting now.

Run up to nottingham

2007-10-24T08:59:00.000Z

So... Friday night I'll be in nottingham for meet-up of UK indies at GameCity. Should be interesting, having never actually met anyone else doing what I do. This means it's a legit business trip, fully on expenses, and tax deductible, which is cool. Because the UK rail system is fucked up, I'll be going by first class train ticket, which was CHEAPER than a standard class ticket. yay for internet rail bookings.

It also means I'll get no work done friday, and then I'm away for two days elsewhere to celebrate? being 38. Wow. still 2 years to become rich before I'm the dreaded 40.

I'm currently working on the tutorial for Democracy 2, although its more a case of hint windows than a fixed tutorial, which i may do separately in some form. I have much play balancing to do, and some artwork to integrate when I get the full stuff, and from then on I can do early screen shots and a very basic website to start building interest.

Todays Fix List

2007-10-19T10:22:00.000Z

So far:

Fixed formatting for the insufficient political control dialog
Fixed starting debt being too high for one mission
Fixed accidental code typo in the global economy calculations
Fixed backwards equation for celebrity endorsement event
Fixed Typo in Banning same-sex marriage policy
Increased effect of GDP on immigration, and immigration on racial tension
Fixed corrupted icon for tourism booms
Added a negative effect on patriots when an oil pipeline gets attacked
Added new effects to stem cell research so they influence the high and low technology situations, and tweaked their numbers too

I guess it might be cool to add a human cloning policy too? There is so much that *could* be added.

in other news, the postal strike is delaying my artists getting paid, which is delaying the first proper screen-shots. bah.
The game is definitely coming together though. I'm *fairly* sure the bulk of the save game code is ok, although it's always a nightmare with a game this complex. I have lots of play testing to do still, the website to do, plus demo upsell stuff, tutorials etc, and mod support.

hideous code hell

2007-10-16T17:12:00.000Z

Today has been no fun. pouring over tons of numbers trying to work out why the loaded in data differs from the pre-saved data. its been pretty grim. tracked down a number of bugs though, one where the values were not displayed correctly because they didn't allow for ministerial competence, another where the initial values of policies effects were not being set up correctly. Slow but sure progress anyway. at least you can happily save and load games and the game you load looks vaguely like the one you saved. that's a start anyway!