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).