KE Studios Blog

Happy Memorial Day

2009-05-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

If you're looking for something to read appropriate to the day, you might try this:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/lost-heroes-of-the-war-on-terror-gallant-deeds-and-untold-tales/

Three Moves Ahead Guest Appearance

2009-03-20T14:54:00.000-07:00

Troy Goodfellow’s new Strategy Gaming podcast, Three Moves Ahead, had a guest on last week to talk about game design.

Me!

If you haven’t seen TMA (or rather, haven’t heard TMA), it’s really cool. Troy, Bruce Geryk, Tom Chick, and Julian Murdoch are the regular panel, and occasionally they have guests (I think I was the second). It’s all about strategy gaming. Troy, Bruce, Tom and Julian have a ton of history thinking and writing about strategy gaming, so their insights are pretty interesting. I’m kind of kicking myself for not pumping them for more ideas when I was on…

Anyway, if you’re interested in strategy gaming in general, I highly recommend all the TMA episodes. If you’re interested in WPP for some reason, here’s Episode 4, my guest appearance.

The Trouble with Torrents

2009-02-02T21:08:00.000-08:00

Piracy. Lots of game developers suffer from it. Some people think it’s killing the industry, driving games to closed platforms. Obviously I don’t agree (at least not completely), starting a game studio and all that. But it’s worth paying attention to. I did a search on WPP and Torrent. Found a nice page that listed five different sites where you could download War Plan Pacific. I hope you, dear reader, didn’t download any of those.

Because who knows what they contain.

Or put it another way, don’t put that zip file in your computer, you don’t know where it’s been.

The smallest of the five torrent downloads was 416 Meg. One was over 900 Mb. The bits that ship on the retail disk from Shrapnel? 110Mb . Throw in a pdf of the manual for another 8 Mb to make it 118 Mb. Throw in the 1.0.1 patch and it’s still under 150 mb. So if you sample one of those torrent copies, you’re getting between 266 and 760 Megabytes of, ahem, extra stuff. Wonder what that extra stuff does?

Shrapnel Games Developer Chat

2009-01-25T23:27:00.000-08:00

Shrapnel, our fantastic publisher for War Plan Pacific, is hosting a chat with yours truly Tuesday night, Jan 27th at 6 PST. Stop on by if you have some questions or comments. It’s a party!

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/ is the website. You’ll find “chat” on the top menu bar (third from the left).

Hope to see you (or at least your text) there.

War Plan Pacific Demo released

2008-12-09T10:34:00.002-08:00

Finally got the demo tested and uploaded. It’s available at Shrapnel Games…

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Demos/DD_WPP.html

Now comes the fun part, getting feedback!

Release is always an emotional rollercoaster. You're so glad to be done, feeling good about actually finishing something, but your gut is churning, worried about some hidden bug you missed over all those months of testing, or about a review from a reviewer who "doesn't get it." Some people get so worked up about it, they can’t think straight. I once worked at a startup company that almost went belly-up because the President couldn’t bring himself to give the green light on our first product. “What if it gets a bad review?” he said.

It was actually a really good product, and he eventually did find the courage to release it. It didn’t really get any better in the six months he hesitated, the company just burned through more VC funding (and lost a few employees). I understand his worry, maybe another two months would turn up that killer bug, or give the team time to polish a few things a little more. And you don’t want to release too early, but there comes a time. There comes a time when you hit the point of diminishing returns. WPP is there.

I think:)

The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month

2008-11-11T01:00:00.000-08:00

Thank you to all our veterans

War Plan Pacific getting close

2008-09-30T12:17:00.000-07:00

Well, exciting, the WPP product page at Shrapnel (taking preorders and everything) went live today. Oh, did I mention Shrapnel is the publisher? Well, yes, I did, and Tim and Annette and Scott and the crew at Shrapnel have been awesome to work with. Thanks guys!

Currently, I’m scrambling to get the manual updated, as well as nail down some AI changes, fix networking issues, and finalize the two alternate scenarios we’re including in the game.

Busy, busy, but like I said, exciting. Then end-game (so to speak) of any project is always a gut-check. There is always something else you could do to improve the game, but you don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And at this point, after living with the game for so long, pretty much all your objectivity is gone. Which is why beta testers are so valuable (oh, yeah, add “working on a thank-you gift for the beta team” to my list of tasks I’m juggling. And did I mention we’re in the process of selling a house? In this wonderful market? Ah, ain’t life grand).

Okay, enough jabbering, I’ve got work to do! Check out the product page, it has some updated screen shots.

Ping

2008-08-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Reply from 192.168.1.109: bytes=32 time=36ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.109: bytes=32 time=42ms TTL=128

Can you tell I've been working on Network code?

Well, it’s been a while since I posted. Bad, bad blogger. Shame on me. I’ll plead busy. WPP is in Beta, and going along well, but of course there are always more things I’d like to do than hours in the day to do them. The final push to shipping can be frustrating that way. Also, another Kid on the way, so we’ve had a little remodeling to attend to around the Hawkins Compound. But I think we’re getting close to ready for the delivery. Baby, and hopefully the game too.

So, back to work!

Disneyland

2008-05-17T17:11:00.000-07:00

I just got back from four days at Disneyland. Took the family, and it was a great trip, except for a minor issue. My 21 month old daughter broke her elbow.

It’s not a bad break, just a hairline fracture and she should be good as new in a couple of weeks or so. Meanwhile, she has a pretty purple cast on her arm that isn’t slowing her down in the least. It happened the first night we were there, supposed to be a day to relax after the flight, settle in at the hotel, and rest up for three days of hard-charging at the parks. Sigh. She rolled off the bed and probably cracked her elbow landing on her outstretched arm.

Well, a quick trip to the ER and by Monday afternoon she was in the park enjoying Pirates of the Caribbean…

Seriously, she loves to dance to “Yo ho, yo ho…”

I think Disneyland is a great inspiration for anyone doing anything creative. At least it should be. Walt Disney was sitting on a park bench eating peanuts one day while he watched his own daughters play on a merry-go-round. And he thought “there ought to be a place where parents and kids can have fun together.” Fifteen years or so later, Disneyland opened. The concept went through a ton of changes along the way, and there were some mighty big obstacles to overcome, but he built a place for parents and kids to have fun together. It’s worth remembering, Disneyland was the first “theme park.” No one had ever built anything like that before, and most observers thought Walt had gone off the deep end, that the whole project would be a colossal failure. Instead, he built something remarkable and wonderful.

“There ought to be…” That’s a powerful way to start a sentence, if you have the courage, vision and imagination to see it through.

Add to that seeing my little daughter run around having fun even though her arm was in a sling, I had plenty of inspiration.

It was a great trip indeed.

Shrapnel Games

2008-05-17T16:52:00.000-07:00

A bit late blogging about the announcement, but we are very happy to have signed a deal with Shrapnel Games to publish War Plan Pacific. You can read the Shrapnel press release for all the details. Tim and the crew at Shrapnel have been great to work with, and I'm very excited about the deal.

So why am I so late in blogging about this? Because signing a deal and finishing a game are two different things! Lots of work still to do, but everything is moving in the right direction at the right pace.

We’re going public!

2008-01-25T16:51:00.000-08:00

Okay, not that kind of going public. But we’ve put up the first public screenshots of War Plan Pacific, our first title. They’re over on the games page. It feels kind of odd, putting up screenshots with a lot of placeholder art, but it gives folks a chance to see how the game is coming together.

New Digs

2008-01-16T18:29:00.001-08:00

Okay, we're Blogger powered now, and things at least look better. Incremental improvements R Us...

New and Improved! Now with less stuff!

2008-01-15T17:33:00.000-08:00

A new PC showed up today. I’m looking at it across the office over by the coffee table. I’m not sure if it’s the new test box or the new dev box – I haven’t opened it yet. But I do know it’s a new Dell Vostro. Under the “Key Features” for the Vostro, Dell lists the following:

Designed with standard tools and services to simplify technology management for businesses without dedicated IT support

Features no trialware and a 30-day money back guarantee

Comprehensive standard Small Business services

Emphasis mine. The marketing person writing up the sales literature get’s three bullet points to sell the product, and one of them is “no free trialware.” Well, okay, they cheated a little by combining that with “30-day money back guarantee” but still, one of the top selling points is they didn’t install a bunch of stuff. On the product page they’re even more blunt. The first topic is:

No trialware.
Customers said they hated trialware, so we took it away. Vostro systems come without annoying trialware pre-installed. You only get the software you want.

Yes, customers hate that stuff. Most of it goes unused, but still manages to get in the way, either during OOBE (Out-Of-Box-Experience, which is not what happens to the computer during a near-death experience, but rather what happens to the person who just bought said computer the first time they turn it on), or every other time you boot, until you get frustrated enough to go hunt it down and uninstall it.

“Now, hold on a minute”, I hear a few of you saying. “Why would Dell (and HP, and, well, everyone) put trialware on there if customers hated it. Didn’t they do any research first?”

Maybe, but they didn’t put that stuff on their because they thought customers might want it. They put it on there because the makers of the trialware paid them to do it. Trialware is an advertising scheme. AOL, Google, McAfee, etc., think that if they can get trial versions of their products on your PC, that you’re more likely to spring for their pay versions. And of course, in one sense, they’re right. Try-before-you-buy is a pretty good sales model. But the downside of advertising is that it is always clamoring for attention, and attention is becoming a precious commodity that people don’t like to give away. When a mutli-hundred, or even mutli-thousand dollar purchase assaults you with advertising before you can put it to use, well, no wonder people hate it.

PC makers have to get by on razor thin margins. Pocketing a few dollars from the trialware makers helps keep them above water. But I think that’s a very short term solution. Finding yourself in a commodity market is no fun, but turning your main product into an ad vehicle doesn’t strike me as a great solution. The traditional response to a commodity market is to break out of it by differentiating your product. In a good way, that is. So that you can charge a premium because it’s better than the others.

Michael Dell mentioned support costs when he introduced the Vostro line. Trialware drive up support costs. I used to work at this big software company with enormous profit margins. For one particular product we sold, we made about $40 profit per box. The average support call cost us just under $30. One, just one support call from a customer nearly wiped out all our profit from that sale. Two support calls and we were in the red. Two calls, followed by “I give up, I’m returning this piece of junk because it doesn’t work right” would really hurt. Luckily we didn’t have very many support calls, but I never forgot that lesson. Quality makes a financial impact in more places than you might imagine. It’s worth a lot more than a few pennies.

Even though Vostro’s have been out a few months, it’s not too late for me to applaud Dell for this, right?. So now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go set up my new toy.

Please pardon..."

2008-01-13T14:26:00.000-08:00

...the look of the blog. It's pretty ugly and we haven't gotten around to working on that.

But then, strategy gamers like to say it's the gameplay and not the graphics that matter, right?

Right?

Okay, they matter, especially when they're as bad as this page right now.

[UPDATE Jan 16, 2008] Moved to Blogger. Things are a little better. Still more work to do.

Deep Appeal and Ad-Supported Business Models

2008-01-12T22:59:00.000-08:00

I talked with a friend of mine yesterday and he reiterated his conviction that advertising-supported games are the way of the future (and, coincidentally enough, as I write this, my wife came into the dining room with a Christmas card buried in the mail stack we picked up from the post office from the very guy – Hi Paul if you’re reading. Nice picture of the family). Anyway, Paul thinks advertising is it, and there’s a lot in what he says. Advertising support means cheap or free games, and customers love free.

Sometimes.

TCSDaily has an article titled Google the Destroyer that points out the dangers of ad-support becoming the dominate business model. Namely, quality and diversity of content suffer, because in that world, the content (game, in our case) is not the product, the consumer (that would be you) is. And the consumer is not the customer, the ad buyer is. That doesn’t mean there can’t be good content, just that good content – and the production budget needed to create it – is harder to justify. Take broadcast TV. Sure, popular shows have higher ratings and thus greater ad revenues, but that reduces each potential viewer to a binary data point. Either you watch, or you don’t. It doesn’t really matter how engaged you are or how happy you are watching the show. A show that you love and one that you just happened to watch because it’s on both count that same. That’s how a show like Firefly with devoted fans gets cancelled while a ton of sitcoms with marginally engaged – but larger - audiences survive season after season. Most TV shows strive for a shallow appeal to a broad audience because there’s no way to monetize deeper appeal (at least not directly within the ad-supported framework. Merchandising deals, movies, books and the like can tap that deep appeal, but those things aren’t supported by advertising). And all things being equal, deeper appeal is more expensive to get. There are some TV shows with great production values (and high cost), but I have a hunch they are counting on non-advertising revenue at some point.

So, what it all amounts to is, an advertising-supported business model doesn’t work very well for niche markets. About the only way to make it work is to pick a niche market with a really, really wealthy audience. If your niche happens to be people willing to drop a half-million on a new Island Packet Yacht, then you might be able to charge enough for your ads to pay the rent. (They are really great boats, BTW, if you’re in the market…). So, I think I’ll modify what I said in paragraph one. Customers like free, but they usually don’t love it.

Hmmmm, so what kind of a sailing game can I make?

Getting Started

2007-12-19T11:40:00.000-08:00

Can we get a website up and running in time to ignore it for the Holidays? That's the challenge. Odd how much hurry-up and wait there can be, but "panic early, panic often" is what I always say. Actually, I don't - technically - always say that, but I say it often enough.

So, we're panicking early. We don't really need the website until after New Years, but it would be nice to know it's there when we do need it, and that we can actually update it.

Five more shopping days until Christmas, but how many more Shipping days are there? Ha ha, that's the more important question for us Amazon addicts.