yobowargames – Page 5

June 22, 2018

Half Year Progress Report

First a quick summary of my 2018 objectives which is year 2 in my three-year plan and had as its main objective of publishing more than one game and building a track record. In more details I had planned for the following:

Publish Battle for Korsun
Publish Invaders from Dimension X
Work on Kampfgruppe
Start work on other games
Be more proactive on Social Media

So how am I doing?

Publish Battle for Korsun

Still working on the AI for this. Actually, I have taken a small break from it as was proving to be too grueling to keep looking at the same code.

Publish Invaders from Dimension X

This game is ready to go. Still working on the publishing strategy.

Work on Kampfgruppe

This has now morphed into Valor & Victory and work is progressing extremely well.

Be more proactive on Social Media

Well apart from this blog I have done nothing different – definitely a fail here.

In addition, I have in various states the following (All planned for 2019):

Fall of France
- Map Graphics done
- Units Graphics done
- Basic game framework set up

Picketts Mill
- Map Graphics done
- Basic game framework set up

Iwo Jima
- Map Graphics done
- Basic game framework set up

Cassino
- Map Graphics done

Years Progress summary

Right now I feel I am on track with what I had planned to do apart from being active on Social Media. Social Media is just not my thing. At the moment it’s not having any impact on anything but once I have a bigger portfolio I feel it will become more important. Need to think about how to tackle this weakness.

June 3, 2018

Going Public with Developer Builds

This week I emailed the guys at Wargamer.com to give them a heads up about Valor & Victory. They very kindly mentioned me on their Friday weekly update – https://www.wargamer.com/articles/wargaming-news-may-31st/. Actually, it was a bit of a bonus as it just so happened they also had news on Unity of Command. There’s my game in the mix with a follow up to an outstanding game!

Of course, my main purpose was to start to generate interest in the game but also to expose the fact I am providing development builds of the game as I work on it. I certainly got a lot of interest because of that article as you can see below. Another unexpected bonus was that some people donated money when they downloaded the game. I also had a few extra sales with my previous game Kursk.

There is a risk to doing this and good reasons why no one else does it. What does developer build really mean to a downloader of the game? Are they expecting to be able to play a complete game, expecting a buggy beta or are they aligned with my vision of a “Hey this is where I am with getting the game working. Oh, btw nothing is tested and uhmm not much works”?

Indirectly this has been a discussion point for another game in development at the moment. Slitherine announced Panzer Corps 2 on 08 Mar 2017 and immediately fans of the game wanted to see screenshots and asked about when they can test the game –
http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=464&t=78967. They have seen very little and are fairly vocal about it. The point is they want to be involved and give early feedback. The risk to Slitherine is that the early feedback is negative and the fans are turned off to the game and doom it before its even released. A commercial disaster for a business. So I totally understand the reluctance to give out something too early.

I hope I am not unique in the fact I write code, feed in some new graphics and after a few playthroughs realize its just not working, something is not gelling or its plain too difficult to implement correctly. No one gets to see these failures if you keep them hidden. Sometimes I rewrite whole chunks of code because I suddenly have an “ah ha!” moment and realize I can make my life a lot easier. There’s no direct impact to an end user of the game so they see nothing new but I spent a week doing it. “Hey guys check out the new build – nothing new to see but the code looks great!”. Without frequent real updates perception can be – He gave up on the game as we have had no news for weeks now.

So why am I providing development builds so early in the process? Well, I play games in a certain way. I don’t read instructions, I never play in windowed mode and I use a mouse almost 100% if I can. No keyboard shortcuts for me if I can avoid it. I have no UI expert with 20 years of game design to help me. I have no AI genius who knows every algorithm there is to know and also knows how to code them. I don’t have much time, funds or indeed the skill set for PR & Marketing. I do this in my spare time. Sometimes there is no spare time. Should I focus on coding or testing during that time? I need help filling those gaps.

The first feedback I got was “Can you make a windowed version” and “Keyboard shortcuts?”. Oh maybe that is important then. “Hey your icons are overlapping with unit displays”. Hmm not everyone has a 1920 * 1080 screen then. There are my UI experts.

“Hey we passed on the news about your game” – Thanks guys from Burden of Command (seriously, thanks, after they twittered to their followers I saw a spike immediately). There are my PR and Marketing experts.

“Hey your AI sucks”. But I haven’t coded any yet! I reply. “It still sucks”. There is my QA team.

Sometimes I imagine myself as the lonely long distant runner at the back of the pack. Tired and despairing of ever finishing the race. Then I look up and I realize there is a crowd running alongside me cheering me on. I hope by the end of this race the crowd will be big. A recent blog on Gamasutra nicely covered this subject https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TellyLee/20180601/319126/Indie_Game_Marketing_The_Value_of_Fans.php
I hear a voice in the crowd “Your AI still sucks”. I put my head back down and start coding again…

// Try and beat this AI
if (player.equals(“voice in the crowd”){
stackEliminated = true;
}

May 27, 2018

Valor & Victory – Be a part of the development

This weekend I received the first completed map back from the Jenna, my graphics artist and I put together the basic game framework for Valor & Victory.

I am going to share my development builds as I make progress to anyone who wants to have some input to the game or who just want to check in on progress.

Builds can be downloaded here: https://yobowargames.itch.io/valor-and-victory

Shoot me an email or send a message in my discord channel if you have any feedback – or just want to give some encouragement.

And why not check out the original boardgame:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28452/valor-victory

Barry Doyle, the game designer, is working on a big update at the moment.

May 12, 2018

Starbucks – A time to let the mind wander

Saturday morning is coffee date time with my wife. We share a coffee and a Double Bacon and Egg roll. She studies Japanese and I pretend to work on my game but mostly I end up daydreaming and people watching.

So today’s daydreaming was related to Heroic Maps. I was thinking that these would look great in a computer game. Getting artwork done is one of my biggest pain points as I cannot engage someone full time so have to fit in with their other work. Of course, if they are good they tend to have a lot of other work. So here’s me thinking “look at all this already done artwork! I wonder if they would license it? Hmm but I need a game to go with them. Do I want to go down the fantasy route? Do I need a storyline?”. And so on.

I did do one thing that was productive. I put all my blogs into one Flipboard Magazine. So if you are a (the?) reader of my blogs and use Flipboard then now you can read it in a magazine format.

View my Flipboard Magazine. View my Flipboard Magazine.

May 7, 2018

New Faucet and Battle for Korsun – A tenuous link

“I want to replace the faucet in our bathroom,” she says. “and here is the new set I want to be installed”. I love my wife’s icy stare.

So I estimated it would take about 2 hours to take out the old faucet and switch in the new one. What I had not figured into my plan was the fact I was taking out something that’s probably been in place for 30 years and had been designed as a test for cracking Enigma.

After 2 trips to Home Depot, finding out PB Blaster is fantastic at loosening rusty connections and 8 hours of sweat and tears the job was done. Wife was happy – Mission Success!

Right now Battle for Korsun is proving to be that old Faucet. Not that’s its 30 years old but that what I thought would take 2 hours is taking 8. The game is actually quite big and it takes a while to play out one turn. So testing fixes and trying to find the root cause of a bug takes time. I am starting to lean towards doing a limited release on itch.io and getting some feedback so I know where to concentrate my efforts.

Where do you go to find out about Indie Wargames?

This question has been playing on my mind recently. There are other developers out there like me, Digital Gameworks as an example, who write wargames in their spare time. We don’t have a big presence, we don’t have a big publisher like Slitherine and our games on Steam, Play, and App store are lost in the torrent of other games released daily.

One idea that is floating around in my head is to put together a website that consolidates all the various links and sources of these games together with links to reviews on those games. My efforts in maintaining a Flipboard magazine have been useful in finding out the effort to do something like this

The problem is how to get people to visit the website and for it to become the de facto place to go to and find links to buy Indie Wargames? Maybe I should take the “Build it and they will come” approach to it.

Anyways this has been bothering me enough that I think I will look at progressing this into something real. Let me know your thoughts on this.

May 1, 2018

MiniMaps

I finally got around to implementing MiniMaps for my games. To be honest I could never quite figure out how to do it but its been bugging me so I made a big push to get it done.

Whilst I was surrounding myself in a glow of self-appreciation my wife immediately asked “So if I click on the minimap then the screen will scroll to that location?”. Uhmm no. Ok so not quite done yet…

Below are comparisons for 4 of my games. These are all 40 times smaller than the actual game. The white rectangle shows what you can see on a 1920*1080 monitor. If you click on the minimap in the game nothing happens – that’s a project for another day…

Fall of France

Iwo Jima

Battle for Korsun

Battle for Picketts Mill

April 29, 2018

Fall of France – New Screenshot

Not much to show this week but I did manage to work on some more of the Units for Fall of France.

Below is a screenshot of the BEF, Dutch, and Belgium units in place. Facing them is the might of the 1940 German Army.

April 21, 2018

Administration Update

For those who follow my progress and experiences in developing wargames, I have made a couple of changes.

My store page now has links to itch.io which I will use as my storefront going forward. I already had an itch.io presence but wasn’t really utilizing it. There are several reasons behind this but the main one is preparing for my work on Valor & Victory. I feel this game will benefit from the existing community involvement and itch.io has many great features for helping with this.

The second thing I have finally set up is a Discord channel at https://discordapp.com/invite/f85Cxb7. Again this is in preparation for Valor & Victory but also something I should have done a while ago. I will see how successful it is as a tool to engage with fans of my games.

April 15, 2018

Fall of France, Helping out the poor QA guy and Website Statistics

Almost 12 months ago I proudly announced I was going to publish Fall of France, designed by Peter Schutze, sometime in 2017. I was young and foolish then and thought I could write a game every 2 or 3 months.

Time and experience have taught me that is just not possible. However, I made a commitment and have finally started some background work on the game.

Below is the final map with some sample German units. Target date to publish? Late 2018…

Helping my poor QA guy

Jonathan, who tests my games to bits, has complained I don’t make it easy for him to get logs and take in-game screenshots to help him show me potential bugs. So this Saturday, while enjoying coffee and double bacon with egg breakfast roll at Starbucks with my wife, I actually got around to writing some code to do just that.

So next time you see some nerdy person at Starbucks coding away just assume they are doing the same thing!

Statistics

Traffic to my website has slowly been growing over the last 12 months. Interestingly the most read article was the one about why no one has published a computer version of Squad Leader.

I also did some comparisons against my store pages on Steam. I wonder if there is a way to draw visitors to my store pages to the other store page or my website? Any tips appreciated.

As you can see from the Steam pages stats China is becoming a very important market.

First up some stats for yobowargames.com.

Next my yet to be released game Battle for Korsun

and then finally Kursk

Finally

Has anyone got some experience of using Discord? I am wondering whether it might be a better way to engage with fans of my games?

April 9, 2018

What Inspires Me

The last three weeks have been a relentless, sometimes soul destroying, drive to polish Invaders from Dimension X and find every bug possible. I have to call out and credit Jonathan for his constant quest to find everything possible that might be wrong with the game.

Between us, I am sure we have played various parts of the game 100’s of times. I can visualize the code in my sleep.

What has come out of these past three weeks is, I believe, a highly polished game. Time will tell if others think the same but I am very happy.

However, the job is not quite done yet. I need to prepare a video, edit the manual, fix a couple more small items in the game and just generally prepare the game ready for launch.

In the meantime, I set my oldest daughter a challenge (paid challenge – shes streetwise and $$$$ wise!). Design a splash screen for my future Picketts Mill civil wargame. The header for this blog is the result. I think she did a great job.

This is what inspires me to keep doing this. The satisfaction of coding a complete game from start to finish. To see new images for a future game.

Oh, and I managed to do a little bit more work on my Model Carrier.

So whats next?

I need to get back to finishing off Battle for Korsun. I am guessing there is maybe a month or twos worth of work left.

In May my graphics artist will free up and start working on Valor and Victory custom maps for me. They will be based on the originals – I will be interested to see what the community think of them.

I also have the map for France 1940 coming. The three games – Valor and Victory, France 1940 and Picketts Mill will share a lot of the common framework that I have built as I worked on Korsun and Invaders. The differences start to appear when implementing each games individual ruleset.

What this means is I can have a basic game with a Map, Units, and movement in about a week. As an example, this weekend, as a break from Invaders, I put together the basic framework for Picketts Mill.

Finally

I see that Matrix finally released Desert War by Brian Kelly. I really admire Brian for working on one game for so long. It shows a real passion and I believe that like me this is not his day job but something he worked on in his spare time.

I am not sure that enough people realize that a lot of wargames are written by developers in their own spare time and they likely won’t make any money from it. There would be a lynching if I came home one day and told my wife “Hey Honey, I quit my job so I can focus on wargames. Everythings going to be ok….”

Did you know that Nightfighter from GMT is still being worked on by two guys? Also in their spare time with young families. I hope they get to see the game published one day.