Developer Blog

One of the early problems I had when coding my first hex and counters wargame was how big should I make the hexes. Hexes on map boards are there typically as a place to put the counters and help control things like movement, ZOC and give an idea of map scale.

Now one of the design issues with a computer version of a map board is how much of the map board do you show on the screen at any one time? When you buy a printed version you lay the map out on the table/floor and can see everything in one go. But in a computer version you are limited to the size of the monitor.

The main driver for the hex size I chose is the counters I wanted to display. Too small and its hard to read. Too big and you don’t get many hexes on the screen. My hexes ended up being 128 * 112 pixels. This allowed me to have counters with a size of 90 * 90, which I felt looked good on a screen.

But wait… This is a computer game. So that means we can change the size on the fly to suit the game players preferences. And what about that lovely 4K monitor you just brought that allows for really clear graphics no matter how small. How much freedom should I allow for the player of my games to change the way they view the game? The more options, the longer to code, the higher the chance of defects, the higher the chance the game never gets published.

Up until now I have not allowed resizing of the screen. More important to get a game published than worry about the ability to resize. However I am recently faced with a new dilemma. I have been in discussions with my graphics artist about a future project I am thinking about writing, a tactical game. I showed my artist some counters styles I found on the web that I liked and said “lets make them look like this’. His response was “Why? Lets make them better”.

Next day he sends me this.

Problem is when I reduce these down to fit a 90 * 90 counter you get this. All that beautiful detail lost.

So do I make the counters bigger so you get to see more detail, but get a smaller portion of the map on screen? If I have to increase hex size it means the maps need more detail. More detail means higher production costs as they take my artist longer to create.

Do wargamers even care? Look at the maps and counters we play with now. In many cases they are very basic and cheap looking. A lot of the time for the same reason – details & quality cost $$$. Many of the games only sell a few hundred copies and it makes no financial sense to incur a high cost that cannot be recouped.

Back to my original question – “How big should a Hex be and why does it matter?”.

It matters for almost the same reasons as a hardcopy of the game – Cost, Time and Quality. I think I will be going for slightly bigger counters and hexes when I write this game but will need to allow for game players to be able to resize if they prefer.

I want to build a community around the games I write and for them to feel they are involved and important to the success of the games. As part of this I will share downloads figures a couple of times a year.

When I first decided to start writing and publishing wargames I scoured the Internet for information on how many downloads to expect with my first game. There is surprisingly little information out there. What I did find is cases where developers had spent a year writing a game and then getting only a handful of downloads even if free. I knew my target market was a fairly niched one – so would the same be true for me?

I decided to write my first game, Operation Typhoon, for Android. I had some experience writing for this platform through years of half finished game ideas. I also decided the game should be free to get maximum downloads and more importantly some feedback.

I published Operation Typhoon and then immediately worked on France 1940. I was not very satisfied with the graphics for either game and had a graphics artist rework the map for Operation Typhoon and republished it. I also at that time published it in the Apple Store.

As they were my first games I thought I might get a handful of downloads and some indication that it was worthwhile continuing to write games but charging for them.

Below are the total downloads since publishing those games.

I learnt several things for these two games:

• iOS users give hardly any feedback or rating
• Android users give feedback
• Even free games on Android get pirated.
• There is no money to be made on Android if you are trying to sell a game
  • This came from a slew of blogs that started to appear around this time
• Writing games for PC is still the best option if you wanted to sell them
  • This came from advice from other wargame developers
• People really liked the games. They didn’t care too much if there was no AI, ability to save game or instructions.

With the above information fresh in my mind I started work on Kursk. The total number of downloads to date has been 133. Considering the game is still in Steam Early Access and has had no publicity I regard this as a great success. It will be interesting to see what the figures are once I formally publish it.

Feedback has been very valuable to me and it has been great receiving emails from people saying how much they like and enjoy the game. It has enthused me to write bigger and better games.

One of things you can do when you have a game on Steam is to link it to Google Analytics.

Why is this useful?

Below is a screen print of the total number of visitors to my store on Steam since I created and published it about 3 months ago.

Naturally the bulk of the visitors come from within Steam itself.  What is of more interest is the Referral number – namely people who have visited the store page as a referral from another site.

I am not sure why steamcommunity appears here however the next four in the list are very useful for the future. I have done no marketing for this game. The referrals from these sites come from users posting on their forums about the game having seen it on Steam. The exception is awargamersneedfulthings.co.uk where I contacted them with a steam key as a giveaway contest.

This is useful to me as I now know that when I want to do some serious marketing for any of my games grogheads.com and puntadelanza.com will be top of the list.

 

 

Developing a Game on your own is not just about coding and testing. The last few weeks have busy for me with many other tasks.

Planning for the Future

I want to focus on Wargames that cover a single battle rather than big strategy games which companies like Slitherine already provide. There is a huge range of boardgames just waiting to be converted to digital and I want to tap into that resource pool. To do so I need to reach out to publishers and designers. That takes a lot of researching to find the right direct contact with the kind of games i am looking for. I have been very lucky that one big publisher contacted me after they heard about my game and two others responded to my email enquiries. I now have a small backlog of games to work on. Wait for announcements on them in the future.

Reaching out to an International Market

To be successful I should not just restrict myself to the English speakers in the world. I know from my previous game releases that there is an interest in my games from French and Russian players. In addition I should not neglect the emerging Chinese games market. Also Japan in the 80’s had a huge interest in wargames – who’s to say that interest is not still there?

I came across fivver.com where people offer their services for $5. For $5 I can have somewhere between 250 – 400 words translated by someone fluent in both languages (English and one other). To start with I have had my store front text translated into Russian and Chinese as an experiment to see if it generates more alpha sales.

Researching AI

I have been reading up on AI in computer games in the last few weeks. Ideally I would like to work with someone who has experience in this area but with my limited budget I cannot afford to do that at the moment. Anyway I have learnt a lot so its been interesting.

Maintaining a foot in the real world

Its very easy to let game development consume you. I have a full time job and do this in addition to that. I took a break from both for some well deserved R&R over three weeks with my family. Luckily my wife keeps me in check to ensure I don’t stray too far towards the dark side.

Its been 24 days since I push my game live on Steam Early Access. The feedback has been great and I’ve had more sales than I truly expected. Bugs found have also been incredible low – I am really pleased with that as I was worried whether I was doing enough testing.

I even got contacted by a major games publisher and spoke to them about my game and plans. Its was fantastic to get some advice from them and understand more about the type of war games they are interested in. I knew my game was not right for them but it shows I am on the right track. The big plus for me is I am getting gradually to meet and speak to some of the big players out there.

I have just started to target some of the dedicated war games sites to see if they are interested in doing reviews of my game. Will be interesting to see how they review my game. Good, bad or ugly the feedback will be great for me.

I pushed another release out last weekend that just about had the game at a finished state for hot seat play or for someone that likes playing both sides. But if I want to be successful I need to have some great AI.

Its all about the AI…

I have read several comments from people who have thought about buying the game that they will wait until it has AI in it.

Theres no doubt about it, writing the AI is going to be tough. The publisher I spoke to said it will be tough to write as well. But I need to do it – without it my games will never sell in any great numbers and my market will always be small.

I have been thinking about how to do it for sometime now. I have read great articles on influence maps, scripting, state engines and so on. I will tackle the Russians first – they need to play defensively to start with and I think this will be easier.

What I realized is that whatever the AI ends up being it will represent to some extent how I play games. How do I plan a move out, what order do I do things in, how aggressive a player am I and the such. Am I even a good player?

My focus initially will be to get some AI into the game – no matter how bad it is. That will act as the framework that I can build on. The first couple of turns will use a lot of scripting. Thats because initially units need to move up to where the fighting is and there is little outside influence that the human player can do to effect this.

It will be great when I release a first version with AI out on Early Access. If I can make my games challenging enough I know people will buy them and I will have a future in continuing to wrote this type of game.

In my last blog I closed with the line “My expectations? I will happy if just a handful of people buy it.” So was I happy after the first 3 days of my game being available to buy and download on Steam Early Access? Read on and find out.

My biggest concern was that no one would be able to run the game after they downloaded it. Had I missed something critical? Was my desktop PC different from everyone else’s? I had a little bit of reassurance as Steam actually do a quick test of your game prior to allowing you to push it live. Since I had passed that surely everything must be ok.

The High

Within about one hour of release I had my first sale. On the Friday I was checking my sales figures every 10 minutes and reading every comment that was posted. It was very exciting.

The Low – The First Bug

I released the game fairly late on a Thursday night. It was a pleasant surprise to find that some people had brought the game overnight. But with that came the first report of a bug and it was a big one – quite literally. I had some code that made a selected unit grow and shrink a little so you could clearly see what unit you had picked while deciding where to move it to. Now I tested this game on 3 different Laptops of various ages and power to try and cover any hardware differences that might effect my game. This feature worked perfectly on all of them.

But in the real world it had an altogether different effect. The selected unit would grow and grow until it almost covered the whole screen. I think it also flashed a lot. Below is a screenshot in all its glory. The unit even ends up being upside down!

Luckily the game was still playable you just had to decide your move quickly before the monster icon devoured your screen. Also not all users saw this.

Also another defect was found overnight on Friday that caused the game to crash. I was up early Saturday morning fixing these two issues and had a patch out by midday. Since then nothing much has been reported wrong with the game functionality as it is now.

Community

One thing I was desperately seeking was feedback on the game. I have previously released 2 games on Google Play and 1 on Apple Store but had got very little feedback about my games. So I wanted feedback but I was taken by surprise on how willing purchasers of the game were to give really useful feedback on what they liked, what they didn’t and what they wanted to see in the final version. I now have a small community willing the game on. This has been a real motivator for me.

The suggestions for improvements for the game have been incredible useful to me. I will definitely get some of them into the game. Others I will add into the design of my next game.

I also have found the small community that has built up in such a short time to be very supportive. I had a bug, they accepted it and were really pleased I had it fixed within 24 hours.

The nonsense emails

Since the game became available I have had several emails asking me to give out free steam keys so they can offer them as prizes. What do I get in return? Maybe a good review. I know my market well. Its a very niched section of game players who have similar interests to me. Giving out free keys in this way is not going to generate anything meaningful for me and I certainly don’t want fake reviews.

Next steps

I have a great looking menu coming in the next release and I will try to get some of the features requested into it as well. The next release will mean the game is complete for the player that likes to play both sides in a game. This is a fairly big proportion of my market. After that I can focus on the AI. If I can get that right then I will have something for the other major section of game players.

So back to my opening sentence – In my last blog I closed with the line “My expectations? I will happy if just a handful of people buy it.”

I am very happy.

Finally I think “Kursk – Battle for Prochorovka” is ready primetime – or at least alpha time! Its time to get some feedback on the game as it is now while I work on the AI.

In the last week everything started to click into place. I fixed some bugs, got the game saving out and tweaked a few things and then suddenly it felt like it was ready for someone else to play with it and see what they think.

I spent most of today getting it uploaded to Steam with all the marketing and screenshots. Now I just need to wait 2 or 3 days for them to approve it and then I can publish it.

I decide to price it at $6.99 as the game is fully playable as is without the AI and I know for some people this will be enough. Full retail price will be $9.99 so I hope that people agree that a 30% reduction for not having AI in place is fair. I am sure there are a few bugs still to shake out but I need real people playing the game to find them when playing in a way I was not expecting.

One step closer to finding out if there is a market for this type of game. My expectations? I will happy if just a handful of people buy it.

For the last couple of weeks I have been trying to get the game to the stage where it is ready for an Alpha release.

The game will be playable as a two player hot-swap (or solo by playing both sides) version. The only items missing as of now are AI (Yes I know thats a big feature missing !) , save game and some starting menu screens.

I have a placeholder webpage in place (http://kursk.yobowargames.com) and will start to populate it with more details. In addition I intend to put together some training videos to show the key concepts and gameplay.

My target is get this Alpha release out by Mid March. Time to put on my Marketing and Publisher hat!

So this week Steam announced (Blog) they would be replacing Greenlight with a fee based submission program. The fee could be anywhere between $100 and $5000. I am naturally a little concerned that although my game is already Greenlit they may decide to charge the fee for all games that have not gone live by the time they institute this change. I consider my game to be in a fairly niche market and was never expecting large sales. So a possible fee of $5000 would certainly block me from releasing on steam. Time will tell on this.

In the meantime I have been continuing to work as much as possible on my game and just today finished implementing artillery bombardment which is a feature of combat. This took longer than expected and wasn’t helped by me being undecided about how to implement it in the UI.

So how complete is the game? I almost have a two player (sharing a PC or someone solo playing) working completely from end to end. I believe I can get this finished in the next two weeks with some rough menus in place. The next really big item after that is AI… Once I have that conquered it would be polishing and final bug fixing before releasing the game. My target for all this is May – June 2017.

Big question for me is do I release an alpha version once I have a two player game working? I am still undecided on this. On the one hand I want some feedback on how things look now and any bugs that are found. On the other I don’t want to face a disastrous release of the game too soon due to too many bugs.