Battle for Korsun

January 1944. The German Army had their last toehold on the Dneiper River. This salient projected between two powerful Soviet army groups, the 1st, and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts. Though weakened in their previous efforts against the Germans, on January 25th and 26th, these two powerful groups attacked and surrounded two German corps.

The Germans responded quickly to this threat, hurrying reinforcements from other sectors. Their relief drive made good initial progress, but stalled in the face of stiff Soviet resistance and both sides antagonist, “General Mud”. In the end, the trapped Germans made a desperate breakout attempt from the pocket. Less than half of the encircled forces escaped the trap, with none of their heavy weapons or equipment.

Battle For Korsun is a simulation of these battles in January and February 1944. Players control the various German and Soviet forces which took part in these struggles. The Soviet player must coordinate the offensives of his Fronts to encircle the Germans quickly before the Germans powerful reinforcements arrive. The German player must form a pocket perimeter, then orchestrate his relief drive with his Panzer divisions to rescue their trapped comrades

Sample Units

Buy from Matrixgames at https://www.matrixgames.com/game/kursk-battle-at-prochorovka

Platforms Supported

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.

February 7, 2018February 7, 2018

Its February already?

Where does the time go?

Well, I know where 6 hours of it went – The SuperBowl! What a great game.

As you can see from the header picture I now have the splash screen for Invaders from Dimension X.

I got the game working on my Android tablets this past weekend. I use them to check that everything is resizing correctly and that the game works well for touch screens which more and more laptops have. The desktop PC is my main focus but I have to say the game looks really good on a tablet!

My focus for the next two weeks will be on testing and to get the first drop to my chief tester and to Mark, the publisher of the original board game. Battle for Korsun work is temporarily on hold while I do this.

In the background, I have been looking for an artist to work on Battle for France that I so proudly announced 9 months ago as “coming this year” (meaning 2017 – oh how young and innocent I was back then!). I don’t want to use my main go-to guy as I want him to focus on Kampfgruppe next. If you are a graphics artist reading this blog then do feel free to reach out to me. I am always happy to give someone new to the industry a chance.

I am now averaging about 20 hours a week on game development. A little crazy when I also have a full-time day job. But I love what I am doing and this is my big year to see if I can really make a go of wargame development.

And finally

Another reason I wanted to get Invaders from Dimension X working on a tablet device….. I can test the game while in bed! Don’t say I am not committed!

January 24, 2018

Work in Progress Update

What has been happening in my small part of the world?

Battle for Korsun

I am making good progress on the Russian AI. I have a basic framework in place and now have the AI moving and attacking based on a priority-based list. It’s actually moving too quickly and I will need to slow it down so the player can see what is happening.

Now comes hours and hours of testing and refining. What I need to be sure of is how the AI handles things as the game advances and things become more open.

I am hoping that by sometime in February I can hand the game over to a couple of beta testers for a first look at the game and to test out the Russian AI while I work on the German AI.

Invaders from Dimension X!

I have received back the splash screen and some menu items. They look really good! I now have them plugged into the game.

Next up is to get one scenario working from end to end. There are still a couple of things that are not flowing right.

Again once I get the first scenario working to my liking I will get the game out to a couple of beta testers – hopefully sometime in February as well.

And in other news

This finally arrived in the post from Japan. I haven’t made a model kit in years. When I opened up the box it looks a bit daunting. If you hear no more about it you will know it turned into a disaster!

While doing some research I found that you can subscribe to Wargamers Illustrated prime. Its £1 for the first month and then £5.99 (about $8) after. That gives you access to their entire back issues online magazines and articles. I am hoping it will be good for researching.

I continue to add articles to my Flipboard Magazine. Viewing readership is growing slowly. I hope that it becomes a place for people to discover stories and websites they were not aware of.

As always do email me with questions or comments.

November 19, 2017

My Birthday today!

Today is my birthday – Yay!

And I got this as a present – Double Yah!

In other news, I have got some more graphics in for Invaders from Dimension X. I will try and get all the new graphics into the game this week to see how everything is looking.

Below is a little taster of one of the Marine Counters.

Most of this week has been spent on bug fixing the two player version of Battle for Korsun and I have also almost finished writing the game instructions.

Once I am sure I have all the language strings I will send everything off for translation and get them put into the game. I am sure there are going to be a few issues with string lengths but once they are sorted out I will then send this version out for some testing.

I have decided I will launch the game in the new year once I have got the AI in and everything is looking good.

November 13, 2017

A mixed Bucket

This week turned out to be a mixed bucket of good and bad things with regards to game development.

Translating Kursk – Battle at Prochorovka

This weekend I had planned to import all the translations I received a couple of weeks ago into Kursk – Battle at Prochorovka. However, it transpired it was not quite as easy as I initially thought.

I had expected there to be problems with some of the string lengths being longer than the English version and thus I would need to do some work to get all languages fitting correctly in the areas assigned. What I had not expected was that the font sets I was using did not have all the characters I needed.

This is a real pain in the ass. If I switch to another font its likely that all the English text will also need reworking.

I have paused this effort while I get up the courage to tackle this in depth. The good thing is I can take this knowledge and make sure I am better prepared for the next game.

Battle for Korsun

Every evening this past week I have been whittling down the list of unfinished items needed to get the two player game working. This is the worst part of game development – getting the game to the finishing stage.

I still have the AI to work on but I need to get something finished so I can send it out for testing.

It’s also getting to the stage in development where I am nervous whether people will like the game. Luckily I am not dependant on the success of this game for a living but it would be nice for it to be liked by the market I am aiming at.

Invaders from Dimension X

I have been waiting for my graphics guy to come back with some more graphics for this game. They finally started to arrive this weekend.

As a little taster here is the front and back of one of the alien activation cards.

Finally

I have been trying out scrib.com. It looks like this could be an excellent way to do research my games or indeed anything else that takes your fancy. They do a 30 day trial and if you decide to subscribe its $8.99 per month.

I wanted to do some research for the Pacific war game I am thinking about for next year (one of many games I am thinking about!).

Day dreaming and wasting time on future projects!

November 6, 2017

Distractions

This weekend I allowed myself to get distracted. It started when I was sketching up some ideas in photoshop for Invaders from Dimension X for my graphics artist. Earlier in the week, I was wondering how to use google maps to accurately map a battlefield to a game.

After a little investigation, I found a couple of plugins for photoshop that could take an image from Google Maps and convert it into something pretty reasonably without the need for an expert artist.

So knowledge in hand I went at it…

I really want to write a Pacific War game so this might be the start.

I also purchased a couple of Samsung 500GB SSD’s this weekend. One I put into my wife’s Laptop and the other into my PC. I was a little disappointed with the resultant speed increase. While there is definitely some increased speed with disk related activities it was nothing like I expected. Maybe I am just being too greedy.

I did do some work on Battle for Korsun! Fixed some small bugs and worked on saving and loading games. Early in the week I wrote up a large part of the game manual. I have yet to start work on the AI.

Finally

The Steam Halloween sale is now over. I had a small but nice increase in sales. I might actually end the year just a few dollars down compared to game development expenditure. Good job I am not relying on this to feed the family!

October 28, 2017

General Update

Things have been very slow on the wargame front for the last few weeks due to personal circumstances, making it hard to focus on yobowargames.

Anyway, time for an update on how things are progressing.

Steam Sale

The Steam Halloween sale has now started. This is my first experience of a Steam sale so I was a little unsure what effect it would have on sales. I was notified a couple of weeks ago by Steam that the sale was happening and decided I would offer a 25% discount. Kursk has only been out for a few months and I don’t feel that a larger discount was needed at this stage.

I have definitely seen a spike in sales so what I had read about Steam sales being a good time for games sales seems to be true.

Battle for Korsun

I finally have all the graphics I need and have been working on improving the menu and getting it into shape for localization.

Below is pretty much the final version. It’s a little cluttered but I think it does the job.

Battle for Korsun - Menu — Battle for Korsun – Menu

Next up is playtesting and making sure there are no obvious bugs in the two players hotseat game, writing the manual and getting translations for everything. Then I will move onto the AI for the game.

I am still very undecided about beta testing as I found it to be a two-edged sword when running one with Kursk. It was great to get feedback on the game but I felt added pressure to finish the game quickly.

I was hoping to have the game finished by the end of November but I am beginning to think that early 2018 is more likely.

Invaders from Dimension X

I have been waiting for my graphics artist to finish the artwork for the Alien actions. I now have them all and they look really great. Next up is the UI for the game. I need to sit down and think about some ideas for how this should look and then discuss with my graphics artist.

Google Wifi

Since moving to our new place back in August we have suffered from poor wifi. We have a Comcast router and while it was just about adequate in our old place it struggles to provide a strong enough signal everywhere in the new one.

So I invested in Google Wifi, buying their 3 pack solution (a bit of an overkill but I was not sure if one unit would be enough). I have to say I am very impressed. Wifi speed went from 10 – 20mb to 150mb everywhere in the house. Everyone is very happy!

September 24, 2017October 13, 2017

Translations, Custom Map and Combat Display

Translations

This week I have been thinking about how to reach more wargamers, especially those whose native language may not be English.

As an experiment, I have decided to have some of my blogs and store items translated into Russian, Chinese and Spanish. Chinese and Spanish because they are number 2 & 3 in the list of spoken languages and Russian because I believe they have a fairly large wargame community.

To do this I have added the WPML plugin to this WordPress site. As I have woocommerce I had to buy the Multilingual CMS version to allow me to get everything fully working.

I then used Fiverr to contact some translators.

So the total cost of this experiment so far has been around $170. What I hope to get is some more hits on this website and sign-ups to my Newsletter with the knock-on effect of more sales of Battle for Korsun when I release it.

Once a month I will look to translate some of my key articles. Battle for Korsun will be supported in multiple languages. Can’t wait to see how this affects sales compared to Kursk.

Map

This week I reached out to Ilya Kudriashov to draw me a custom map for Battle for Korsun. Ilya is an upcoming star in the board game world. Check out some of this work here.

I will use this to help with the marketing of the game. Hope the investment pays off!

Combat Display

I wanted to have a good way to display some combat information in Battle for Korsun. So after a little bit of playing around with photoshop , came up with this: