Tag: pc strategy war games

This week I have been working on improving my code dealing with retreat. Since this is a common feature of war games I thought I had better make it work better than I presently have.

There are several problems I am battling (no pun intended!) with at the moment.

Take a look at the below scenario

Here the Russian 167 Rifle Division (Center of the screen)  is required to retreat 3 hexes. Possible final retreat hexes are marked with the yellow outlines.

So the problems I am wrestling with:

• Do I let a human player choose the hex they can retreat to? This, of course, would be the norm in a board game. Not so common in PC war games.
• What about the AI? How can I replicate how a human would choose the final retreat hex?
• If I really can’t replicate how a human player would choose then is it fair in the game to give the human player a possible advantage over the AI?
• Do game players even want this level of control?
• Should a 2 player game allow players to choose retreat hexes but not when playing against the computer?
• What about PBEM? I cannot expect the players to email every battle when there is a retreat decision needed by the opposing player.

With Kursk – Battle at Prochorovka I let the computer decide on a random retreat hex with little real thought on how it decided which one to pick.

My current thinking is I will let the computer control the final retreat location but I will try to give more reasoning to the final location by for example looking at things like:

• Does the final retreat hex help maintain the front line
• Is it a hex with defensive benefits
• Is the retreat hex in supply
• Are other friendly units nearby

So I will give each Hex a value and then the one with the highest score becomes the choice.

I will also backport these improvements into Kursk – Battle at Prochorovka so that players of that game benefit from the things I learn/improve as I develop more games.

For the last week I have not written a line of code. Any free time I have has been taken up with preparing my game for its final release. I have also decided to launch it on Google Play and Apple Store. I was going to hold off from releasing it to these two stores but decided there was no real reason for this.

The mobile version is actually exactly the same as the PC version – So best suited for Tablets but I am sure people will also download it to play on their tiny mobile screens!

I am unsure what pricing strategy I should take with the mobile versions so have priced them a little higher than other available games. I figure I can always reduce the price later if there are no sales but not increase it. Not expecting much from Android or iOS sales – more a case of testing the waters and seeing if there is still an audience out there that will pay for a mobile game.

So for the last 2 days I have been battling with the development tools to get my game in review with the people at Apple. Its a fairly simple process once you know how to do it. However the last time I published a game in the App store was 8 months ago so I have forgotten everything and had to look up how to do many of the needed actions.

Getting a game ready for actual launch takes a lot of time and its something I need to plan out and prepare for better next time. You need screenshots, icons, text, instructions, translations and so on. I have not done my best with preparing the assets needed this time. I really think I will engage my graphics guy next time to help me prepare some professional looking screenshots and icons. This time I did it myself – unfortunately cost is a consideration at this time until I know games I write will at least sell enough to cover off my costs to produce (The development hours are a labour of love…).

For my next game – Battle for Korsun – I am going to try to localize for the Asian market. China, Korea and Japan are getting to be big markets on steam and it will be interesting to see if there is a market for a traditional hex based wargame. I have had a couple people from China and Korea buy Kursk in the Early Access store – so I know there is a level of interest there.

I have also been fairly heavily engaged with my graphics artist this week on my various projects. He is not a WW2 buff so I need to guide him on what I want to achieve. I really like his work so the effort needed to help him get things right is worth it to me. Plus his work really motivates me to finish projects and see everything come together to produce a game.

My motivating this week is the new splash screen for Battle for Korsun. I think it looks great. I am really enjoying working on this game.

I have a very specific target audience in mind for my games. They are either wargamers that like PC based war games or they are board wargamers who occasionally dabble in PC war games.

The problem for me is they are also a very scattered group. There is really not one go to place to reach out to them. Many of them are part of small online groups with words in the title such as PBEM,  HEX Based Wargames, Avalon Hill, Historical and so on.

I need to be careful when telling them about my game as some don’t like the idea of being advertised to in their group. I fully understand and respect this – so how do I get them engaged and at least aware I exist and am trying to produce games they may like to play.?

I have started to build up a list of these groups, researching what is allowed in their forums, asking permission if I cannot see that someone has announced a game previously. It takes time and patience. I do not want to offend any one of these groups.

But it has been useful. I have found a small PBEM group and I think they would be ideal to reach out to and ask them to test my next game which will include PBEM. They get a free game I get valuable feedback – I am hoping it will be a win win situation.

Of course these groups want their members to be active in their forums. I have a genuine interest in everything they talk about but not enough time to be as engaged as I should be. Its tough for me to spread my time around all the things I need to do to get a game published (and remember I have a full time day job too!).

For my next game, Battle for Korsun, I am going to try and get some interest in the game from some of the big review sites that cover off war games. I am a little wary about this as I don’t have a lot of time to produce slick videos or fancy marketing – and yet I want them to know I am serious and passionate about what I am doing.

So far I have not upset anyone. Fingers crossed it stays that way!

I am sure a majority of wargamers would agree that dealing with stacks is a pain in the ass. In a printed game you have to keep checking them to see what units you have in there and possibly their state. They get knocked over when trying to move nearby units. You have to be careful when moving them on a crowded map board.

You would think with a computer game dealing with stacks would be a whole lot easier. But I believe the reality is quite the opposite. When dealing with stacks I have to check the following when deciding why the player selected the stack:

• They want to move it
• They want to see the terrain the stack is in
• They want to look through the stack
• They want to Re-order it
• They want to pick one or combination of units to perform some action (likely move or combat)
• They want to add a unit/s to the stack

Most players expect to use a mouse to point, click and execute an action. So I have to take the limited actions available from a mouse and translate to the above.

I don’t believe there is a universally accepted standard for what to do in each circumstance so I have to train the game player how they can perform all the above actions.

So how have I implemented the multitude of possible actions?

• If they left click on stack I assume they wanted to select the whole stack
• If they left click on the stack while pressing the shift key I select the top unit
• If they click on the stack again while still pressing the shift key I rotate through the stack bringing a new unit to the top with each click
• If they right click on the stack I expand the stack out to show all units in the stack

• If its movement turn I highlight allowable hexes to move to based on whether we have a stack or unit selected
• I can add up the combat values of the stack
• If it’s a combat turn I can add a stack to the combat

I have so many ideas but never enough time to implement them and always have at least 3 projects on the go at anyone time.

My excuse for this is that if I hit a roadblock on the current most important project I can move to something different to clear my head and within a couple of days something normally pops into my heads that solves the roadblock.

For the last month I have been heads down getting some decent AI into my Kursk game. The testing of every little change is time consuming. When ever it got too much I switched to working on my next game “Battle for Korsun”. This is coming along quite nicely and I now have the map, counters and basic movement in place. The biggest headache in this game is dealing with stacked units – I will write a piece on this soon as it really is a pain to deal with and allow a computer player to manipulate a stack of virtual counters.

Finally I have been working with my artist on the game I have always wanted to write. I have always been a great fan of Squad Leader. I can still remember the first day I got it as a Christmas present. All those counters and map boards! Sadly its not possible to convert Squad Leader to a computer game as all the rights are with Paradox Interactive who have had them for 10 years now – but with no plans to do anything with them.

So I going to write my own Tactical Game, based on my own rules and with my own implementation. I have many ideas around how I want this game to work and to make it as open to Modders and the wargaming community as possible. But at the moment they are just ideas.

I am thinking of calling the game Kampfgruppe – which is German for Battlegroup. Below is the first publicly available screenshot. I hope it is not the last!

 

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.