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.

March 23, 2018

What keeps me awake at night

This week I have been thinking over some design considerations for future projects I will be/am working on.

Unit Facing and overlapping sprites

In my next couple of games, the facing of units is important. As those of you who follow my games will know I like bigger graphics for displaying units and hexes. However when rotating those units to allow for facing they start to overlap. Now I could make the unit counters smaller but if you have a stack of units you need to make them smaller still.

I also hit some graphical problems when rotating the sprites. I noticed that if I rotate them in the code they lose a little bit of clarity. To avoid this I will need to have a graphic for every unit in 6 directions. A lot of work but I think worth it to maintain the quality.

For now, I am going to go with the overlap look.

What to do when a mapboard is smaller than the screen width?

Valor & Victory mapboards are 16 hexes (if you include the 2 half hexes) columns across and 9.5 hexes rows down. If I display them at the normal hex size that I have used in my other games then the map will be smaller than a standard 1980 * 1080 monitor screen. Some games, Heros of Normandy as an example, display the map as if it’s on a table.

Others, like Unity of Command, grey out areas that are unreachable. Basically, they extend the map graphics beyond that needed to play the game.

Both are good solutions to the problem although I like the Unity of Command approach better.

For now, I have decided to take the third option and graphically increase the map size so it will fit (once I add a side panel for icons etc) a 1980 * 1080 monitor. What I will need to think about is what happens when a scenario uses 2 or more mapboards. Do I shrink the graphics down (in which case to maintain graphically quality I need 2 sets at each size) or just have a big scrolling map?

I am still thinking about this one for the final version. As its a tactical game, having bigger graphics does give you a feeling of immersion and wanting to protect your precious units.

Community Involvement

Valor & Victory has an existing passionate community who love the game. I would like them involved in the development of the PC version of the game. But at what stage do I release builds to play with? I would love to provide twice a month builds and get feedback right from day one. The problem for me is that means I have to ensure every build is as bug-free as possible and that any new feature is complete which may make progress slower. I don’t want the community to lose faith because every build is bug ridden and a new feature not quite complete.

However, I do see the enormous benefits of early feedback and the early detection of bugs.

I am still pondering on this one.

March 13, 2018March 19, 2018

Valor & Victory

As usual, for me, I have been busy both with my existing projects and planning out future projects.

So let’s start with some exciting news (Well I’m excited!).

Announcements

Valor & Victory

Those who follow my blogs will know I have been talking about Kampfgruppe for a while as a future project. I knew I wanted to do a WW2 squad based game but needed a good ruleset to base it o, preferably with some kind of existing fan base. I think I have found the perfect game – Valor & Victory by Barry W Doyle. Check it out here on boardgamegeek.com. Kampfgruppe will have a name change and become Valor & Victory. It’s very early days so you won’t see too much for a while. I have some ideas on how to get very early builds out to people that want to see development and be involved in the process – more news on this to follow in the coming weeks.

Space Vermins from Beyond!

My work on Invaders from Dimension X is slowly but surely reaching completion and I have started to share ideas with my graphics artist on the second game in the series – Space Vermin from Beyond. There is a lot of artwork to do so I will let him work on that over the next few months and then I will start working on the core code. I can use a fair amount of the framework from Invaders from Dimension X but it has a different ruleset so there will still be quite a bit of coding to do.

Existing projects

Invaders from Dimension X.

With frequent feedback from my guru QA goto guy, Jonathan, I have been busy fixing issues and making small changes to make the game flow better. I now have 2 of the scenarios working with the campaign scenario left to do. Target is to have the game complete by end of March and then more testing. I also have the original game manual to review and edit to get it aligned with the computer version of the game. Hoping to get most of that done this week.

Battle for Korsun

Work on this has been on hold while I focus on getting Invaders from Dimension X to near completion. I will be looking to move back to working on the AI for Korsun in early April. Target completion for this game is End of April/Early May.

The Fall of France

I have been working with a new artist on the map for this game. Still a little way off from getting a final version but its shaping up nicely. Once I have that I will put the basic code framework together and then start on the game specific rules. No timescale on this yet.

Unofficial Projects (Or what I do in my spare time when I should really be concentrating on the above…)

The battle for Pickett’s Mill

On my list of 1001 things to do before I die is designing a board game/computer game combination. I now have the finished map from another graphics artist I am trying out (and who I hope will be using on Valor & Victory). I sent it off to a boardgames company to print up. Yep, this is totally not the way to design a board game but enthusiasm got ahead of reasoning. I have been thinking about the counter design and have a good idea of how they will look. This is very much a long-term project.

Book Review

I finished my first book review (Battle of Wills) and sent it off last Friday to the editor. I actually found doing this surprisingly stressful. I had to read the book and write up a review in 3 months (I did it in slightly over 2 months). That seems like a lot of time but with everything else I do and not planning out reading time for this correctly, it was constantly in the back of my mind as something I had to do.

FlipBoard

View my Flipboard Magazine.

I am still maintaining my magazine on Flipboard on an almost daily basis. It makes for a great read if you have an interest in all things war-game related. So please so check it out.

Building Aircraft Carrier

Yeah. Uhmm its still in the same state as it was last month. I did go try to buy some paint yesterday but the shops closed when I got there. Its now becoming a family joke that it will never get completed. I will prove them wrong!

And finally…

The day job! Yep, I do all the above in my own time. I have a great full time+ job as a Program Manager which I am also equally passionate about. Isn’t that why we have 24 hours in the day – to do the things we love.

March 4, 2018

Battle of Pickett’s Mill – Wargaming in different formats

An idea has slowly been forming in my head.

Our hobby covers many areas and formats from tabletop medieval wargames with figures to card-based WW2 boardgames to futuristic Warhammer computer games.

And within each area comes it own additional pleasures like the painting of figures, the shared experience of winning or losing a board game and the ability to play an online game against someone on the far side of the world.

As many of you will know sometimes we can’t find someone to play the game with and many times we play these games alone – solo play. Indeed some games are ranked on their solitaire playability.

So back to this idea that is slowly taking up space in my head. What if I could take a little bit from each of these areas and bridge the gap. So the rules from figure wargaming, the concept of board games and the technology of computers. This brings me to the Battle of Picketts Mill.

What if I take Brad Butkovich excellent book Criminal Blunder – Wargame Scenarios for the Battle of Pickett’s Mill, the rules of something like Johnny Reb or Regimental Fire and Fury, my many years of wargaming experience across all formats and my programming skills, mix them all up and see what happens.

What I am imagining is Pickett’s Mill as a board game and a computer game with the possibility that if you are playing the board game solo you can have the computer play as your opponent.

Never one to let an idea stay in my head I have started to work out the basic foundations of the game. I have been looking for a new graphics artist to work on some of my projects and I got her to work on the Pickett’s Mill map as a first job. At the same time, I started playing around with some ideas for the layout of the counters.

Using the idea in tabletop wargaming of a figure representing say 50 men you would get 4V meaning a Veteran regiment of somewhere around 200 men. In the board game, this regiment would have two counters stacked on top of each other so that as losses are accumulated you flip or remove the counters to reflect the reduction from 4 to 3 to 2 to 1. The orange strip at the top indicates what Brigade the regiment belongs to. I am also thinking of using it to represent the facing of the regiment on the battlefield.

Notice the lack of information on the counters for movement and firepower. That’s using the concept, from tabletop wargaming, where these figures are referenced and finally learned by the player. For a game like this it won’t be hard to quickly remember them and for a computer game, all this info is calculated automatically for you.

My next step will be to finish off the counters and get a printed version of them and the board produced. At the same time, I can start work on the computer game version.

This may be as far this idea gets. I know designing a board game is not easy, but I will complete the computer game.

My pleasure from this great hobby is dreaming and looking at proving concepts could work.

February 19, 2018February 19, 2018

Cycling against the wind

Sometimes I feel like I am cycling against the wind. I am putting a lot of energy and effort into things but don’t seem to moving very far.

For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to find a couple more graphics artist to try out and work with. My present graphics artist is really great but I am not his only client so sometimes he is just too busy to work on things for me. Hence my looking for someone else.

I think I have found two potentials, so I have agreed a rate for some work, provided something for them to work on and now look forward to seeing what they can do. It all takes time and energy with very little to show for it at the moment.

Next up is I think I may have found a great partnership for my game Kampfgruppe. It will involve a change of name for the game and I think will have a great future. More news I hope on this soon. Again time and energy with nothing to show right now.

Most of my spare time is still being spent on getting Invaders from Dimension X! to a state where I can pass it over for an initial test and show the fruit of my labors. I feel like I have done a lot of work and improvements on this in the last couple of weeks but its not quite there yet. Another big push this weekend.

Oh and additionally in the spare time I don’t really have I agreed to review a new book – Java Game Development with LibGDX: From Beginner to Professional 2nd Edition. This looks like a great book for someone both learning Java and game development. I am definitely going to recommend that you buy this book.

And finally in the spare time in my spare time….. I have been thinking about designing my own board game. It will be an American Civil War based game. My wife’s comment was “Are you crazy?!!?”.

One sad piece of news – James Cobb, who is very well known in the wargames arena, sadly passed way in January of this year. James reviewed my first game last year and I was very much looking forward to sending my next game to him for review.

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.

January 15, 2018

First update for 2018

I didn’t write a blog last week although I had done a lot of work over the holidays. So here’s a little catch-up.

Battle for Korsun

I have now started on the Russian AI. I spent a few days working out what the objectives should be and how the AI should react. So I felt there were 3 stages:

Very aggressively cut through the German lines and create the pocket
Widen the gap between the trapped forces and the relieving forces
Defend

To help with this I have given each Hex a value. This helps drive the Russian AI when making decisions on what to do. Each turn it will make some checks – Has pocket been formed? Is there a wide enough gap? where are the German forces concentrated? etc.

As an example, if its the early stages of the game and the pocket is not yet formed it will be guided into where it needs to go next by the hex values. As it must form the pocket to stand a chance of winning it will attack very aggressively. Units that cannot help with that objective will look to pin German units in place.

Invaders from Dimension X!

I also did a lot of work on this with testing the various possible Marine and Alien moves. In addition, I prepared the second Map for this game. Finally, I talked to my Graphics designer about the menus and he has roughed up some drafts which look great. When I get the final versions I will show on here.

Flipboard

I have now got into the daily routine of adding articles that interest me or I think are of interest to a wargamer. Do check it out here.

Book Review

While doing some research I came across a magazine that needed someone to review books. I read a lot and had a secret desire to write reviews. So I signed up, chose a book, received it and am currently reading Battle of Wills. I will publish my review here once it’s submitted and published.

Iwo Jima

In between all of the above, I also did some research on Iwo Jima (and broke one of my 2018 resolutions to stay focused!). I thought I might try out a new graphics artist so gave him the job of graphics for the island. I also put together a potential splash screen and unit counters.

The graphic was based on US aerial photos taken in 1944 and an army report I found produced at the time with various maps of the island.

Feedback welcome.

Finally

I have been thinking about computer wargames and wargaming in general and how to get more people interested in what I do and what I am sure others are also trying to do in this area.

I feel there is a gap in the market between the type of games I make and what companies like Slitherine make and publish.

Some ideas I have had are:

Redo some maps and counters from old board games and offer them here free as downloads. I know there are a lot of wargamers who make their own counters but may not have the expertise to make them look good. Another alternative would be to do some good Vassal mods.
Reach out to a company like Slitherine and see if they would look to work with small independents and have an Indie developers section on their site. They could perhaps take a 10% cut of games sold. It would act as an incubator for the next generation of programmers.
Reaching out to other small wargame developers like me and forming a collective group to support and advertise each other’s work.

If you have your own opinions on this please do email me your thoughts.

December 29, 2017

The Shape of Things to Come

What is planned in 2018 for yobowargames?

Battle for Korsun

I was originally hoping to release this around late November but as usual I underestimated how much effort it takes to really finish a game.

As of now, the two player game is almost complete and I have all the translations for the game. In the new year, I will focus on the AI and really test it out.

The planned launch is now sometime in March/April 2018.

If this game does well there is the possibility of a follow-up game that has the same ruleset – meaning a lot less work for me to release.

Invaders from Dimension X!

I am also tentatively looking at April/May (possibly earlier) for the launch of this game. Presently I am testing one of the scenarios out and making sure all the Alien and Marine actions work correctly. Once that is done I will work on the second map/scenario and the campaign game. I also need menus to be created and designed.

As for Korsun, if this game does well there is the possibility of a follow-up game.

Kampfgruppe

One of the things I have learned is that creating games that have different rule sets means I cannot reuse a lot of the code I have written. This means a long time span between games coming out.

With Kampfgruppe I am planning to release smaller incremental modules to the game. I am pretty much decided on the base game being free. This model seems to be working for Slitherine’s Order of Battle. Also, I want to appeal to fans of games like ASL who are used to a game coming out in modules. As a side note, the rules for this game will not be based on ASL.

This will allow me to work on a smaller subset of the game with each release. Also with the base game being free, I am hoping there will be more people playing it. Finally, I can get community feedback a lot earlier and adjust the future of the game based on that.

I will be adding modding tools to this game. For it to be successful I need to have community involvement.

Social Media

In today’s world to get noticed you really have to be active in the social media.

I am going to tackle this in a couple of ways. First up is I have started a Flipboard Magazine that puts together a lot of stuff I read on the web on a daily basis.

I will also use my Facebook and Twitter feeds on a more regular basis.

Finally

Happy New Year and thank you for all your support in 2017

Lance

December 29, 2017December 29, 2017

A look back at 2017

2017 is almost over and it’s about time to have a review of how the year has gone. Let’s start by setting out what the year should be judged against.

I have a three-year plan to see if I can become a full-time developer writing wargames or for a new opportunity related to this area (wargames development) to present itself. Below is a “back of the napkin” outline of that plan.

Year one – get a game published
Year two – publish more games and get a track record
Year three – make enough money to be viable as a full-time vocation

Presently I have a full-time job and therefore can only work on this in my spare time.

So let’s start with some hard facts:

Games Published: 1

Platforms supported: 4 (Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android)

Developer Blogs: 51

Times Blog read: 1884

NewsLetters sent: 1

Reviews: 1

Below is where I earned net income for my first game. iOS sales were a nice surprise for me. Google sales were a disappointment – I am not sure if I made it free that downloads would be much higher. I made a small profit from my first game. From what I read that’s a great achievement on its own.

PC still rules when it comes to selling games.

Below are the number of page views on steam for Kursk. The first peak was when I launched Beta and the second when I officially launched the game. Interestingly the Steam sales show only tiny spikes and yet sales were relatively good in those periods.

Behind those hard facts is a year-long list of things I have learned:

Blogging is easy when you have a genuine interest in the things you write about and don’t try and cater to a supposed audience. I have tied over the years to start a blog on various subjects because it seemed to be what everyone else was doing. Now I have found my niche. I write about things that interest me and its almost like a personal diary.
Writing code is probably only about 50% of actually publishing a game. I am constantly surprised at how much time I spend on things like research, working/speaking with my graphics artist, 3rd party contacts for localization, documentation, preparing for the launch of a game etc.
Finishing a game is really really hard. I have read this many times on other blogs and it’s an absolute truth. Test, fix, test, fix and repeat. It’s truly grueling!
People are generous, kind and helpful. I have had people reach out to me offering to test my games, suggest improvements, respond to my blogs with their own experiences, write emails just thanking me for writing the game and the list goes on. Thank you – they are the ones who motivate me to continue.
Localisation needs to be planned and is time-consuming. I have yet to see the results from my labors on preparing my games for localization in 5 other languages. I hope the investment will pay off eventually.
Technical skills have increased in areas such as Photoshop, InDesign, Code Management, Java, Packaging, AI and others

I have also learned about things I need to improve on next year:

Plan, sketch and commit to paper the game before starting coding. Up until now I roughly plan out the game in my head then go to it.
Marketing… I either need (free) help or I need to learn a lot more to make this effective.
Social Media – I need to be a lot more active in 2018 on things like Twitter and Facebook.
Walk don’t run. I am doing too much at the same time because I know it needs doing when the reality is I am under no real time pressure.
Stay focused. I allowed myself to get diverted working on things that provided no real benefit.
Staying healthy and spending time with my family is important. I have got better with this as the year has gone on but I can improve more.

Personally year one has been a success. I published a game, made a little money, learned a lot and have a solid foundation for year two.

Scorecard: So far so good