Sid Meier's Railroads

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I’ve been playing (in my very little spare time while working on USM2!) the last game from Sid Meier’s, Railroads. At first my impression was very positive (well is still quite positive). But lately I found that the AI, which is in charge of moving the trains from one city to another, using the binaries you’ve placed, has some troubles 😀

I bet that from the programming point of view that part of the game must have been a real nightmare… figuring out what is the best path to take with algorithms must have been really hard to program for the (poor) coders of the game!

Apart for that the game rulez, as if Sid was a “quality guarantee”. Indeed of their latest games I’ve played (Pirates, Civilization IV) all of them are very good. Maybe a bit too much geared towards the “casual” market (like the annoying cutscenes of Pirates that I was skipping everytime after I saw them once!). Still, he is a real master of gameplay!

Yet another USM2 update…

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Today I’ve been working on the load/save functions. For now I’ll just stick to .csv savefiles. That way I’ll be able to track bugs better than if I was using a normal binary save file. I thought the .csv format might be too slow, but actually, in debug mode (which is much slower than the final release mode) the game takes only 3-4 seconds to load/save a db with 25k players.

In any case I’ll let user change the size of database or which leagues to run in the game options. Also for now, as I already announced, no cups will be present in the initial v1.0 release. Of course as soon as v1.0 is on sale, I’ll start working on adding features in subsequent updates, which will be free for existing customers 🙂 This kind of games (sports managements) are really huge to make, so I guess I’ll never run out of new things to add!

In the meanwhile, take a look at my title screen!

universal soccer manager 2

USM2 match finished!

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Yes I can proudly say that! The USM2 match engine (at least for version 1.0) is done! that means that still need some testing, but you can play a match and see:

  • scoring actions with multiple choices and different results based on your active player skills
  • events like penalties, free kicks
  • injuries and yellow/red cards
  • substitutions
  • set your general team strategy: type of attack, counterattack, offside play, type of defensive marking, etc
  • change speed of the match
  • see in realtime the ratings of players and their fitness value (fatigue) to choose better which one to substitute

So now what’s left for the version 1.0 ? the player transfers and the end of season events – promotion, relegation and such. Also I need to make the possibility for the player to change team during his career. So yes, there’s still quite some work left to do… 😐

Indie "marketing"

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There was a recent thread on indiegamer.com that saw Caspian complaining about the fact that he can’t find an indie “marketeer”. I want to write my 2 cents on that.

What is an indie marketeer? that’s the first question you have to ask. Because except for sending out a PR, what else you can actually do to promote your game that doesn’t require money? What other effective way to market it you have? My conclusion is: nothing.

Sure you can give it for free to bloggers – you can obtain some exposure but, nothing exceptional.

You can update the game and ad a level pack for example and try to resend the PR. But not every journalist would post twice about your game unless the expansion is something really big or innovative to catch their attention.

So what’s left? buying ads? requires money and so far everyone I talked to was “unsure” about the results (like playing a lottery and hoping to win). Trying to get a review from a big site? nope, if they want to review they’ll ask you. There’s no way you can “enforce” some well-known site to review any of your game if they’re not interested.

So what could really do an indie marketeer? mostly that’s left is very near to spamming 😀 that is, have a own blog about your game(s), post in game-related forums with links in your signature, and such. Nothing so special actually, that could guarantee you a good exposure, but at least you won’t be spending (ehm, actually wasting) money.
So really is a dead end. Like in real world, online business isn’t different. You can’t hope to get “exposure for free”. Portals spend huge amount of money in ads – you can see it in adwords and banners everywhere! Pavlina closed his games site. Probably he realized that there’s too much competition going around now in games, and you can’t just hope to live off 1-2 games earnings alone.
I think the only option for a small indie is just keep releasing new games, hoping that “one of them” becomes a huge hit. Everything else is going to cost money and “maybe” (depends how good actually you can track ads) give you unsure results…

PES6 first impressions!

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Yeah I know… I should work on USM2 😀

And indeed I’m working on it, I swear! yesterday night finally passed another great milestone – played a complete match, everything went fine, player ratings, realistic results and events, etc.

But the “problem” is that today got my copy of PES6 fresh from the oven ! So I MUST play it for a while. I just played for a few hours and those are my first impressions:

  • realism: the game got even better! the dribblings feel much more realistic – more varied, not always the same sidestep as previous version, there are more casual rebounds like in real soccer
  • goalkeeper finally can lose control of the ball when saving: before either they were saving, or they were putting on corner kick. Now they can even just punch the ball, that will remain dangerously in the penalty area!
  • conterattacks! yeah! finally a true counterattack! Was the 89′ minute, my team winning 1-0 and the opponent all pressing forward during a corner kick, I manage to steal the ball and launch a solitary player. I went one on one vs the opponent GK and scored! such situations never happened before (there were always some defenders around!)
  • air play – the headers, the contrast were also greatly improved. Even here, the word is “randomness”. Of course having a big tall guy can have you get almost all the passes, but for other cases there’s much more variety of touches and situations.

In one word: this new version rulez, way better than the previous one that was a little disappointing!