The Making of GSB

A new article here:
positech.co.uk/gratuitousspa … ofgsb.html
Please tweet it, or digg it, or do other groovy social networking style fun things with the link if you enjoy it!

Very interesting stuff. Ive been hoping to read this for quite some time. One man making such a game is very interesting, especially where you make the decisions to outsource certain parts of the game.
Though i wonder on a few things. Why choose to make the game so detailed? As well as paying artists to make ships, you seemed to needed to make a new engine. What about a prepurchase, free beta? Have the “bad” grapgics and such. Get a community, and see what talent you can get from there. Expicity state this is a competition to make something for the game, and the reward is getting a name in credits, or prehaps a ship named after them.

It just seems you could of cut quite a bit of cost and time. I think ive zoomed fully in 4 times in this game, just to see. I wouldnt miss it if its gone. I prefer instantly identifiable ships, which dont really rely on the poly count. And the larger overview is better for seeing how the battle goes. Its very impressive that you have done all this stuff, but i still cant quite fanthom why. Was the extra detail worth the extra costs?

And congradulations on the challange system. Its the most engaging part of this game, by far. Youve made quite a community here. I bought the democracy games, and they were good.
But this is something else alltogether.
:smiley:

Thanks, Cliffski.

Thank you for posting this. I’ll be inflictingcoughs I mean discussing this with my game design and business students.

Interesting. A great read. Thank you for writing it.

You might want to mention it on your blog - I only found out through a link from Blues News (not that getting listed there is a bad thing).

Nice read on how the game evolved to what it is now. Those original ship graphics made me think of old console games. Amazing job for a one man developer.

I enjoyed reading the article - I’ve always been a fan of how things are done and why certain decisions are made. Regarding the graphics, I’m glad there are those extra details. I think it’s important as another facet in enjoying the game: watching the gratuitous explosions, the turrets swiveling, the missiles launching, the escape pods…err…escaping. Not every moment of every battle do I need the big picture only; I frequently will zoom in on the destruction. In other words, I think the extra time and effort was worth it. As a fan of GalCiv2, I would’ve loved to see a combat system like this a chooseable option - I could see myself just playing battle after battle and forgetting the empire. Thank you for the insights.

I’m a developer myself, although not of games. It’s nice to read how things work for such a one man shop. I hope the time and money invested pays of.