Positech's Cliff Harris on indy game developing

Positech's Cliff Harris on indy game developing

Feature

Positech Games has a unique approach to game developing: one man does it all. We speak to Cliff Harris, head of marketing, sales, development and... well, everything else too!

Hooked Gamers: Most game companies with more staff than Positech Games rarely release more than two or three patches for their games and older titles get forgotten very quickly. What motivates you to work on your older titles, patching and developing them further still even years after their original release?

Positech's Cliff Harris on indy game developing
Cliff: I know from experience that you can make a game so much better by incremental improvements. My second ever game was StarLines INC, it was ok, but it looked terrible, had no random maps, very little variety, and had a number of gameplay problems. Over time, it was patched and fixed and changed so much that it justified being renamed to Starship Tycoon. Looking at the original version now is just embarrassing! The same has happened to Democracy, I've added online-autoupdating, 3 new countries, tons of new dilemmas and policies, a restricted powers feature, better elections, bugfixes, the senate feature, ignorable dilemmas, more music, an animated background and tons more. I'm sure it won't end there, I'm planning on adding a campaign-finance reform dilemma tomorrow!

My games keep on selling long after release, because they sell online and there is no need to find shelf space. As long as I still sell a few copies of Democracy each month, I'll be patching and updating it. It makes the game better, the players happier, and the sales higher. That's the beauty of selling online, I can update as often as I like.

Hooked Gamers: Would not it be more profitable to release a sequel, rather than a free upgrade to a previous title?

Cliff: A sequel is a huge undertaking. It may happen one day. Releasing the free upgrades makes the players happy, and takes surprisingly little work once the full game is up and running. I like to think I'll do both.

Hooked Gamers: I've personally only played a couple of games of Democracy thus far, but I could immediately see that the game included some very current issues as problems that the player has to make a stand in. Are you an avid follower of world politics and do you tend to watch news, thinking "Is there something here that I could use in Democracy?"

Cliff: I am. You couldn't write that game unless you took an interest in politics. The difficult part is finding issues that make sense in gameplay terms. My list of voter groups is fixed, and that rules out issues that affect groups that the game would not recognise.

Hooked Gamers: Many of your games offer multiplayer options. Are there any such plans for Democracy, or perhaps its sequel?

Cliff: I'd love to do an online version of Democracy, although that's a major undertaking. Maybe one day it will happen. I do intend for all my future games to at least have internet-updates autodownloading, and maybe some system of high score tables.

Hooked Gamers: Democracy was released in 2005 and Starship Tycoon (a sequel to StarLines INC) in 2004. Is there a new title coming out this year?

Cliff: Absolutely. Currently its called 'Kudos', and theres a basic website at www.kudosgame.com. The game looks fairly different to that now though. It's a life-sim, but a turn based one with (again) no 3D world. To some extent, it's like an RPG in the modern day. The gameplay is changing as I write it, so who knows how it will turn out. I aim to release the initial version of it before Christmas.

Hooked Gamers: Most of your games thus far can be characterised as management and tycoon games. Do you have plans to work on other genres as well, or are these the types of games that are closest to your own heart?

Cliff: My heart and soul is management / sim games. I love to program and design them, and I do play some, but I am so fussy that I end up getting frustrated with many of them. If you code sims all day, you tend to play other games to relax. Right now I play a lot of GalCiv2 and Battlefield 2. I also play the odd RTS game, and have a love/hate relationship with eve-online. I've quit playing it 4 times now!

Thank you, Cliff Harris, for the interview. Personally, I must say that it is exiting to see that we still have real independent game companies around, catering to the needs of those of us who may look for something else in our games than what the general market offers nowadays. Games like Democracy may be targeted at a niche market, but they offer a lot more content and thought-provoking concepts than many of the other games out there.

So, if you haven't tried Democracy or some of the other Positech games already, all I can say is that you are missing an opportunity. The demo versions are free to try and, as Cliff said above, he's listening to feedback from the players and actively developing the games even years after their initial launch!