GBGamesI’m currently fighting off a cold, and everyone knows how miserable it is to be sick.
What is surprising is how hard it is to resist creating something even though you should be resting. When you’re sick is the worst time to forget to eat a meal because you’re so engrossed in your work.
Even so, I wouldn’t trade this for the world. B-)
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 23.25 (current year) = 432.5 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 35 (current year) = 745 / 1000
First the bad: I had multiple days off from the day job this past week, but I still only managed to dedicate something like 10 hours total? Come on, Self!
The good: I have a EULA for the game. To make things simple for me, I will use a Creative Commons license and keep the source proprietary. I did a bit of research before deciding on using a pre-existing EULA, and CC licenses are standard, well-known, and easy to understand.
The game will be freeware, and it will currently only run on x86 GNU/Linux platforms. I will distribute a tar.gz file.
After I figure out some logistics, I can release the source to the game. I can also provide an installer which will output a EULA that the player needs to agree to before the game is installed. I’m actually surprised at the number of shareware games out there that just install without even presenting a EULA. If you want your customers to legally be bound by the terms of your EULA, you need to present it to them BEFORE they install. Otherwise, your EULA will not hold up in a court of law.
Even further down the line is getting this game to be cross-platform friendly. Ideally I can use something like mingw on my GNU/Linux machine to build an executable for Windows. I’m sure some code changes will be necessary, but I hope I have anticipated them. For one thing, I learned that SDL video and SDL audio needs to be initialized together on Windows for some reason. I have a comment in my code as a TODO item. I don’t know if I can also create a Mac OS X build, but if I can’t, then I should be able to enlist the help of a Mac-using friend. I could always buy myself a Mac, especially since the Mac Minis are so darn cute, I mean, inexpensive.
In anticipation for the release of my game, I have created a web page for it: Killer Kittens from Katis Minor is “coming soon”! I’m excited! Are you excited?
[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
Since a Chicago Indie Game Developer Club meetup hasn’t happened in a long time, Shawn Recinto of Immersive Realms has taken it upon himself to organize one, but he apparently got a bit overzealous. Now it’s announced as a Chicago Game Developer Gathering, and it even has its own website at http://www.cgdg.org/. Go ahead. Check it out. It’s pretty snazzy!
But this meetup isn’t just a meetup anymore! It’s a panel of indies talking to budding game developers about how they got started, what they do on their projects, and what lessons to take away from it all.
Oh, and somehow I am on the panel, along with Mike Boeh of Retro64 and Shawn Recinto. The event will be moderated by DePaul University’s Joe Linhoff.
When:
Wednesday, March 26th 2008 from 6-8pm
Where:
924 at DePaul University’s CTI, 243 South Wabash AveRegistration Ends Monday, March 17th 2008
The agenda on the website gives an overview of the topics we’ll be discussing but I have a feeling that Q&A time is going to be more interesting. Want to attend? Be sure to register soon!
[tags]indie, video games, business[/tags]
I was thinking about writing about marketing and so I naturally wanted to look at what Seth Godin was saying. Well, Jay beat me to it and wrote about the future of the music business, which links to the PDF transcript of the music industry talk that Seth Godin did recently. You should go read it as it is a good talk, and it won’t take you very long, but I’ll summarize a few points:
Godin talked about how the music industry was perfect in the past. Technology, society, marketing: they all came together to create a perfect storm.
But things have changed. Music is digital now, and digital means that copying is easy and cheap. Music is no longer the primary form of entertainment for many people. Control no longer rests in the hands of a few major players, and people can go anywhere for music.
To continue to try to keep to the old business model is silly. People can get their music anywhere, they have varied tastes, and they aren’t happy with a few choices. They don’t want what they merely like. They want what they love. Sending out blast messages in the hopes that people take notice and buy your product isn’t going to cut it anymore. Adding DRM to make digital act like analog is the opposite of adding value. Suing your fans? Yeah, that’s exactly what you thought about when you were thinking about becoming a rock star. That’s how you know you made it. That’s sarcasm, by the way.
The market has changed, and if the industry wants to play, they have to play by new rules. At this point, Godin talked about everything he has ever talked about: permission marketing, turning the funnel over, giving people stories they want, etc.
Jay notes that the music industry is similar enough to the video game industry that such discussion is important. Times are changing for video games as well:
I believe that in a lot of ways, the PC gaming scene isn’t “dying” so much as it is “evolving.” Due to proprietary technology, the consoles have a little bit more grace period left in them before their business model goes the way of the dinosaur. The PC hasn’t had that luxury, and in many ways it has been blazing the painful trail. But the music biz has been even further in the front, and there are a lot of lessons we can learn from watching that particular industry getting its butt kicked a few times.
Piracy
And both industries have claimed that the ease of copying will be their respective ruin.
GameProducer.net has written recently about piracy in Brazil, something that was covered in The Escapist’s Console Clones article back in 2005. StampOutPiracy.com is a site that claims to have been formed to help crack down on the video game piracy out there. Gamasutra had an article on Reflexive’s piracy stats, and GameSetWatch posted a follow-up, which claimed that 92% of the people playing the full version were not paying customers. Ouch.
And of course, Cliffski’s been fuming about non-paying customers who have the audacity to make support requests!
For some reason, it seems as if the World Wide Web just blew up in discussing piracy and its effect on the video game industry. Was it a major talk or round table at GDC?
In any case, everyone is talking about it, and it seems that the use of the term “piracy” in the place of copyright infringement isn’t going to go away any time soon, but that’s just a pet peeve of mine that isn’t important to this post.
What about solutions? If people are making illegal copies of games rather than paying for them, what’s an industry to do? Well, this part is familiar to those of you paying attention to the music industry. The video game industry has tried to make reality change to how things used to be, and Reflexive’s DRM stats might indicate otherwise, but I believe that fighting against reality is folly.
Reality-based Business Models
The reality of the digital world is that it is a lot easier to copy things than it is to prevent them from being copied. If you insist on trying to keep to the old business models, you’ll fight a losing battle. Before networking infrastructure made mass distribution easy, you could sell physical copies of games and expect that illegal copies won’t go far. Trying to clamp down digital distribution through the use of DRM, CD keys, and requiring online access to play an offline game are just ways to give your customers excuses to not be your customers anymore. So far, people have accepted it, and a lot of them will claim that “if it wasn’t for the pirates” they wouldn’t have to deal with it. Fair enough, but if piracy is still such a problem in spite of these measures, then you are getting inconvenienced and frustrated by methods that don’t actually do anything but inconvenience and annoy paying customers like yourself. You’re paying for the privilege of being treated as a criminal, while the real criminals get to enjoy the game they didn’t pay for all the more.
And yet more and more infrastructure is being put in place to make your computer less and less useful so that the people who write the software can pretend that they’re preventing “the few bad apples” from spoiling things for everyone else.
Perhaps the idea of selling an individual game as you would a toaster is past its prime? This argument isn’t the same as saying “People don’t like to pay for things, so let them have it for free!” If you look at the link to Cliffski’s blog above, I think it is clear that a lot of people just don’t see making a copy of a game as wrong. Why isn’t it more obvious?
Well, copying files is what you DO in this brave new world called the World Wide Web. Giving someone your copy of a book and sending a copy of your audiobook aren’t seen as two separate actions governed by different aspects of copyright law. Similarly with lending someone a vinyl record or giving someone a cheap copy of a music CD. After all, you’re simply sharing with a friend! When Microsoft or Lars Ulrich come knocking on your door with either BSA or RIAA lawyers and accuse you of piracy, well all you’ve learned is that you need to make such sharing more private. It isn’t as if you are doing anything wrong! And copyright enforcement is now tougher because so many people see copyright as a confusing mass of laws that only large companies use to make money.
So what are the options? You could fund public service announcements to warn people not to copy that floppy, and try to get them to first understand and then obey the convoluted mess that is copyright law, and make them afraid to be your customer.
Or you could start looking into different business models, models that accept the customer’s ability to make infinite copies as a fact of life. Making copies and sharing them with friends is what they want to do, so why not capitalize on it? And no, I’m not telling you that all games of the future must be MMOs or require a subscription to play. No, I’m not suggesting that all games get supported by ads. I don’t have to be the creative one that tells you what new business models you can implement, but I can say that both the music and video game industries could stand to reinvent themselves as Godin suggests.
You can look at people willingly copying your games as a problem that causes lost sales from your old business model, or you could look at it as an opportunity for your new business model.
IS PC Piracy Really the Problem? is a fascinating run through of all of the other reasons why PC games aren’t selling as well as people might like. Reasons like increased competition from other sources of entertainment, higher prices than may be justified, and hardware requirements that actually match what most people have.
New Attempts
A friend of mine informed me that Trent Reznor has been experimenting with a different business model. Actually, my friend informed me that Reznor had accounts on The Pirate Bay and similar notorious sites, and I was curious about the reasons why a musician would support the very thing that the music industry claims is ruining it.
Well, Reznor believes that the music industry is ruining itself, specifically by exploiting their customers. When asked why a Nine Inch Nails album was selling for an obscene amount of money in Australia, a suit informed him that his fans would be willing to pay any amount. “As a reward for being a ‘true fan’, you get ripped-off.” So he followed Radiohead’s lead and set out to distribute an album without the backing of a major label.
Reznor teamed up with his friend Saul Williams and released such an album: The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust. You could download the music for free, but you had the option to pay $5 to receive a higher quality download. Fewer than 1 in 5 people paid, and Reznor was shocked. You can read about his view on the lack of success of this album in Trent Reznor: Why won’t people pay $5?
You can also read Saul Williams’ take on it in Unlike Trent Reznor, Saul Williams isn’t disheartened. Williams sees an 18% conversion rate as a good thing.
I think Trent’s disappointment probably stems from being in the music business for over 20 years and remembering a time that was very different, when sales reflected something different, when there was no such thing as downloads. Trent is from another school. Even acts that prospered in the ’90s, you look at people like the Fugees or Lauren Hill selling 18 million copies. That sort of thing is unheard of today. But Trent comes from that world. So I think his disappointed stems from being heavily invested in the past. For modern times, for modern numbers we’re looking great, especially for being just two months into a project.
Anyone else remember reading about “disheartening” sales figures from people who think that a 1% conversion rate for a video game was a sign of doom? People on the Indie Gamer forums were scrambling to tell the hapless newbie that 1% was a decent conversion rate. Seemingly low conversion rates are the norm when the business model is similar to mail order catalogs. Reznor seems to have accepted such expectations since Nine Inch Nails has released Ghosts: I-IV online, this time with a multi-tiered sales model. There is still free content available, but the more you pay, the more you get. There are only 9 free tracks this time around, and $5 gives you access to all of the tracks. There are a few other options as you go up in price, and there is even a $300 option for the Ulta-Deluxe Limited Edition Package!
Currently the website has this notice in red text:
We are experiencing an extremely high volume of traffic and orders right now…
The emphasis is mine. When I clicked to download the free tracks, I found that the download site was down.
While the site is down, you can still purchase the complete Ghosts I-IV here from Amazon’s MP3 store for only $5. The MP3s are high quality and DRM-free. You can also order the deluxe and limited edition packages from Artist in Residence.
If you’re familiar with BitTorrent, you can download Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, for free, from our official upload at The Pirate Bay.
Emphasis also mine. Note how NIN is actually USING a website that has a lot of venom thrown at it from the music and software industries. Reznor isn’t crying foul and complaining about how unfair piracy is. He’s just making use of the channels people already use.
It’s heartening to see Reznor experimenting with different business models, even if the first attempt wasn’t as successful as he had hoped.
Video Games and You
I’d like to hear similar stories in the video game industry. I already anticipate that people will read this post (or maybe only part of it, as it is quite long) and get upset at the idea that piracy is ok. I’m not saying that copyright infringement is great. I’m just saying that if the reality of the marketplace is that it is easier to copy than it is to prevent copying, then why insist that those who copy are criminals? Why not change your business model and make them customers? Why not get mad about the people who won’t copy and spread your game to a larger audience? With so much competition out there, can you afford to succeed in preventing copies? Maybe in the short term, but in the long term, you’re actively slowing the spread of your game.
Snood was a cheap-looking Puzzle Bobble/Bust a Move clone that took the college world by storm. Do you believe that better copy protection would have allowed it to proliferate throughout college dorms and become the 9th most played video game in 2001?
But what can you do to spread your game if you insist on locking it down? And if you insist on locking it down, can you complain about the lack of sales and the increase in the amount of piracy?
[tags]marketing, business, music, video games [/tags]
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 13 (current year) = 422.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 35 (current year) = 745 / 1000
Killer Kittens from Katis Minor now has a credits screen. I know I said that all I needed was a credits screen and a license for the game data, but I just realized that I still have placeholder graphics that haven’t been updated. Specifically the main background and the player’s ship. You know, the things you see throughout the game! I want to release this game and get some feedback, but I already know from experience that I will get a lot of comments about how crappy the graphics are. I’d like to fix these problems before release. Besides, if the art isn’t a bit better, there isn’t much of a point of having a decent license for its use.
Ideally I could have just grabbed some free sprites from somewhere. I know decent quality free sprites have to be available on the World Wide Web, but all of the websites that I have been able to find that offer free sprites aren’t offering anything that I could use in my game. They either don’t work with my theme or they put me at risk for copyright infringement. I really don’t want Sega or Nintendo coming after me, so no, I don’t think I will use some of the billions of Sonic and Mario sprites out there. I knew about The Linux Game Tome’s Game Development forum and the Repository for Free Game Content sticky post, and I know GameDev.net has a similar thread called Sprites, sprites, and more sprites!. Both seem to point to websites with copy infringement problems or art that isn’t appropriate for my theme. I searched for some time, but I think it will be less of a hassle to create some better programmer art instead.
And so Version 1.0 is even closer to reality, and I plan on taking some time off at the day job soon so I should be able to throw a lot more time into finishing this game. I also hope that I can release it and quickly move on to prototyping a new game during this period. I think that creating a second game in a matter of days after releasing this first one would be a fun challenge.
[tags]game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 8.25 (current year) = 417.5 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 15 (current year) = 725 / 1000
I’ve been journaling about an appropriate EULA for the game. While the source code could be licensed under the GPL, the actual game data doesn’t need to be. An example of a game that uses a different license for its data from its source code is the well-known Dangerous Rooms of Death: Journey to Rooted Hold. It is obvious that it can be done, but at this point I’m not sure if I even want to keep the data proprietary. The art and sound effects were quickly put together to be placeholders so I could work on the game mechanics. I was planning on replacing them with better assets, probably outsourced or otherwise not made by me.
Since this game has taken me so much longer to make than it probably should have, I just want to release it and move on. Still, I could retain the rights to the data, requiring that if you want to redistribute my game, you would need my permission to do so unless you replaced the data with your own. In the future, I may need to release a game with proprietary data, and having the experience now can only help. Even if I only release the game for free, having the data licensed separately from the code leaves me with more options. Besides, releasing the data under the GPL or a similar license really doesn’t make sense.
I’ve been thinking more about the process I’ve been following to make a game, and it’s not going to work out. Essentially I’ve come up with an idea and then worked toward implementing it. Maw!Soft’s humorous Thousander Club Update from November of 2006 documented a list of prototypes done throughout the year. Since then, I’ve been reading a lot about the benefits of creating quick throw-away prototypes. Gamasutra documented the prototypes developed by the creators of Tower of Goo, and back in 2005 I’ve written about the interview with James Gwertzman of PopCap in which he claims that the development process is “extremely prototype-heavy”.
I still want to get to v1.0 with Killer Kittens to have a finished game under my belt. I was thinking about going back to work on Oracle’s Eye afterwards, but I think my time would be better put towards prototyping ideas. Oracle’s Eye is not exactly a well-formed idea, so I could just prototype with it, but the point is that I want to make a good game next, and it is clear that creating prototypes is the best way to figure out if an idea is a winner. I mean, it works for PopCap, and not doing it clearly doesn’t work for major publishers. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have billions of dollars to invest in a project for three years before finding out that the game won’t sell enough to recoup its costs.
[tags]game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 8.25 (current year) = 417.5 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 0 (current year) = 710 / 1000
It’s not that I haven’t been coming up with ideas. I just haven’t transferred them from my notebook to my computer, and until they are in the master list, I don’t count them.
I finished working on fixing my build scripts. In less than 10 minutes, I can now go from a freshly pulled-down-from-Subversion project directory to a distributable tar.gz file that lets the player untar and play in any directory.
My next step was to fix the menu system. When I last worked on this project, I wanted to replace the menu elements with a library of existing code, such as Guichan, but since I would like to hit v1.0 sooner rather than later, I decided to work with what I have for now. It’s better to get something out there now and improve it later. Frankly, the only really bad thing is the volume control slider in the options menu. I tried to write a general purpose slider, but I do not have enough experience in writing GUI code to do it well. Since it has been months since I last looked at this code, I am not sure if I should be impressed or disgusted with what I managed to hack together.
Ignoring how badly I want to replace all of it, my main concern was that each time the player brought up the options menu, it would assume that the volume was set to the highest level. On startup, this is true, but if the player lowers the level, exits the options menu, and then returns to it, the slider will be reset to the highest position even though the audio level itself hasn’t changed. This is partly because the slider’s position is not coupled to the volume, and partly because my code to load the options menu was hardcoded to use the highest volume setting as the value to associate with the slider upon startup. It was a simple fix to get the options menu to load and pass in the current volume setting to the menu slider control when it is created.
Ok, great. That problem is solved, but while I’m messing with the volume slider, I should fix another problem. What if the player wants to mute the sound? Well, you could move the slider all the way to the left. You could, but up until now, because it was so decoupled, you wouldn’t get the volume muted. It would just be very low, which means you could still hear the sound effects. Another small change in the code fixed that problem, too.
What’s next? I would like to ad a credits page to my menu system, specifically to thank people who have helped me as well as give credit to font creators as per their license. I would also need to make a final decision on how the content of the game is going to be licensed. Once those two tasks are completed, I will have a v1.0 to distribute.
For part of this week the day job is sending me to Las Vegas for a prototype. If I get some time during the weekend, I should be able to squeeze some of my own development in, but otherwise I don’t expect to accomplish much. Then again, I could doodle on the plane and during downtime. I can mock up some screens for an improved Killer Kittens after v1.0 or for some future project.
[tags]game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 6 (current year) = 415.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 0 (current year) = 710 / 1000
I found that my build scripts were broken for the game. You know how if you leave a Nintendo controller out long enough that the cable somehow gets itself tangled? I always wondered how it happened. Now I wonder how the heck my code stopped working since it isn’t as if I changed anything to break it. Whatever. I set to work fixing it.
To build my game, I am building custom versions of libraries, such as libSDL and Kyra. Rather than use my system’s installed libraries, I want to be able to distribute my game without the player needing to worry about dependencies. To make the download size smaller, I was building the libraries so that only what I needed for my game was compiled. For instance, libSDL didn’t need to load BMP or TGA files since I was only using PNGs. To build these libraries and make sure they installed into my project’s subdirectory instead of into my system, I had to pass the install path name into the configure script.
It turned out that the build scripts were hardcoded to pathnames on my desktop. Now, we all know hardcoding things is bad, so why did I do it? Well, it turns out that you can’t pass relative paths into a configure script. They had to be absolute paths. I needed to pass “/home/gberardi/Projects/foo/lib” instead of “../../lib”.
So since I was just trying to build my game as quickly as I could, hardcoding it was fine. Since I started building it on my laptop, however, the directories I kept my projects in were different, and I had problems.
In a few hours, I learned more about using GNU Make, specifically how to pass around variables from one makefile to another. Now I can get the absolute pathname of the project, and using that, I can pass it around to subdirectory makefiles, which can then specify other subdirectories. Also, if I use any machine to build the project, it should work without a hitch.
Now I just need to get the game to build. Kyra is a real pain to deal with because the original maintainer did not keep the build scripts working for it. You cannot configure && make && make install. Or at least you couldn’t, until I learned about autoconf and automake enough to get it to work last year. Unfortunately, it turns out that I’ll need to jump into it again because it copies over most header files into the install directory, but not all of them. I’m sure it won’t take much to change the build to copy those files, too, but it might take me some time to figure out how to do it. In a pinch, I can hack a small script to copy those files separately from Kyra’s build, but it would be nice to have the library act self-sufficiently.
Kyra is just a tool, of course, and as nice as it has been, it may be best to switch to a much better supported tool, such as Allegro. Once I finish v1.0 of Killer Kittens from Katis Minor, I’ll make an effort to switch libraries. For now, I just need to get to 1.0.
EDIT: Oh, it turned out to be easier than I thought. Makefile.am just needed to be edited to tell it how to create the files, then automake needed to run to generate the Makefile.in. Simple. Now my game builds and runs just fine, which means my real work can begin in earnest.
The last time I updated the Thousander Club entries, I had the following data:
Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 146 (current year) = 409.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 103 (current year) = 710 / 1000
That was September 24th. Somehow throughout the rest of the year, I did not work on my game development again. I’ve had a few more ideas since then, but not significantly more.
It is now February, and I am just now getting back to game development. It’s been a long break, and while I think it has been way too long, the best I can do is move forward.
It’s a new year, and these are my new starting stats:
Game Hours: 409.25 hours out of 1000
Game Ideas: 710 ideas out of 1000
Two years and I still haven’t gotten to 1,000 ideas? I should be able to fix that soon. Adding hours in game development might still be more difficult, but I hope I can make significant progress this year. I’m due for some time off at the day job, and I hope I can take advantage of it.
Ready, set, go.
Knight Corvus sent me an invitation to join him in his army, and I could not refuse. I joined him as a squire, intent on moving up through the ranks of Knighthood. Of course, I had my own castle to run, and soon enough, I had built up a formidable army of my own. The market was healthy, the workshop was busy upgrading my defenses, and the walls, palisades, and watchtowers kept it all safe. As a knight, I served as a strong arm for Knight Corvus. Once I gained the title of Baron, however, I knew it was time to leave my liege and strike out on my own.
I was sovereign now, but I was attacked by more than a few people attempting raids on my treasury. More and more of my friends joined my army at my invitation, and my castle was much more secure due to their help. Still, the raids kept coming.
Looking at the numbers, I knew that if I didn’t find a way to add more bodies to my castle, my army would be weak in comparison to other armies, especially in the face of alliances. I was continually attacked, occasionally losing money, but thankfully I never lost a vassal. I realized I needed to seize my own vassals if I was to stay ahead.
My first attempts were unsuccessful. Perhaps I was new to the kidnapping game, but I could not capture my first target. After multiple attacks on my part, I gave up. My next attempts were more fruitful. I pressed the attack on Knight Ajdin’s capital until I was to emerge victorious: Knight Chris was now my vassal. Though he is still loyal to Knight Ajdin, he has become a very productive member of my workshop. Perhaps by the end of the next day, he shall give no second thought to swearing fealty to his new liege.
Soon to join Knight Chris was Lady Lainey, formerly of Knight David’s service, and Knight Moti, who I am sure Knight Art shall miss. Then again, perhaps not. No attempts to save these vassals have come.
Knight Geoff has been somewhat more concerned about his former vassals. Knight Carl and Knight Tim are spending the next couple of days in my newly built Tower. Knight Geoff has attacked me multiple times in the past day, and though my defenses hold strong, I do not want to take any chances. There have been random attacks by other armies as well, and if fortune goes to Knight Geoff, he may find that my army has weakened before he arrives with fresh attackers.
My strategy seems to be working so far. I have not lost so much as a single piece of gold to a raiding army, and as I gain more and more vassals, I’m sure I will be able to continue to support my fortifications while also expanding my capital. Still, I fear that all of my efforts will be for naught. I do not have the heart to dedicate all of my waking hours to my castle, and in the face of strong alliances, I do not see how I can hope to become the highest ranking knight in all of the kingdoms.
For now, however, I will enjoy sleeping, knowing that Knight Geoff’s cries of anger are echoing in his streets. I left him his best knight, though, and I wish he would show a bit more gratitude at my generosity. Perhaps if our paths cross again, I will allow him to join my army as a reward for amusing me with his persistence.