Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Gratuitous Space Battles Beta Patch 1.21. Nearly done….

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Soooo…Behold, its patch day for you lucky people who are currently enjoying space battles of a gratuitous nature. The latest patch has numerous exciting changes, here are some of the big ones:
1) Added remaining medium and hard deployments.
2) Lots of balance tweaks.
3) Total conversion mod support: Base game can now be disabled under mods.
4) Added default ship designs for the Yootan hulls.
5) Expert mode high scores for all applicable missions now get tracked online.
6) Retaliation challenges will now work correctly.
7) Added a bunch of new module graphics for some of the variations.
8) Added 10 New complex ship hull components for the terrans.
9) Some new explosion particle effects added.

Plus there are lots of behind-the-scenes bug fixes and a few optimizations, some of which came from making that rendering video I posted about.

So what is still left to do? well not much. The big ones are:

Get Linux & Mac Ports finished.

Get Final Text for all the supported languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch).

Some final bug fixing and polishing, and optimizing for crappy laptops!

The release trailer!

In the meantime here is a frankly stupidly big screenshot…

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Don’t forget you get a steam key if you get the game (it wont work yet) and if you want, you can start playing the beta right now, just click below :D

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Gratuitous Space Battles 2 with Graphics Debugging!

So here is something you might enjoy, especially if you like gratuitous charts and stats porn, or are interested in graphics programming, or maybe you just want to tell me I’m doing it wrong. This is a video of me demonstrating nvidia nsight, and how I use it to spot things that are inefficient in my engine for Gratuitous Space Battles 2. I’ve already fixed the two inefficiencies I point out in the video, while I was waiting for it to upload :D Enjoy! (And please share!)

Big Pharma update, GSB2 Trading Cards

Lots going on. Its good fun when you have two games in production, you get more stuff happening each day. Anyway… GSB2 is getting steam trading cards. I really enjoy getting art done for this stuff. here is a preview montage of some of it.

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Plus I’m working on adding web high score tables for every mission, so you can compete to win with the smallest fleet. Its a work in progress, but so far the empty scores table is here.

Plus big pharma is coming along. There is a nice preview of the game here, on Rock Paper Shotgun. And you might want to check out Tims latest video blog:

And because you *might* have missed the new, you can grab the Democracy 3 collectors edition from steam at 50% off all this week and weekend:

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Democracy 3 collectors edition: 50% off right now

I haven’t mentioned this on here, so I feel I must. The collectors edition of Democracy 3 is 50% off this week on steam.

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Tell your friends, and also buy a copy, if bizarrely you don’t have one already :D The collectors edition is the base game plus all the DLC. What could be more fun! Plus its on Windows, mac & Linux, which seems to be less common on steam than it used to be. Ho hum. Anyway… I’m promoting this a bit on reddit and facebook, and hoping to have a nice bump in sales. Games like D3 can keep selling long after release, and its been a great last year for sales. Its my last hurrah before the release of GSB2, and then not *that* long afterwards…big pharma.

Gratuitous Space Battles2 Patch 1.20 Live NOW!

So yay! It’s that exciting time again, it’s PATCH TIME. What is in this version? Here are the highlights… <drumroll!>

  1. Default ship designs added for all Zyrtari ships!
  2. Subtle fill-bars behind variables when looking at a module stats now show immediately how that stat compares with others of the same size class.
  3. Fixed a lot of bunched-up dreadnought turret GUI things.
  4. Fixed some horrible bugs where composites got scrambled
  5. Also fixed thing where layers below the hull were forgotten about.
  6. Fixed a pesky ‘design vanishes’ bug.
  7. Spatial anomalies are now added to missions!
  8. Default engagement ranges now more sensible…
  9. Shield resistance of most shield modules reduced.
  10. Support for French, Spanish and German!

Plus there are a load of minor tweaks, adjustments and fixes, including some performance tweaks. There are likely still two more patches before release day, and the final one is likely to be pure polish/optimization. (and possibly some module tweaking for balance).

Here is a screenshot showing what I mean about showing relative values of variables:

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I think that makes things clearer than asking people to click on a variable and view the comparison chart.

And here is proof that the translations (first pass at them) are in!

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(Hopefully that makes sense in Spanish?). On a related note. I’d like a sanity check on the translation in general, so if you speak Spanish, German or French, if you go the steam store page for the game (you still can’t buy it yet) which is here. You should be able to change language at the top right from your account to those 3 languages. Does it all look ok to you?

If you have already bought GSB2 from our website here, then you should get a patch download kick in either today or tomorrow. If you can’t wait,. or it won’t trigger, then just re-download the game using your original download link.

And tell your friends to grab a copy!