Category: game design

I spent some time today on a new race for GSB. It looks like I’ll release this pack before the campaign is finished. I actually had expected to have finished the campaign and have released it by now, but it’s much more involved than I thought, so I’m still working on it. Once I’ve finished complete bug free playthroughs as 2 different races, I’ll get some people testing it for me, then there will probably be a pre0order beta thing, then release. That is probably another month (best case) of work.

So in the meantime, luckily I have artwork for a new race all complete, and am working on the data and the balance. There is nothing radically different in the race in terms of gameplay yet, but the style is interesting. The backstory is that it’s a very very old race, a bit like the dwellers from The Algebraist (Iain M Banks). Over the years, they have rebuilt their ships from the salvage of their enemies, so you will see that their ships have some rebel engines, some order engines, and various other components. They are also the first race to have multicolored ships. I’m calling them Nomads, and they basically fight out of sheer boredom on their multi million year journey across the universe. They have a cool retro look.

I was lying awake at 2AM this morning unable to sleep, thinking about new weapon and ship modules for that race. This pack will be different, likely no new missions, just the raw fleets for you to use. I had originally thought no new modules, but I think I’ll at least add some variants.

A lot of the more interesting ideas involve a ton of code, which I’d rather not do when I’m so busy with the campaign, but there is plenty of scope for module variants that work within existing parameters. I keep thinking that a very long range sniper laser with high penetration but low tracking speed and low damage could be interesting. Hopefully I’ll do some work on it tomorrow.

I found this really annoying when playtesting the campaign, and I know people have asked for it before. I want to know if this is an improvement, before I release it in a patch. People were getting vexed because they often had 5 or 6 or 20 cruiser designs of the same race (for example) and the silhouette icons were no help in picking them, so they have to use mouseover tooltips to pick the right one, which is slow. So i have experimented with adding the (cropped) name of the design to the UI: (Please click to enlarge)

Old:

New:

If you play GSB a lot, you might think “yes, I need this!”, but I’d like to know if you think it looks a bit cluttered, or messy, from the point of view of someone just trying the demo for the first time.

Edit: I tried it with a smaller font. Better? or too small?

Newer!:

My latest playtesting has convinced me to change the way ai attacks happen in the upcoming GSB campaign. Previously, there was a complex system involving local threat levels, which changed over time based on the strength of your fleet combined with the number of enemy-controlled systems linked to your world by hyperspace warp tunnel thingies.
And that works fine, and its cool, and mostly staying.

But what was happening was that you would conquer a system, push forwards and conquer the next system, and there was still a threat ‘behind the lines’ to recently conquered worlds. That was fine too, but I also coded a little ‘unlikely but possible sneak attack’ system whereby any of your worlds could get attacked at any time. If you didn’t have a big fleet sat there, this would be unopposed, you would lose the system, and maybe now have a gap in your supply lines.

Frankly, in game terms, this is a pain in the exhaust-port. It’s frustrating and annoying to lose a system behind the lines, and it’s wasteful to keep a fleet in every system just in case. The good old ‘pushing-back the frontier’ system is better.

I’ll keep the gradually lowering threat level thing, but ditch the sneak attacks. Once you have conquered a world, and parked a big-ass fleet there for a few turns, you can mvoe on and not fear losing it. It is, after all, a big map to conquer.

On an unrelated note, can whoever codes the cursor stuff at ATI get their shit together please? Multiple monitor setups in windows 7 are basically chaos with an ATI card. Random cursor corruption when swapping monitors, and an invisible cursor if it goes into text carat mode and back again on the secondary montior… These are not new bugs, from what I read, so why are you tweaking drivers to get an extra 1 FPS on starcraft when you should be fixing basic windows functionality? Bah!