Category: game design

It’s pretty clear from the tons of great feedback I got that GSB has an initial-learning curve and usability problem regarding designing ships and seeing the effects of them. I’ve already been trying to address this with adding damage feedback indicators to the game (see here). I think that will make a big difference. It’s also clear that the ship design screen could do with some work. One of the ‘improvements’ has been there for ages, but it’s not very well promoted, so you might have missed it. And if you played the original beta or demo, it wasn’t there, and you really should try it again:

Here is a screenshot showing recent changes:

A) Shows that a lot more modules are now locked at the start of the game. People found the choice overwhelming, and to be honest, you aren’t going to absolutely need an EMP gun or light plasma launchers to beat the tutorial, so they are now locked. When the game patches, it will now lock those modules, but existing players will have plenty of surplus honor to re-unlock them right away. This should make things look less scary for people trying the demo or just starting out.

B) Is the feature that has been in for ages but isn’t well known. Its the module-comparison dialog. Clicking any line of data about the selected module will open this window, with a sorted list of every module with that attribute, and highlight where the current module stands. Great for working out whether this modules missile speed (jnt his case) is slow or fast relative to other module choices. This feature is really handy. Its also launchable from other screens where the same module data is visible, like the unlocking screen.

C) Is a new item on this ‘ship stats’ window at the bottom. (In lower res layouts, this is a seperate pop-up window launched by a button in the corner of the blueprint). This shows shield resistance, as well as strength. These are very different things, and you may want to pritoritize resistance over strength, in some cases.

D) Tooltips! These explain those stats, which are probably confusing everyone. This stuff is in the manual, and hinted at in the tooltips for module data, but it’s much more useful to have it here, when you can see those numbers next to the design that they apply to.

This isn’t the end of usability improvements, I aim to add a bunch more, although they will probably be quite minor, and relate to tutorial windows and so on. Hopefully, by the time the next patch (1.41) goes out, the game will be far more attractive to new players. I’m kind of playing a ‘long game’ with GSB. I normally move on to the next game quicker than this, but I love working on GSB and I’d like the game to reach its full potential.

A lot of the replies to my ‘why didn’t you buy gsb’ post mentioned the lack of understanding what weapons and modules were effective, and the steep learning curve. I think this is a good point and I agree it should be better. I suspect one of the worst things is seeing your weapons firing but not knowing if they got through, and if they did any damage. You *can* tell this now, by the explosions, or the armor or shield glow effects, but it’s not immediately obvious and thats different to how most games handle it.

So….

I thought I’d investigate how it looked to have those MMO style floating ‘damage numbers’ above ships as they got hit. I stuck this in this morning, and so far I REALLY like it. You can of course, toggle it off, along with the whole UI, if you prefer a more cinematic less gamey look. I think this makes the game much easier to play and learn from in the early stages. My only phear is that established players may howl with anger at the thought of changing this, because it removes a lot of the guesswork. I think the guesswork probably creates more annoyance than fun, but what do you think?

here is a crappy blurry youtube video.

But much better to download the wmv.

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/media/damagefeedback.wmv

It still looks blurry, and not as good as it really looks, but its better than youtube.

In other news, patch 1.39 is in limbo because some people had crashes with it. I’m awaiting feedback from people with that issue so I can give them patch 1.40 and see if that runs ok, before I release it properly. This damage numbers thing likely won’t be in until patch 1.41, which may roll in some other usability improvements now I have some decent feedback on what to fix.

These are things on my list right now:

• Add new code to tutorial so it can zoom to a specified location.
• Finish off tutorial text and code for the remaining bits of the campaign.
• Do the screens for victory or defeat in the campaign.
• Filter out fleets where ships have no engines, so they aren’t selected as enemy fleets.
• Merge 2 fleets if you drop one fleet icon on another.
• Prevent exploit whereby you invade a system, then save and load before the battle got resolved. (Ooops).
• Merge two fleets into one if you send two fleets to invade the same system at the same time.

None of these are trivial tasks. It’s coming together though. I’ll probably interrupt work on this at some point to release patch 1.39, although the campaign itself will need a patch to support it, so I might wait until the campaign is finished first. I keep considering putting the campaign code into a separate DLL, but tbh thats only going to be needless grief. There will always be one or two tiny things I need to change in the base game to support all the campaign stuff, so why bother? The campaign is all seperate data, just like the expansion packs.
Sales of GSB are definitely slowing. Hopefully the campaign will boost them up long enough to last me until I finish whatever game I do next.

I’ve been slightly sidetracked recently by the release of the Swarm DLC on steam (few technical issues there) and some updates to the core game which will filter through in the eventual next patch. Meanwhile, slow but sure progress continues on the fun and games of the campaign game. Here is a current work-in-progress coder art style screenshot. I’ve just finished coding the ‘scrap ships’ UI so you can scrap ships to recover some of the money. You only get 25% of the value, so it’s a desperate measure rather than a simple way to refit the fleet. It might be useful for when you have damaged ships not worth repairing, or for when you capture enemy ships that don’t suit your current fleet.

In other news, I now no longer find the big clump of black birds that live in a tree in our garden to be cute. Bastard things woke me up at 6AM this morning. I suspect they are ravens, or maybe pterodactyls. Certainly not as cute as I recall. Jack now has my express permission to get the bastards. He’s been practicing on the smaller birds. So far it’s about 5:0 to him. Nature eh?