Category: game design

Ok, so new orders are something people often campaign for, and I like the idea of a ‘stay in attack formation” style order for fighters. So today, I went to implement that, and opened an entire canning-factory full of nematodes. I ended up re-writing the AI a bit so there is a definite concept of a fighter squadron (which I’d got by without, until now). The code gets involved, because each squadron needs a leader it can follow, and that leader needs to be re-elected in the case of the leader getting blown up, its engines shot down, caught in a tractor beam or limpet-mined. I need to test all of that works… Also I need code to assign slots in a general formation to each fighter, so they don’t bunch up too much, and look l33t when flying long distances,

I also needed to handle combinations of orders like ‘stick together’ and ‘formation’. I think they *do* need to work together, so you can have a fighter squadron sitting in formation at the rear, set to attack effectively only when their parent ship is destroyed, at which point they will then still stick together.

Of course, the big question is “is it best for the fighters to always stick together?” I suspect not, I suspect it depends if you want a bunch of general purpose dogfighters, or a coherent strike force. I like to think it’s a fine balanced decision, but only real life game testing and the eyes of a thousand GSB experts will tell. Here is a video showing how it’s looking right now:

I should probably add some suitable ‘stay in formation perkins!’ comms chatter too…

This isn’t finished yet, so this is just a work in progress screenshot, click it to enlarge…

This is new challenge UI stuff. I got sick of squeezing more columns in 1024 res on the list view, so now those download and delete buttons get replaced by ‘details’ which opens this new screen for a selected challenge. All the old data is here, with room for some more, and the history of that challenge is now auto-downloaded and displayed here at the top right. You can also now see the challenge ID in the titlebar, (I’ll probably add that to the list somehow too). there are two super-exciting new things:

• The challenges now uplaod a screenshot of their deployment, as you can see. Obviously old challenges will not have one, but new ones will. I’m very happy about this :D
• The challenges now have a parent, because when you win a challenge, you can send your fleet back as a ‘retaliation’. These get listed like any other challenge, but if you pick one of your challenges, you can see a list of it’s retaliations on the bottom window. I don’t have a super-threading view of it all, but this is a first step.

My plan for this is that

• Players will be able to see what a challenge looks like before downloading, which helps detect ‘spammy’ fleets for people who prefer not to play against them
• There will be a more on-going to-and-fro between players over who has the best fleet, using retaliations.

I still have more tweaks, and a ton of testing to do, to make this work well. I’m hoping the next patch will really improve the online stuff. Ideas and feedback are most welcome, as ever.

The deployment UI for GSB is not as good as it could be. I’m aware of this, and more acutely aware of it, because this is the main meat and potatoes of the game itself. The battles are great fun, and look cool, but a player who really gets into the game will spend considerable time on the deployment screen. I was thinking recently (and a post by a player on the forums reminded me of it) that I should display to the player the ranges he is fiddling with when assigning shooting orders. I’ve ended up fixing four problems here.

Firstly I changed the wording from ‘max range’ to ‘Move to attack at this range’, which makes more sense. Weapons will always fire at targets the minute they enter range, these instructions are for movement, not firing, and tell the ship to move to range X to attack fighters, or Y to attack frigates, depending on the current target. This was not clear. (It’s still imperfect, but better).

Secondly, I wanted to display the range on the screen as you changed it, and decided to re-use the white range circles to do so, which was fine, albeit requiring me to fix all kinds of other minor quibbles. It meant that I should allow the player to drag that window aside so they can see whats going on ( a good idea anyway), leading to a few tooltip bugs I had to fix. Once I was staring at that window, it became clear that a lot of the weapons module strips on there were redundant. If you have 5 cruiser lasers, you only need a single entry for them, to allow you to check and auto-set their maximum range, so now it says cruiser laser (x5) rather than spamming that window.

Minor changes, but lots of minor changes make for a batter, less frustrating and more fun game. Who knows, it may double sales! (unlikely :D)

I’ve been even busier than usual lately, and lost of stuff is in the preverbial inbox. There are two fairly imminent things.

One is patch 1.31. This fixes and improves lots of things, and there is a big annoying bug with the game freezing on startup for some people (very few, thankfully) which it should fix. I need to spend tomorrow on this, as a matter of urgency.

The next is the upcoming expansion pack, which adds a new race. Right now, the plan is for it to add a bunch of things. Graphical asteroid belts (which look l33t), some great new backdrops, likely to be two new missions, and a new race that has limpet mines and radiation guns. wahey!

The problem is that the expansion pack needs some code changes, and I would rather they *all* were in patch 1.31. I don’t ideally want to do 1.31, then in 2 weeks do 1.32 before the expansion, I dont want people to be constantly bugged by patches.

Sadly, I suspect that will be the case, because I want the expansion to be really awesome and it will likely be at least another two weeks of work away anyway, probably more. In any sense, I’m slightly worried that people have seen less frequent updates and wonder if the game is still moving forwards. It definitely is, and it will keep getting better. I just need to focus on one thing at a time. Today it was limpet mines (videos coming soon), tommorow is patch 1.31, and hopefully getting some decent testing done on it, for a mid-end week release.