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

Category: game design

Reach for the stars

Posted on January 20, 2010

“Reach for the stars, cause they’re sweeter by far, than the moon, though she’s brighter and closer to you…”

Lyrics from a song I listen to (bonus points for spotting whose), but also my attitude in recent years to my job. The whole idea of ‘lone-wolf’ indie game development is absurd on paper. Activision spent $70 million making COD:MW:2, and $130 million to market it. That’s vs Me, in a spare bedroom.

I am doomed to fail.

Except somehow I don’t fail, but keep going for years on end, even making a reasonable living from it. Clearly, fighting such impossible odds attracts a specific, maybe warped mindset. I’m glad to say that ever since I started work on GSB, I’ve had that mindset in spades. A lot of the reviews for GSB praise the visuals, saying it looks really good, and that’s welcome, and very nice, but when I see it, it looks crap. it looks really cheap and badly done, and old school, and unconvincing. The reason I think like that, is rather than playing other indie games and comparing them to GSB, or other AAA games and comparing them to GSB, my point of comparison is Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, or any other high quality movie special effects.

You might as well set your sights high…

One of the things I do when I want to improve the graphics is take a huge bunch of screengrabs from space battles on DVD like this: (I’ve got dozens of folders like this). This takes hours…

I then take a look at what those ILM visuals look like in a single frame, which is very helpful for designing visual effects in code. For example take a look at this freeze frame of a laser gun in Revenge Of the Sith, I find stuff like this fascinating.

When I have time to improve the visuals again, I’ll go through a lot of this and study in, and also zoom in and study GSB and work on making one look like the other. I had a number of false starts with the explosions and debris for GSB, and although it’s better than it was at the start, I still need that stuff to be better still. Expect the game to keep getting better as long as it keeps selling.

Press button, get banana

Posted on January 17, 2010

I’ve been playing the star trek online beta (let’s just say I won’t be buying) and I also not long ago experimented with farmville, for research purposes (far too cute  a game for me). I am not a fan of these sort of games, in fact, they depress me…

MMO’s in general (not Eve) and many facebook games annoy me because they seem designed by business types who want to maximise player-time and revenue, rather than real fun. There seems to be a tendency for business types to equate an ‘addictive’ game as being ‘good’. Not fun, enjoyable or rewarding just ‘addictive’ will do.

We are at the very very early stages of research into how people react to games. 50 years ago, I could watch you through one way glass playing a game or watching TV, and make notes. I could maybe ask you subtle questions about your experience, and do some guesswork to interpret the real answers.

These days (if I wanted to) I could log every mouse movement, every delay, every button click, every action, and analyse you along with thousands of other players to work out all kinds of subtle effects.  It’s theoretically possible for a game to auto-adjust its gameplay to maximise revenue, and player time. This isn’t commonplace, but if people arent already working on it, I’m amazed.

Yet this saddens me. I play games for fun, to feel like a President or a Starship Captain. I don’t play games just to kill time or spend money. In short, the aims of the more cynical game developer (Get them to keep playing, tell their friends, and spend money) don’t marry up with my aims (have fun!).

Right now, it’s fairly easy to look at farmville and see it as a cynical viral marketing/push-button-get-banana business, that I stop playing the minute I see how shallow it is. But in 10 years time will it be so easy? I saw a furniture companies ad earlier today that was targeted directly at me, based on items I’d looked at days before on their website. Will Farmville IV be so perfectly targeted, so acutely balanced based on 50,000,000 playthroughs, that my brain is just incapable of letting me stop playing?

I don’t buy anywhere near as many games as most game designers. I get halfway through the demo and find myself having an internal conversation that starts “Am I having fun right now?” and the answer is often no. I might be wanting to see what item I unlock next, or what happens when I reach the next level (often nothing special), but is the actual process, the actual journey fun? often no.

I am not aiming to make addictive games, or viral games, I’m trying to make fun games. They probably aren’t as profitable (nowhere near as much), but it makes me feel better. You press a lot of buttons in GSB, we don’t always give you a banana, but I hope the button pushing was fun in itself.

Radiation leak on deck twelve… bah…

Posted on January 13, 2010

I’ve been working yesterday and today on a new weapon, which is a threefold thing, because you have the simulation, the visual effect, and the balancing. The sim is moderately easy, the visual effect was a nightmare. I tried lots of things but ended up with a sort of greenish slimey effect that appears in blotches on the ships, which took a lot of code re-jigging, but looks good. I now have a more generic system for splatting one texture onto the surface of a ship, blending the source and destination alpha together so I can effectively splat a decal onto a ship. I was already hacking this in for the armor glows, now it’s more general. In theory, I could have done the damage textures that way… It’s all done without shaders, so even really old PC’s will still see that effect.

Anyway, the new weapon (likely for a new expansion one day) is a radiation gun. In game terms, this is a weapon that is rubbish at shield penetration, does little impact damage and has really slow rate of fire… So why bother?
Because if it makes it through to the ships internals, it delivers a radioactive payload which keeps ticking. Over a period of time, the payload causes repeated damage internally to different modules. This continues even if the original firing ship is no more, or the shields go back up.
Effectively its like gambling and throwing all your shots into one payload. If it hits, they all hit. and their damage is distributed across the whole target. You can damage every module on a ship with one hit. Yay!

I think this is interesting tactically for several reasons:
1) ‘sacrificial’ ships with tons of weapons but sod-all defences are now viable, because they only need to get a few shots in at the right time. They can then go bang! their work is done…
2) shield disruptor bombs are now more useful, because coupled with radiation payloads, they can deliver a one-two punch.
3) it’s a slight counter to the tribe, who trade armor and shields for more internal hit-points. Radiation could be their undoing, and negates their ‘big tank’ strategy.
4) It adds the first gradual weapon, meaning that if you can deliver this initial attack, just staying alive and waiting actually can be a winning strategy.
5) it adds a reason to have minimal shielding. People ignore the really cheap shield modules, but now that will leave them open to radioactive weaponry.

Of course it’s all in the final balancing. thoughts?

Asteroids for now… moving onwards

Posted on January 11, 2010

I’m already on other stuff now, but with a bit of shader depth of field (subtle, but worth it) and the rare laser blast impact, and a bit of knocking them sideways with explosions, I’m done with asteroid belts for now. They will show up in an expansion at some point. There is a ton of other stuff to do next.
Doing the belts meant looking at all sorts of code and led me down paths which have meant improvements to performance in other areas. It’s always good to claw back some CPU or GPU, knowing there is a big list of stuff I want to add which can use it up again :D

ASTEROIDZ!

Posted on January 8, 2010

After watching some star trek online gameplay videos (everyone says it sucks, but the space battles look interesting) I thought I should experiment with asteroid fields in GSB, purely (for now) as a visual effect, just a gratuitous bit of visual fluff which all the ships and weapons ignore.

Anyway, I don’t like just putting stuff in the game until I’m really happy with it. I’m not happy with this yet

But I’m not sure why. I need feedback on it from people like YOU. What looks wrong? what could be improved? Adding shadows is the obvious thing, but for boring technical reasons it would be a HUGE big deal in performance terms. I’d already have done it for ships if it was easy or fast.

Given that adding shadows isn’t an option, what else could be done to make this look more gratuitous and movie-like?