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

Category: game design

Repair Drones

Posted on September 27, 2009

It’s amazing how much extra effort had to go into this over the last 48 hours…

Repair drones have always looked a bit cool, but not been much help to the player. The problem is, their only tie to the core simulation was their quantity. Every repair module gave you a ‘swarm’ of repair drones, and once your ship took some damage, you would see them hovering around and looking like they were welding the ship back together. The problem was, they didn’t actually achieve anything froma  visual point of view.

Thios was worse than a visual bug, because it means that when you play against an enemy fleet that has lots of ships which make strong use of repair drones, you cannot tell if that enemy cruiser is on it’s last legs, or just cosmetically burned, yet at 100% hull integrity. Surely this had to be fixxored.

So now (behold the youtube vid below), those drones (as well as having nicer welding effects) do actually weld those damaged bits of your ship back together. To make it REALLY obvious in the vid, I built a ship with three repair modules, so until the repair supplies run out, it’s pretty nippy at welding stuff back together.

Let me know what you think. I reckon it not only looks better, but will make playing against repair-spammed ships much easier and more enjoyable. (in terms of learning from the battles. The simulation is unchanged)

Another patch, some web stuff…

Posted on September 24, 2009

Today I released version 1.12 of GSB. That fixes a ton of AI stuff, and a lot of minor UI niggles. It is pretty handy that beta testers compile lists of little UI things they notice (that as developer, you tend to become blind to).

Fixing bugs is relatively stress free, it just takes time and effort, and concentration. Improving Ui stuff, new features and new graphics are all quite stress free too. The really scary stuff seems to be balance changes. Everyone who plays the game uses different tactics, and no matter what you test, the nanosecond you release the new patch, people find some cunning way to design ships that takes advantage of a loophole you hadn’t even thought of.

That sort of stuff is inevitable with a game that involves competition, but it does make it pretty scary and time consuming to ever change anything. I concluded that missiles were not good enough, and that fighters flew too fast, but there are a dozen ways to fix both those issues, and every change has its side effects. Still, the game is much better balanced and playable that it was on first release, and despite minor niggles, I do think that on the whole it gets better with each patch. (If not, I’m wasting my life!)

In other news I added a flash widget to the GSB website that scrolls through images. It cost me actual real money! I’m no flash expert, so buying a pre-made component was worth it for me. I normally don’t like flash on websites, because it seems a bit gratuitous but…

How complex?

Posted on September 20, 2009

How complex should a game be? Obviously it’s a huge question dependent heavily on genre. Most simulation games are pretty complex. Turn based strategy can be uber complex, MMOs too. Flash games are often very simple and iphone games can be simpler still. Is it a question you can even attempt an answer to?

I think an interesting take on it, is “what are you asking?”. Too complex can mean two things:

“This game is too complex to enjoy”

“This game looks too complex. I’ll pass”

Similarly:

“This game is very simple”

“This game is too simple to be worth buying”

There are loads of games out there I might find fun, that I would not buy. There are also games out there that look awesome, and incredible, and wonderful, and I would not buy them either, and it comes down to complexity.

Take a game where you make a single mouse click to time a guy swinging a bat to hit a ball (there are many, some involve penguins). As a web-based flash game, this can be fun. You might even waste a whole lunchtime on it. But ultimately it’s throwaway disposable fun that we all know someone coded in a weekend. It’s very unlikley you would pay more than $0.99 for it at the very very very most.

Now, Take Eve online, or any of those Hex Based wargames. Or, take Empire: Total War. These are all great, awesome games, with TONS of stuff to do, incredible depth and complexity, but tbh, life is just too short for me to play them. I played eve for years, playing an hour a day or more, and never more than scratched the surface. I never got far into 0.0 space. In E:TW, I played ONE campaign game a third of the way through, then gave up. It was taking ages, and there was too much to do.

The weird thing, is not only are games like that more complex than they need to be in order to get a sale from me, their complexity actually has a negative impact on my chances of buying. Even though I know it’s irrational, I am put off buying them because I’d actually resent having paid for content I’ll never see or use. (ironically I do own E:TW anyway, but I’m aware of my own niggling feeling about it).

I’m probably not alone. I think almost everyone has a ‘complexity’ curve for games that influences their purchase decision. We all regard some games as too trivial or simplistic to buy, and some are too overcomplex and involved to buy. Obviously mass market games need to be in the sweet spot at the top of the aggregate curve. Niche developers like me can cater to the other extremes, and GSB possibly heads slightly towards ‘too complex’ rather than the opposite.

What I find a lot of game devs forget is that a game can be fun, enjoyable, playable and cool, and well made, and addictive and generally excellent, but a LOT of people will play the demo and never buy it, because they resent buying a game that seems like it’s too simple in form.

Are you one of those people, or is it just me?

The metagame

Posted on September 16, 2009

Gratuitous Space Battles right now is probably best thought of as a very complex, expanded and pretty versions of the space battle segments of a 4X game.

In other words, these are just battles, fought out between similar fleets with similar objectives, in the same way. It’s kind of like chess. In chess, the map never changes, the pieces are set in stone.

It takes a loooong time to perfectly design and balance the ‘sandbox’ that allows games like this to remain fun over a long period, nd its definitely my aim to get to that point. Howver, I’d also like to introduce a lot more variety and options to keep things interesting. I can always describe more ideas than I have time to implement but here are a few:

1) More unlocks, and modules in general. Although I sympathise with those people who dislike the whole unlock concept, I think there is some good middle ground. People who are very good at the game have lots of spare honor, and as long as there is nothing too game-brekaing, I think some extra, expensive modules might be a good idea

2) Scenario variety. Right now the ‘terrain’ options are quite limited. They aren’t really major in terms of changing tactics (25% range reduction isn’t really earth-shattering), and there are many more possibilities. Maybe a nebula where plasma weapons just do not work? or one where radiation levels mean that no fighters can survive?

3) Modding. There has been little in the way of formal mod support so far. I have some very primitive tools, instructions and general information on how to do stuff like add ship hulls. I should write this up and make it available.

That’s what I’m currently thinking of, and hope to add to the game. So if you think the missions are a bit samey and the ship design options too limited, this will change. If people have similar suggestions, please throw them out there. I love hearing peoples ideas.

Patch 1.08, ratable challenges

Posted on September 14, 2009

I’m just uploading version 1.08 now. It fixes a numebr of bugs and minor issues, but the two big things in terms of gameplay and usability are these:
Firstly all of the variables associated with ship modules now have fairly extensive tooltips which explain their gameplay significance a bit more. This was needed because a lot of people just Escaped out of the tutorial windows, didn’t spot there was a manual and thus had no idea how ship design worked or the components interacted. Hopefully this improves that a bit, and I also stuck a big button on the main menu to launch the manual, although if you for some reason have no PDF reader on your PC, that will seem like it just quits the game. Almost all PC’s now come bundled with the bloated crapware that is Adobe reader (try this instead), and people who self-build their PC’s know about PDF readers anyway.

The second change of note is the introduction of ratable challenges. Basically I stuffed some more data in the challenge database, and you can now sort challenges by map (only for new uploaded ones sadly) and by difficulty or enjoyment. Once you finish playing a challenge you can rate it out of five for these two variables, and the average score is presented in the slightly nicer challenge browser. There is also no longer any ‘auto’ challenges, which were crap anyway, and you can instead now filter to see just your posted challenges, to see how many people have beaten your fleets :D

This is what it looks like:

I’m aiming to work today on configurable ship orders for each ship design, to make laying out those big fleets much less of a chore.