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

Category: game design

The New Game

So what is this space game all about then?

Well it’s basically a big space battle simulator. A top-down, 2D space battle strategy game with no resource management, empire building, exploration or diplomacy.  The game is influenced by a number of things, in visual terms, I’m inspired by the stupidly big battles at the end of star trek:ds9 and the start of revenge of the sith. In game terms, it’s inspired slightly by galactic civ II, and partly by an old pen and paper RPG called traveller.

 

One of the books of traveller was called ‘trillion credit squadron‘, and it was based around the players being given a trillion credits to design and build a big space fleet (with certain restrcitions) to fight other players. That’s the basis of the gameplay for this currently un-named game. There will not be a big story, it’s basically a case of build a big fleet, send it into battle and enjoy the fun. I’ll be trying to make the battles look as good as 2D battles can look.

There is a lot more to the game than this, but that will come later. All my art is placeholder right now, so obviously there will be original spaceship designs. I haven’t found my spaceship artist or backdrop artists yet. In fact I haven’t started looking yet. Even now, it looks pretty cool in a big 1900×1200 window with maybe 40-50 ships a side. I hope to scale it up way way beyond that.

Core Breach!

Still a work in progress…clearly. But getting better… Details of what the hell this game is will arrive eventually…

GUI Coding is slow and dull…

I still hand code my GUI stuff. TBH, although I know people talk about using GUI libraries, I can’t see how it can save them that much time. I have a library of stuff like button, and window classes. This isn’t the issue. The issue is coding all the stuff that says “this window has a button here, and when you click it, that scrolls through this list there”

GUI stuff takes ages. it’s also really boring to code, and there is a huge long list of features which are automatically assumed by gamers which you must have. All buttons need mouseover states and tooltips, and you need the idea of modal windows, draggable windows, windows that go to to the top when clicked, etc.

Add to all that, the nightmare of making a GUI that runs nicely in different resolutions. I know that stardock have some clever system for doing this, but they employ dozens of people and run their own GUI software business, so they can spend a lot more time on it than me.

This is why I’m not blogging about exciting enw stuff in ‘the game that has no name yet but will have a code-name soon’. I’m doing GUI stuff for one of the three big ‘management’ parts of the game, and it’s nothing exciting to talk about. Not compared to the lasers and explosions anyway.

Adding financial incentives to modding

Modding doesn’t seem to be living up to it’s full potential.

Developers and publishers make a game, and release an SDK and mod tools so that ordinary games players can come together and make changes and improvements to the game. This is awesome, and one of the best things about PC gaming, but there are two drawbacks.

1) Most mods are unfinished and suck

2) The publisher and developer are basically using modding as a marketing tool, and nothing more. they gain nothing from a virbrant mod scene and decent mods other than goodwill from gamers and an increased perceived worth of the game. (not to be sneezed at, but not massive either)

In other words, the incentive to encourage production of great mods is low. Modders do it for fun, and maybe for their CV if they are insane enough to want to get into games. Develoeprs support it as an afterthought if they have the time. Why can’t we go further and have a financial releationship as an option?

Idea:

Modders get the rights to release paid for mods to the game, with technical support and QA from the developer. The gamers buy this mod, and the money is split between the mod team and the developer.

Would this work? is it a good or bad idea? I’m not saying mods shouldn’t be free, just that with financial incentives, some mods could be much better. In principle, I’m in favour of people doing high quality mods for my games, and selling them for a profit split with me. Would this work? is it fair? is it evil?

Thoughts…?

The angst of original game design

Game design is a pain. But ORIGINAL CONCEPT game design is like a pain intensified with pain amplifiers set to MAXIMUM_PAIN.

90% of games have very little originality. Some of them have some original ideas or twist ion existing concepts, and very few of them are totally utterly new. The Sims was a reworking of little computer people, and Kudos is in some ways a new take on the Sims, albeit different in fundamental ways. Democracy is a bit of a weird one, being influenced mainly by neural networks and watching TV debates over politics, but it probably looks like some other game to someone. I’ve heard talk of ‘shadow president’ but never seen or played it.

The last 3 games I did were Kudos 2 Democracy 2 and Kudos:Rock Legend. These are all games I worked hard on and am very proud of. D2 and K2 are my fave games, and I think they are the best I’ve done so far. But the last time I released a totally ‘new’ game was the original Kudos.

I’m determined not to coast on past successes, so this new game is totally different. I’m trying to carve out a new idea for a game again, and it’s a pretty tough job. The problem this time is technical, not conceptual. I can see the game in my mind, how it plays and how it works. Translating it into code is tricky. There is a lot of conventional AI to code (unit AI, as you might get to some extent in an RTS), and that stuff is a pain to get working consistently at reasonable speeds, especially with the pretty big number of units I’m hoping to support.

So this next game will take a while, hopefully getting done before the money runs out. But it will be pretty origianl (I think). That will give me 3 strings to my gaming bow (kudos, Democracy and NewGame). On the positive front, it’s also got me coding more hours than ever before, because I hate it when the game looks like it’s a mess…