Category: gratuitous space battles

GSB is a big success and sells well, and I love it. it’s my fave game, out of all the games I’ve made, but it still has problems, because I made some fundamental screwups, technical and otherwise. here is what I think I did wrong in no particular order

• It doesn’t support netbook resolutions
• There are a fixed number of ship sizes
• The battles are not deterministic, preventing replays
• There are no achievements
• The tutorial is weak, and the learning curve too steep
• The auto-update system is dumb regarding where the game is installed.
• The online integration doesn’t include many features, like friends lists and user profiles, clan tags etc
• It makes poor use of multi-core CPUs.
• The player cannot customise the physical appearance of their units very much
• Mod support is not quite as easy to use as it could be
• The unit design tools (ship editor) used during development was laughably poor
• The UI was not as gratuitous as it could have been, given the subject matter

Have I missed anything? Obviously if I ever did a similar game, I’d be keen to fix all of those issues.

I have a slight problem with the balancing of the GSB campaign. The problem is that swarms of fighters are just *too good*. The main game prevents this because each battle has pilot limits. The campaign battles do not. It’s not a total game killer, because spatial anomalies act as ‘chokepoints’ preventing fighters roaming everywhere. It’s annoying though.

One solution is to increase the maintenance costs of fighters. The downside to this would be that it’s hard to explain to the player, doesn’t make *that* much sense and may not be effective enough.

Another is to make them more difficult to build, maybe using twice the resources per CR in a shipyard, thus making shipyards more efficient when building cruisers etc. This maybe just delays the inevitable, and is also hard to justify.

Another is to introduce the idea of needing carriers. This is tons of work and testing, plus it breaks the link with the main game, where they are not needed, and means the player will fight AI fleets designed by players operating under different rules.

Another is to introduce flight schools, and pilots as a new resource. This is adding even more complexity, although to be fair, I could make academies churn out pilots too, so its just a resource, not a new facility too…

Another is to add more anomalies that block fighters, or set hard limits of the number of fighters in a particular fleet or battle. That involves real chaos, as I’d have to handle it when merging fleets yada yada.

I can see whatever I do will involve lots of work won’t it :(

I was looking at the conversion rate for the GSB demo (The percentage of demo downloaders who buy) and thinking I could find a way to improve it. One of the pieces of common feedback about the game was that people had no idea whether they had made good choices or bad in terms of ships and weapons.

Obviously there are all the ship and module stats and the post-battle stats, but I was thinking that it’s a bit much on the first playthrough, and that maybe something more simple was needed to give instant feedback. So I’ve coded a popup dialog on the stats screen that basically gives you four stats, based on the amount of hull damage that ships and modules do:

Thoughts? I know there are some people here who tried the demo but didn’t buy. Would this have helped ease you into things a bit?

This was a weekend diversion, I’m back on campaign bugs now…