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

Category: gratuitous space battles

Gratuitous Patch Number 32!

At last I’ve released patch 32 (version 1.32) for GSB today. If all goes well, then I’ll roll that out to partners like steam over the next two days. There are many changes big and small. Here are the big ones:

1) Performance: UI performance improvement for scrolling on the challenge browser screen.
2) Performance: Differential challenge data downloading means that refreshing the challenge list is much faster now.
3) New Feature: Fleet overlay UI for the battle screen showing every ship on your fleet and it’s current status.
4) Usability: Mouse cursor now changes to the hand icon when over something clickable.
5) New Feature: Added module stat comparison window when you click any item of module data.
6) Bug Fix: Weapons will now fire at anything within range correctly, even if ordered not to attack a certain class, providing that no other suitable targets are in range.

Depending how you play the game, some of these may be irrelevant, or awesome. I really like the module stat comparison stuff. I should have done it ages ago, and the fleet overlay is handy too. People who micromanage their weapons orders to the nth degree will appreciate number 6. I always thought it was working that way, but it turns out my code is buggier than a bug breeding colony on bug island. It works in a much more sensible way now, and its more viable to build ships that mix and match anti-fighter and anti-cruiser weapons :D

The patch will auto-download over the next 24 hours for existing buyers. New buyers get a  ready-patched copy anyway.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. I forgot to mention in the readme that I beefed up some of the explosions and particle effects too. The very next thing I do will be the next expansion pack, which I’m pretty excited about. After that, it’s likely the mini-campaign.

Two new features for GSB

I was honestly trying to work on new DLC, but hey, I ended up adding and improving some stuff. One thing I ended up doing was mouse cursor changes, so it actually changes to the windows pointy finger thing now to show you that you can click something, which is quite nifty. I also added two features.

The first feature is the ‘fleet overlay’ at the left of the screen. It’s a scrollable column of icons for every ship in the fleet. The tooltips show your current damage percentage, and they fill red as the ships take damage. you can also click them to zoom to that ship. It’s a handy way to see at a glance in big battles which ships are taking hits. I also added a tiny arrow icon to toggle that new feature on or off, in case some people don’t like it. I have a tiny UV bleeding issue on that button I must fix…

gratuitous space battles fleet overlay UI

The second feature is rather cool for statistics-freaks. If you have played much GSB, and spent much time on the ship design screen, you will know the frustration of seeing “weight=122” and not really knowing how that compares to anything else. Obviously you can go through each module of the same ship class and compare, but wouldn’t it be better if the game makes that trivial to do?
Tada! It does. You can click any of those data entries at the bottom left now, and get a comparison window, ready sorted and scrolled to show where the current module fits in. I hope people find this useful.

gratuitous space battles ship design screen

Now I can get back to work designing fleets for the religious aliens in the next DLC…

Both these spangly new things will be in version 1.32, which will get released shortly before the new DLC. Yay!

Programming Gratuitous Rocket Trails

I was watching District 9 ( I liked it, except the more yucky violent bits), and there were some cool rapid rocket trail effects in it, and it suddenly reminded me that the rocket trails in Gratuitous Space Battles aren’t good enough at high speed. Take a look at this rocket trial, from a rocket cruiser missile at 4x speed:

Crap isn’t it :D. At normal speed it’s fine, but at super high speed, the missile actually moves too fast per frame of rendering for me to actually space out the particles. So I just knocked up some code that instead of doing this: (pseudocode)

HowFarHaveWeTravelled?
IsItTimeForAnotherParticle?
IfSoPlaceAParticleHere

does this:

for(distance_accounted_for = 0; distance_accounted_for < actual distance, distance += particle spacing)
{
  Position = LastMissilePosition
  Position += (distance_accounted for)
  Place a particle at Position;
}

Which is more work :D But it’s worth it, because even at 4x speed it now looks like this:

I know it’s a bit late to be worrying about all this months after the game came out and got reviews, but I am just completely drawn towards tweaking the game to look better. Also this means I can experiment with superfast rocket trails which will still look good. Also today I’ve done all of the debris and turret gfx for the new race in the new DLC/expansion pack thing. Now I have to actually design their ship configurations, and allocate their bonuses. Then I need to do their mission deployments, and then it’s pretty much done (and I then need to balance and playtest it). Yay!

Xbox? No, not for now anyway.

Over the last few days I’ve been seriously considering making an effort to get Gratuitous Space Battles onto XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade). I have decided not to do so (I must send that email…) and here is my thinking:

  • According to wikipedia, the Xbox has sold 34 million units. I suspect that less than half are used by people who are happy to buy and play downloadable games. Most will be used purely for Madden and for Call Of Duty. So that’s 16 million, vs 25 million people with an account on steam. Lets round up the other digital dist sites and say there are 35 million people able and willing to buy PC games online?
  • Games on XBLA are cheap. people gnash their teeth about $15. As someone who sells a $22.95 game and a $19.95 game, this does not bode well.
  • On PC, I can sell direct, taking > 90% of the price. Through portals such as steam, it’s less, but still quite good. On XBLA There would be a Microsoft cut, then probably a publisher cut, and then I’d get the crumbs. All out of a smaller price.
  • The Xbox has a long list of requirements about how games should play. Obviously it must be played with a gamepad, which is awkward enough, but platform holders have a funny habit of insisting you use their latest feature, even if it makes zero sense in context of the game. I hate that.
  • On PC, there is no publisher involvement, and no approval process. I know 100% that at some point, someone somewhere at Microsoft would say that the game would be better if you could control the ships. They are wrong, and I’d have to waste precious hours of my life arguing the point. This would not be fun. I’ve heard numerous horror stories from fellow indies about this sort of thing.
  • There are up front costs, for ESRB, getting a dev kit and so on. I already have a dev kit for PC games development, it’s called a PC. This is a big chunk of cash I need to find on the off-chance that I’m ‘allowed’ to publish a game for less money, at a lower royalty, that I had to redesign to fit at a low resolution using a controller designed for beatemup games. hmmmm
  • Xbox gamers are not known for their love of slow paced heavy thinking text-based strategy games. GSB is not Halo, or COD. They may hate it.

So combine all that and I have no urgent need to get involved with the Xbox. Maybe this is a mistake and it would have sold 100,000 copies on there, but I suspect not. Maybe if you didn’t need the ESRB stuff, and the dev kits were the same price as an xbox, and they automatically approved any game that passed a basic ‘not offensive’ check, I’d be more tempted, but as things stand, PC beats XBox for me, and it beats every other console out there.

BTW I worked around the vertex buffer thing, patching both games to not use vertex buffers at all. This is slower, and infuriating, but it works. Grrrr.

Best cruiser explosion ever

is at 2 minutes 32.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZIPsXY7_fc

Thats what I’m aiming for. Obviously without ILM’s budget, but hey.

I’m tweaking  explosion effects right now. I’m waiting for one more expansion pack ship, then the turrets, and then I can start balancing them and doing the new missions. I’ll show some screenshots of the new stuff before I release it.

The format of this expansion/ DLC is very similar to the tribe. New race, with new weapons. Plus asteroid belts will look 3D in the new mission. yay.