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

Category: gratuitous space battles

Challenges and Mods and Expansions

One of the arguments against expansion packs for games is that they ‘split the community’ It’s a real fear, and it’s one that Company Of Heroes solved cunningly by patching the content for everyone, but only letting purchasers play with those units. That might work for GSB, allowing people to fight against enemy fleets from another race, but not be that race themselves, but that is a bit of a major project for another day maybe :D

When preparing the way for the games expansion pack, I’ve put a lot of time into making it as flexible as possible, in the hope that players will be able to add content and mini expansions of their own. Everyone has their own ideas on what spaceships look best etc, and I’d love to make modding GSB really easy. To that end, the expansion has been a great ‘test case’ in that it forces me to make add-on content easy and modular.

One of the things involved was support for multiple distinct directory structures for add-ons, which is already done. The second big issue was challenges. People with the new fleet will be able to upload challenges, but obviously people without it can’t play them. A method was needed to tag challenges with the names of the installed expansions (or mods) and let the client check them against what is installed locally. This has all been in for ages, its just been dormant. Now, there is finally a UI for it on the challenge screen (in the next patch). Here it is:


Basically the game lists a checkbox for each installed mod or expansion pack, and defaults to them all being on. Any challenge you submit is tagged with them all, unless you untag them on submission. This way, unfortunately you can tag them wrong, and upload a challenge which will crash if the player doesn’t have the data, but you would have to deliberately do that. What it does allow you to do is to still issue ‘basic game’ challenges, as well as ones with new content. More importantly (and the reason its not an automated file compare thing), is the ability for anyone to create a mod, give it a user-friendly name, and upload challenges with it in, which will flag up a notice explaining what’s missing for people who attempt it.

I’ve probably explained it really badly. In any case, that screenshot is of my test case with 3 packages installed locally. Thoughts?

Testing new stuff…

I’ve been play testing a bunch of battles today. It’s scary how many times you need to play a scenario to even be sure it poses a proper challenge. I think I’m maybe half way there, in terms of the two extra maps.

When I make the scenarios, I try to put together a fleet that will put up a bit of a battle against all the existing races. Everyone has their favorites, and ideally nobody will be able to just cakewalk through the two new missions on all 3 difficulties without tweaking their fleets.

The new race has short range but rapid firing weapons, and has to basically charge right up to the enemy and bombard them at close range. This can be a surprisingly good tactic for big cruisers, especially against fleets which rely on missiles and plasma. You might think that getting in close helps the enemy, because it means the missiles hit quicker and can be relaunched, but if you can get close enough, you can be inside the enemy cruisers minimum range.

For this reason, I think people are underestimating how helpful decent engines can be on frigates and cruisers. Many people assume you can sit at maximum range and bombard the enmy at your leisure, but I recommend people experiment with fast moving close-attack ships. Especially if you try the new race :D

The testing will take a while, because as well as two new scenarios and 12 new ships, I’m also introducing kinetic weapons, which in manyways are just pulse lasers with invisible bullets (albeit with their own visual effects), but they work differentl under the hood, because I need them to be rapid firing, but quick to process. Anyway, all the issues with the code for that stuff seems to be fixed now :D

Expansion pack underway

There will be an expansion pack for GSB, and it’s still a little way off, but I did some work on it today so it’s fresh in my mind. Before I release it, there will be another mainstream GSB patch, mainly to improve the modding support to tidy things up and make mods more manageable. After the pack, who knows what’s next?

Anyway… current plans for the pack are to introduce a new race to the game. It will have the same variety of ships as the other races. The ships will also have a few race-specific modules, and some quite drastic ship bonuses. It was a relief to work out that ship bonuses can be negative, meaning this new batch of ships will have weak shields, weak armor, and very strong hulls. My plan is that these ships can take a sustained battering and rely on hull strength and repair systems. The new weapons will be kinetic bullet-firing stuff, like gauss guns / autocannons. I’ve been sorting out the sounds and visuals for them today. There will also be two new scenarios featuring the new race, and it will likely come pre-unlocked so if you buy it you can play with that race immediately.

The existence of a paid expansion pack means that some people will be uploading challenges other people can’t play. This is already handled, because there is a system for challenges to mark what ‘packages’ are installed, and thus the UI could flag challenges that you can’t play. I need to finalise the UI for that though…

Whenever a developer releases an expansion pack, there are always debates from a small subset of players that expect the content for free, or oppose the idea of expansion packs. Personally, I’m a huge supporter of them. I wish Company of Heroes had many more! The way I see it, expansion packs are about giving people options. Some people will snap up extra GSB content immediately. Many players will not. The main thing is you have the choice. Why release a game at a high price that puts some people off when you can release the core game at a lower price and let people choose if they want to have extra content?

I haven’t picked a price for the pack yet, I keep changing my mind on that.  I’m only looking to recoup the cost of making it, so it’s just a matter of how many people I think will buy it, balanced against the art and sound costs and the time working on it.

The Cellar of Death and Expansion packs

Eventually there will be an expansion pack for GSB. I have the mental plans for at least 2 major add-ons for the game, plus tons of little cool things that need to be improved and added, time and sales permitting. I’m currently working 50/50 on bug fixing and tweaks versus support for expansion pack stuff. The current plan is for a new expansion to add an entirely new race full of ships, with some new race-specific weapons and a few new scenarios. That will be the first thing I get done. If that proves sensible, I’d love to do a second one which will be more meta-game focused. Right now, adding new ships is a bit cumbersome so the last few days have seen lots of work on my rubbish ship editor to mean it’s almost slightly usable, despite having no tutorial and being full of inconsistencies and bugs and issues. Certainly it’s not ready for release yet, but it’s getting better. This has also meant sorting out compartmentalised support for mods which should make modding much easier and tidier.

I’ve just moved house, and  this adds considerably to the list of stuff I have to do. I was half way through designing a new cruiser earlier when I had to stop it and drill some curtain pole supports. I bet that never happened to Admiral Ackbar.

Anyway, as I said a while back, this new house is old. Older than Napoleon in fact. When it was built, the population of North America was 2 million, and George II was King of England. This means the house has it’s quirks, not least the scary cellar:

And the bizarre well in the corner, which is actually full of water. Occasionally, water runs in a  channel along the floor.


Methinks we will not be storing anything of value down here. I keep trying to come up with a way to utilise this ready and limitless supply of water to generate power somehow. It would rule if I could manage it, because Positech would be the only games company I know of to be powered by 18th Cetury hydro-power.