Category: gratuitous space battles

I have two big areas of gsb to fix. Challenges (adding features) and tutorial stuff. My straw poll of friends suggests that the initial mission and tutorial are what needs more urgent work. I was going to scribble this in my default ‘working.txt’ file, which is where I cache my brain, but I thought what the hell, why not just do it in public via the blog?

Current problems with the tutorial/learning stuff

• Nobody notices the manual, or reads it
• The timed ‘helpful’ popup windows are annoying and interrupt the game
• The tutorial windows are often ignored or deleted, and cannot be recalled once skipped
• The tutorial stuff breaks immersion, and interrupts what should be fun
• The game is initially overwhelming for some players, and they have no idea what to do or how to do it

I don’t want to spend weeks fiddling with this right now, but it’s clear this needs fixing. I think the first item is a lost cause, it’s a PDF manual so not easily integrated into the game, especially as I’m too stupid to have integrated a built-in web browser for stuff like that (which would be ideal). The only possible tweak would be to have the manual mentioned by a hint when the game is first run, or maybe in a loading-screen tip?

I think just ditching this silly idea of popping up windows when I notice someone hasn’t used a certain feature might be the best idea. Ideally I’ll come up with a less intrusive way to deliver that information. Maybe an easily ignored little scrolling message at the bottom of the screen? The problem is that ship design mode uses 100% of the screen on minimum res…

Maybe the tutorial windows could be a little flashing question mark window that you can click to get help, which the first time player could ignore? (until they realise they need it). That might work much better.

One of the major things I need to do is flatten out the learning curve right at the start. Possibly give the player some starting ships which *can* actually win the first battle, write off the first battle as a tutorial (or add a new ‘trainer’ mission with just one level of difficulty). I could disable  the ‘new ship design’ button at the start, and let the player just learn the basics of the deployment screen for the first battle. Battle #2 could come with a different tutorial window which pointed you at the ‘new ship’ button. If I wanted it REALLY basic, I could also grey out all of the ship orders here too…

In fact I wonder if that is 90% of the learning curve sorted? I guess that people got overwhelmed with setting up orders and designing ships? My idea is that people learn the game like this:

1) learn how to add ships to a fleet and position them (could be mission #1)

2) learn how to use orders to control ship behavior. (could be mission #2)

3) learn how to design new ships (this could be unlocked after mission #2 with extensive popup and tooltip help for that screen)

I think I’ll address the tutorial stuff with this plan in mind. For now, I’ll go through the current system and remove everything that doesn’t fit this ‘new model’.

Today was mostly spent playing the game, going through a lot of module data, reading a lot of forum posts, doing spreadsheets, and analyzing what modules and ships needing changing to make GSB more balanced. There were some really obvious screw ups that have been there for a while, such as frigate power supplies being too good, frigate crew modules being too small, and fighter torpedoes being stupidly heavy. Lots of this is now fixed and awaiting the next patch.

There has been press coverage here and there, not least here:

http://www.cyberstratege.com/magazine/2009/09/gratuitous-space-battles-en-direct-de-la-beta/

Hopefully that’s a good review, but my language skills are weak at best!

There is a ton of improvements I want to make to the game, mostly UI and online challenge-related stuff. I also badly need to ease casual players into the game much better than I currently do. This is all ‘on the list’. Plus there is a backlog of insanely cool features I’d like to add one day, maybe eventually there will be an expansion pack or something. I wouldnt mind if I was still doing GSB related stuff a year from now (providing it actually sells ok, obviously).

To people asking about GSB on platforms such as Impulse, the answer is *soon*.

I just uploaded version 1.05, and activated the auto-patching. This fixed a ton of things. The big stuff is code to prevent most of the hardcore ‘stacking’ on the deployment screen, by means of a snap-to-grid system for deploying ships (this has it’s quirks, but will be polished more later). That means fleets look more like this:

There is also a groovy new right click option for designs (mass deploy) which means you can add new ships with a single click. I also fixed about a  dozen minor interface niggles and made two big gameplay changes:

Repair modules now have limited resources, and when they run out, they stop working. This means they are no longer a long term equivalent to the infinitely recharging shields. In short, you can’t build indestructible ships just by stacking repair modules and armor

Escort orders now have variable range, meaning you can have closely knit groups of defending fighters, or squads that roam into enemy space only so far, which should mean a lot more tactical flexibility.

I’m well aware that I need to give the existing AI enemy fleets access to these new capabilities and improve their deployments as a result. However, that’s come secondary to making the game better balanced for challenges and for playability. I’ll be improving the general balancing, and all sorts of other stuff over the next few days. I might get around to a much needed beefing up on the online options too. It sucks that you can’t browse on-line high scores or stats, or easily track the progress of challenges you issued, or rate challenges for their difficulty. I have long term plans to get a lot of stuff like that in, plus all sorts of other goodies.

Here is some interesting coverage of the game over at good-old RPS

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/09/08/gratuitous-space-prattles/

I took slightly longer over the latest GSB beta patch, because most people were at least playing the game (albeit with some sound slowdowns) so I wanted to get more fixes in this one, and not get stuck in perpetual ‘patch-a-day’ land.

Here are the fixes:

version 1.04

1) Fixed crash bug when editing a ship after clicking edit on the deployment screen from a challenge and then returning to the deployment screen

2) Added option to change the number of maximum sound channels the sound system uses in prefs.ini

3) Changed the way the ‘Attack’ orders work so now if you have no attack fighters order (for example) they are totally ignored until the enemy has nothing but fighters left

4) Added new togglable option to enable or disable pitch-shifting sounds with game speed, as possible fix for the 1.03 slowdown bug

5) Confirm dialog added for escape key on battle screen

6) Fixed a number of bugs relating to modules changing into different modules when you save and load them

7) The dialog for confirming that you admit defeat now pause the game while it is active

8) The post-battle stats window now has a button to return you to the deployment screen, as well as the main menu one

9) Re-design of the hull picker window so ships are selectable from a scrolling list, and also are sorted in both race and then ship class within a race

10) Double-clicking an order in the order-selection window now adds it

11) Changed the way shield stability recovers from disruptor bombs so it makes more sense on ships with a much larger shield system.

12) Text-edit windows for renaming stuff now behaves better, with click-split, home, end and right left keys all working the way windows does.

13) Increased variety of gratuitous ship names

14) New AI-Order ‘Keep Moving’ will keep a ship meandering around it’s current position and maintaining it’s attack range (when attacking)

15) Fixed crash bug when going from deployment to ship editor and back, then selecting one of the orders already displayed

If you pre-order the game NOW onwards, it’s already version 1.04, else it will autopatch when you start the game up. Hopefully this won’t introduce any new issues. (always a fear). The BIG changes for anyone who hasn’t encountered any crashes are the new ‘Keep Moving‘ Order for ships (useful for frigates, not applicable to fighters) and the changes to the way attack orders work, You really can now have ships that just refuse to engage fighters (unless only fighters are left). Feedback on all these changes most welcome, I know there is tons of other stuff to fix and tweak, even before I consider stuff to balance and add. That could take years!

BTW, A few people who are exchanging challenges by tweet are putting #gsb in the tweet. Hopefully this actually registers a bit somewhere and makes it look popular? :D

Amongst other things (mostly sound related) I’ve been tidying up the ship hull ‘picker’ from the ship design screen, which was a bit fiddly and unpopular. The new one looks like this: (click to enlarge)

I wasn’t sure about the aesthetics of a three-pane look, but I’m assured it looks ok. I considered fading out everything behind it so the screen looked less cluttered. The big usability improvement (apart from the scroll wheel plus the keyboard up+down moving the scrolling list) is that hulls are sorted by race and by category, so you get all the alliance ships first, in fighter, frigate, cruiser order, then the next race etc…

I’m pretty convinced that is the sort of thing people wanted from it.

The performance slowdown on version 1.03 seems to be confined to certain hardware or windows combinations. I suspect it is related to the sound effects being sped up and slowed down, and this will be togglable in the next build, pending an eventual discover of exactly why that seems slow.  I’ve also been fixing tons of small Ui issues, and fixing some incorrect module data. The proper gameplay balancing hasn’t started yet, so if you think the game sucks because plasma torpedoes are too powerful 9for example), thats because I haven’t really got cracking on that yet.