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

More Waffle about Spaceship Shields

Posted on May 5, 2009

Lets continue mulling over the space shields dilemma a little. I worry that my idea of concentrated fire taking down shields might be a bit too fiddly and non-intuitive.
I also worry that its too easy to just ‘uber shield’ a ship and laugh at your enemies.
So I conclude this (please let me have your feedback):

Shield penetration should be decoupled from actual shield strength.

What I mean by this, is a ship could have say 3 standard shield modules (for example). These modules would give the ship a shield strength of 60 (20 points per module). This means that ships blasting away would need to do 60 points of damage before they got through to the armour, and then the internals.

Right now, I take the shield strength and divide it by the size of the ship, and that gives me a shield penetration value, and and weapons attacking it with a lower shield pen value than this just bounce off. This means if I up the number of shield modules, the required shield penetration value rises.

What I’m considering is having the shields strength (hit points) be additive as now, but the shield penetration value is just the highest value of your shield modules. Or maybe their average.

So you could have configs like this:

  • Ship A has 3 type I shields with a total strength of 60 points and needs >5 shield penetration to actually damage the shields
  • Ship B has just a single type III shield. Its total strength is only 20 but it needs >8 shield penetration to do any damage.

Note, I’m talking about damaging the shields, not going through them. You can’t actually penetrate the shields until they are down (so far). My aim is to allow for some tactical flexibility. You could protect your ships against fighters just by having a single highly reflective shield module. But defence against bigger ships would mean you take penetration for granted (penetration is the wrong word really) and concentrate on brute strength of the shield itself. It also allows me to have small weapons that arent entirely useless against shields.

What do you think? Too complex? Thanks for your comments so far, I read all of them.

Shaders, and then on to game data and weapons

Posted on May 4, 2009

I spent the weekend mucking around with pixel shaders. I’ve not used shaders before, and tbh, the documentation for such things assume you already know how they work, which is insane. I was originally hoping to get some shockwave distortion effects in for ship explosions, and although I got it working, there are some artefacts I’m not happy with. I might still use shaders to do some simple stuff like tinting the whole screen certain colours in some of the nebulas (I think it looks kinda eerie). Of course, thsi kinda stuff will be optional for anyone with older cards.

So this coming week I’ll be turning my attention to game play balance issues and getting some proper data in there. I need to knock up a few decent, balanced enemy fleets to fight against and check the game mechanics as they are. My concern right now is that putting a ton of effort into shields and armour may ‘trump’ everything else. A small proportion of shots always penetrate each (lucky shoT!), so they are not absolutes, but still they are probably too beneficial.

One idea I had was for shields to operate only under certain ‘loads’. So say we have a shield with a strength of 20, and its hit by a laser beam with penetration of 11. That beam won’t make it through, which is fine, but I was considering allowing multiple beams at the same time to ‘overload’ shields.
So if you had simultaneous beams of a strength of say 40, all hitting a shield at once (or over some short period) they would knock the shield out entirely for a second or two. That would mean that large groups of frigates with relatively low power lasers could still take down a cruiser, despite its shields if they concentrate their fire.

Right now you have a damage and a penetration value for each weapon, so you might have a weapon with massive shield penetration but tiny damage, which always damages the shield strength a bit, or a weapon with tiny penetration and massive damage, which is easily deflected by a shield, but if it isn’t deflected, does major damage.
Hopefully a wide range of options on equipment like this will lead to the emergence of a ton of interesting ship designs. Maybe :D

New Gratuitous Space Battles video…

Posted on April 30, 2009

I think it’s about time to show people where I am in terms of how the battles look in GSB, although lately I’ve been working on website-integration stuff rather than the battle scenes themselves. This short video gives you a  general impression of how some of the larger scale battles look. You can also see the bits where I play about with the playback time, which is great fun.

Although GSB is really a game about strategy and planning, I know people will judge it at a first impression from how the battle scenes look, which is pretty inevitable, so I’m very open to any suggestions or criticism. The pre-battle configuration and ship-design screens are still a work in progress so I won’t be showing video or screens of them for a while. Everything works, but the exact way in which the GUI will be arranged needs some fiddling, and all of the data is pretty placeholder, so I probably have some hugely unbalanced stuff in there right now.

I’m quite please with how it looks though. If you have a youtube account, please post a motivational comment for me :D

Racial and Ship Bonuses

Posted on April 29, 2009

Something that went in yesterday, but I haven’t put final data in for, is bonuses for individual ships. The actual ship designs are handled by the player (although the game ships with one sample design for each hull), based upon a range of ship ‘hull’s which determine how the ship physically looks, it’s size and base cost and base power production.

The thing is, given that frigates are roughly the same size as each other, I need reasons that a player picks frigate hull A instead of B, etc. So that is where ship bonuses come in. There are currently five different bonus types, Shields, Armour, Integrity, Speed and Power. So if a ship has a 20% power bonus, any power plant modules on that ship produce 20% more power. The Integrity bonus increases the hit points of every module on the ship.

This system us augmented by additional ‘racial’ bonuses which I’m applying to every hull in a fleet, so all the Alliance ships are getting a 10% armour bonus, for example. Hopefully this means that the different races will tend to use different tactics, and play to different strengths.

The individual ship bonuses will encourage the player to pick specific ships for a task, so one frigate might have a big power bonus, and thus be a good choice for beam lasers.  Another might have a speed bonus, and thus be more use for flying out first to intercept the first wave of enemies, and so on. It also means that a player who prefers armour over shields will tend to pick specific hulls within a fleet. In theory, it also means that when you see the enemy fleet coming, you might eventually get a feel for which what strategy he has gone with by looking at the ship choice (you can’t see the module load-out of enemy ships during battle).

This is the current theory and hope anyway, I haven’t spent enough time configuring fleets and playing full battles yet to get it all tweaked.

Splines and how to sell GSB

Posted on April 26, 2009

I’m looking into using some splines for a few things in GSB. The thing is, I need super-fast splines, which I haven’t found yet. Still… it’s my task for the day.

I’ve been reading more and more about the whole piratebay trial and peoples attitudes to it, and their attitudes to intellectual property and copyright. I’m a strong believer in IP and copyright. I’m glad they exist, because they are what enables people to make movies like Star Wars and TV series like Star Trek. I’m glad we have those things.

But increasingly it seems like it’s the ‘general consensus’ that copyright is somehow evil, and that people should have the right to copy anything they want for free. I find this really sad, because there are only two alternatives for me in the future:

1)Use some really harsh-ass DRM to try and force people to pay for the games rather than pirate them. or

2)Somehow engineer all my games so they are based around being on-line to play them, or micro-transactions.

I’ve always lied the idea of micro-transactions because I believe they give more freedom and options to both the gamer and the developer, as long as you can’t ‘buy’ an advantage in a multiplayer game. However, the idea of designing a game to be always-online annoys the fuck out of me. A lot of people have flaky web connections or game outside or on the train, and it also means I have all those people hitting my server all the time they are playing. Plus it means doing a ton of web coding I don’t especially enjoy.

Ironically, there *is* a lot of really cool ways to integrate GSB on-line, which I have at the back of my mind, and would probably do anyway if I was more familiar with web coding. Unfortunately, I’m now looking at this sort of thing as essential and inevitable because I just don’t think you are going to be able to sell singleplayer games on the PC within a  year or so. Stardock recently discovered that even original PC strategy games without DRM get pirated to oblivion, and supposedly stardock are the good guys.

I like singleplayer offline games. I just wish our friends in sweden and their pals hadn’t done such a good job at making that whole genre almost unsellable :( Nice work guys…