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

Campaign Encounters, Patch 1.37

GSB got patch 1.37 recently. It did some weapon-balancing, plus some bug fixes and new features, like that new post-battle stats stuff I talked about a lot on here. It also increased the variety of ship debris, a side effect of preparations for an eventual new race.

In addition to finally getting that sent out, I’ve been doing campaign stuff. The map now looks like this:

Which is very similar, but those tiny icons are my placeholders to show facilities at each ‘encounter’ (basically each planet). The current types of facility are as follows:

  • Repair yards
  • Factories
  • Shipyards

The factories and shipyards come in 3 flavours. My current thinking is that the factories generate cash each day (real world day) if they are under your control. The repair yards let you fix your ships (rather than letting you do it regardless of where you are) and the shipyards let you build new ships, of a class dependent on the shipyard (Only the best yards can construct new cruisers).

I have all the code done to place these things, and load and save their data. The actual facility code to generate cash and the code that restricts or enables shipbuilding and repairs isn’t done yet. The plan is to have a game thats more in-depth than GSB was in its vanilla form, but nowhere near as detailed as a normal 4X game. There are plenty of 4X games already, I’m trying to do something different, by making the battles the focus, rather than the resource-gathering.

And yes, this expansion has mushroomed into serious feature creep. Typical…

Now I need to go pour some wine so I can enjoy the first ever political leadership debate in UK history. In 30 minutes time…


8 thoughts on Campaign Encounters, Patch 1.37

  1. I am curious about the new campaign…
    That paid or free question is a good one. If Cliff thinks that he has already reached the maximum number of license he will ever sell, then is only way to get return on the time he spends is to take it from those who already have the game. Which means a paid expansion.
    If he thinks that there is still a big potential to get new buyers, then updating the game for free might be much better to the commercial point of view (as well as strengthening the fan base, happy to get things for free).
    A third solution would be to release an expansion at the same time as the free update : the fans, happy to receive a new free toy to play with, might be much more keen to reward Cliff and buy the new race. That’s the route that Arcen Games took with AI war 3.00 and its expansion…

  2. Cliff will correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty certain that the campaign system will be a free upgrade for all owners. I don’t think it’s an expansion.

  3. As to paid or free – I’m happy to pay for the new content. Developing the product is clearly not trivial, and I suspect you are now paying more for your GSB back-end server than before.

    This leads to my question – will the game be playable offline? I hope that GSB will remain fully playable regardless of the status of my network connection or your server.

  4. In order to make it playable offline, Cliff will need to make sure the time-based features of the campaign are calculated off the computer clock and not off the server clock. That way, you could play it offline but when you go online with the game later the server could compare times on your computer and the server time to check to see you hadn’t fiddled the stats. Am I making any sense here? It’s late where I am. lol.

    This is going to be an amazing expansion, Cliffski! :D

  5. Just want to say that incorporating “real time” in a turn based (kinda) game is dangerous. I look forward to seeing how it pans out, but see room for disliking something that does not allow me to separate the timescales of playing a game from running the rest of my life. Just saying :P

    Cheers,

    GH

  6. I strongly believe in paying for the campaign addition to the game. Here’s a government budget style, figure shuffling, example:

    Make the campaign another DLC for, say, 5 pounds. And reduce the price of the main game by, say, 4 pounds. This increases the attractiveness of the main product, acquires more money from existing owners who purchase the new DLC, and, for new buyers, incentivises the purchase of a selection of DLC with the 4 pounds saved on the core game price.

    Regarding your previous post further down. It seems to me that not having supply limits in the campaign will be fine. If the server selects a challenge that has supply limits, then the limitations should only apply to the challenge creator’s fleet. That way we receive a wide variety of self limited fleets to face. The campaign player has entirely different limitations to deal with.

    For example: The server selects a challenge that bans all armour. The creator had fun posting the challenge. The campaign player has fun smashing a fleet that happens to have no armour penetrating weapons – since the creator already banned armour in his challenge and thus wouldn’t have equipped such weapons. And everybody has fun.

  7. I love this idea. For the amount of work it looks like it required, it will probably be a paid x-pack. Which I will happily pay for. Quick suggestion: you could have it so the player unlocks brand new modules by conquering certain planets. It would add a deeper strategic element to fleet movement.

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