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

Month: August 2026

Challenge code and UI almost done!

Posted on August 26, 2026

So…I am still working on the online multiplayer(asynch) code and UI and UX for Ridiculous Space Battles, but progress has been pretty good, and certainly way quicker than the first time I attempted to do all this sixteen(!) years ago… So I am happy to say that apart from a few small things I need to fix, and a few minor things to add (like rankings and victory counts), the online challenge portion of everything is kinda in and done! Here is the current challenge list screen:

UI code is fiddly and takes ages, but what really took a while on that screen was the filtering and order sorting. You can sort by any column, which is pretty cool, and all the filters at the bottom work correctly now! There is a manual ‘refresh list’ button which grabs a new dump of all the challenge data from the server. Right now its super-dumb and just grabs the first 1,000 challenges from the server. The original game (Gratuitous Space Battles) was so popular that this would have been useless, and in an ideal world, where I get a lot of players, I maybe need to redo that so it multi-threads, and gets the ones that have changed only, and so on…but that is probably something worth saving for refinement during early access… Anyway here is a totally NEW screen:

This is what you get when you click on a challenge. It shows you the enemy deployment thumbnail (although their ship positions obviously get inverted when you hit play and fight against it), some data about it, the description and name entered by the challenge author…and today’s mornings work, which is the list of challenges that were issued as a ‘retaliation’ to that challenge.

So a ‘challenge; is basically a player designed fleet, formation and orders that is designed to beat all opponents. It gets uploaded to my server (its only a 10kish text file) along with a small jpg of what the deployment screen looks like. Anyone and everyone (including the challenge author) can then design a fleet and fight against that challenge. If you WIN against it…you see an extra button on the game-over screen that lets you submit your victorious fleet as a ‘retaliation’. Here is what that currently looks like (It might be easily missed I think…)

That gets attached to the existing challenge, with that challenge as its parent. These are the challenges you can see in the ‘retaliations’ list above, which are normally filtered out. You will be able to hit ‘replay’ to watch the two fleets fight, and the idea is that you get to see how an enemy managed to beat you.

Now this is just my first go at the UX and gameplay for this, so it will likely evolve. Right now if you win against a challenge with an amazing victory, there is no way to break that challenge out into its own fresh challenge, and maybe I do need that. And I definitely need to put in a voting for difficulty and fun system like I had with the original game. But its progress! and eventually I’ll get back to working on less UI code and more awesome battle stuff like this screenshot:

Anyway… I signed up the game to be in the next NextFest with a demo, so I have a hard deadline at last. Kinda scary. But if this sort of game appeals to you, please add it to your steam wish list using the widget below:

Challenge UI for Ridiculous Space Battles

Posted on August 19, 2026

If you played the original Gratuitous Space Battles game about 500 years ago, you will recall that the online challenges were a very popular part of the game. If not, let me explain: GSB was the first autobattler, so its a game where you set up a fleet of space ships (that you designed), give them orders, and then use that fleet to defeat the enemy in a mission (which I called a skirmish) that was designed by me (the developer). HOWEVER, there was also the option to just design a fleet that you thought was a good all-rounder against all foes, and submit a ‘challenge’ to another player (or everyone) and let them fight against your fleet.

To do this, there was an online system where you logged in, and designed the fleet, typed a ‘taunt’ for your enemies, and submitted that challenge. It got stored on my server as a small text file, along with a small thumbnail preview image showing the fleet formation. Other players could browse available challenges, download them, and enjoy designing fleets to beat them. There were ratings system, message systems, and ability to view all of the fleets that were sent to battle against your fleet. It was so cool, and so popular, it crashed the server. The challenges were stored as individual files, and there was something silly like 500,000 of them (or more), and the whole back-end basically collapsed eventually!

So lets not let that happen this time eh? (hardly a risk, as I doubt this game will be as popular).

Anyway, I am re-coding the whole thing from scratch, like I have done for the whole of Ridiculous Space Battles, so it means completely re-thinking the UI, the UX, and the back-end code. The previous layout of the challenge browser looked like this:

Which has not aged THAT badly, although it certainly does not fit the more clean and white-space loving UI of the new game. The original game went with an ‘industrial physical’ theme for the UI, and that feels very 1990s to me now. The new design currently looks like this:

A bunch of stuff has changed. I am now listing the challenge ID, and also a title as well as a description. I do not have difficulties in there yet, or ratings for fun, but I might include that again. The big problem is getting the balance right between ‘I have a lot of information to display here’ and ‘do not look too cluttered’. This is something I struggle with a lot in design, because I feel like my tastes are the opposite of most web designers and game designers these days.

I am an autistic, numbers-obsessed data-loving geek who loves nothing more than a super-complicated dashboard of data. (Its a miracle I only worked on the software on trading floors and did not become a trader myself) This means I am pre-disposed to a data-rich UI layout. But these days its apparently ILLEGAL to update any software without saying its a ‘cleaner’ look, which means that the whitespace has gone from 90% of the layout to 95% of the layout. Absolutely every ‘designer’ seems to assume the only UI in the universe is a mobile phone, and the only customer is someone who is mentally incapable of seeing two pieces of information on a single screen. By Kahless I hate this trend… but anyway, nobody gets to tell me how to design my own game, so why do I care :D.

Anyway, there is a lot more to do. I have a different UI almost complete for actually submitting a challenge:

…but I still need to do the code that downloads the challenge from the browser, and then launches the deployment screen with it as a battle to be fought, and resolve all that at the end (Telling the challenge there was an attempt, and if it was a victory… logging what the attempting fleet was, etc). I also need to stress test everything, and set things up so you cannot create multiple users etc etc.

Doing all of that means writing a bunch of web client code (I use the WinInet win32 API) and also server code in PHP and SQL. This is where I have found working alongside Claude (Anthropic’s AI) has been great. I do NOT (yet) use ‘Claude Code’, but what I am doing (with a £15/month sub) is occasionally asking for Claude to write some php, or some SQL or an WinInet function for me, that I then read through and check. This, in my opinion is a great way to use AI to make you a more productive coder, without worrying that its doing random stuff. I use Claude very sparingly to write general C++, but for this part of the game, I’m using it a lot.

Why? Because frankly I do not enjoy SQL or PHP and am not an expert. I can code in C++ with my eyes closed (you would expect that after 29 years right?), but I have written very little php or SQL, and this stuff is web server stuff so its DANGEROUS. If I screw up the .exe, the game might crash, but screwing up database code and php could let someone hack the server and wipe things. I REALLY need expert help on the php/sql stuff, and Claude certainly seems to be amazing at this. FWIW I use Opus 4.8 (High) right now. Anyone who has used SQL will appreciate being able to say “Write me the correct SQL to do this…”.

Anyway… things are progressing! And I hope to actually have the game in a shippable (to Early Access) state around October at the latest. All I have left to do is this challenge stuff, then a bunch of ship designing and fleet designing for the levels and campaign (already done, but definitely need another pass), and a tutorial, and then its basically very playable. Early access will hopefully be a period of optimisation, any bug fixes, and responding to player suggestions about balance, gameplay tweaks and new features. I think I *am* just going to re-use the GSB2 music for this game, and all of the art is done, so I am not waiting for anybody else (and this is proudly a solo project anyway).

If you want to be notified when the game is finally released, you can add it to your steam wish-list using the widget below, or maybe bookmark (and share!) the games website link. Thanks :D.