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: