Category: game design

I’m working on a GTB expansion, which means a lot of playing the game to balance out some new missions. In doing so, a few things have occurred to me:

1) Missiles are overpowered. I keep thinking their limited effective range (max-min) compensates for it, but it does not, because there is always *something* for them to shoot at. I may have to nerf them.

2) I really needed to have separate graphics for command/supply trucks and also for repair/command bunkers. This was me saving money, and it was a false economy. I need to fix it.

3) I may have been a bit too tight in terms of setting the supply-limits in battles. Constantly hitting them means you tend to loiter by the entrance tiles and not enjoy the full area of battle when attacking. They may need tweaking too.

There are also a bunch of graphical mistakes I made, which I should fix theoretically, but would involve considerable re-work by artists at unjustifiable expense. It’s such a delicate balancing act to know when you are ‘speculating to accumulate’ versus ‘throwing money away for no gain’. I suspect I *do* need to get a few more improved bits of artwork done though.

Games are never finished, you just run out of income and have to make something new :D

I’m working on adding this as an option for Gratuitous Tank Battles.  If you are red-green colorblind can you let me know if this looks better?

One day I’ll take a day off.  In fact, ideally, it would be in the caribbean. anyway…

I’ve been improving the graphics for the flamethrowers in GTB, which sucked. They look a lot better in video, but for now, here is a little image (click to enlarge)

As well as having a nicer effect, they also leave more obvious flame effects on burning troops, and also they set fire to any units like tanks etc as well, just briefly, which looks much better.

The other BIG news in GTB update land is a new feature which is something I hesitated to change, but I personally found frustrating, so I suspect a few players do too. In the current game, if you place infantry in a trench, maybe there are 12 free slots, so you get 12 infantry. If 11 of them get killed, you have to twiddle your thumbs and wait for the last one to die before you can put any more in that spot. Worse, you can’t actually deconstruct infantry. Sooo…

As of the next patch, you can drop infantry on top of existing ones in trenches/bunkers and they simply fill in any vacant slots. You can’t do it where there are no free slots, and you can happily mix and match infantry of different types, so you can have 8 infantry and 4 snipers in one trench, if it works out that way… I find this to be much better, and it just removes a tiny frustration in the game.

There are lots of other improvements coming in an imminent patch, I just thought I’d mention those two today :D

In other news, i stupidly ruined my 24″ iiyama monitor by pulling out the HDMI cable too hard. I pulled the whole socket out :(. I can’t cope with 1 monitor so immediately bought a second, but it’s 1900 x 1080 instead of 1200, which I preferred. Happily, iiyama will repair the old one for the cost of me posting it (£15.30) plus £15 inspection fee, £20 labour plus parts. (They ship it back free). A new HDMI socket can’t be more than £1, so we are maybe paying £51 for fixing a £150 monitor. The plus side to this is that a) it’s a 1200 res monitor which are rare now and also b) It means a perfectly good lump of metal, plastic and circuitry didn’t end up in landfill for the sake of a tiny broken piece of metal. I’d feel bad otherwise…

Nothing in life is perfect. Not even sheldon cooper. So it’s always worth taking a fresh look at stuff you have made and trying to tear it to piece and criticise the hell out of it. Fortunately, the internet is full of people, ‘professional’ or amateur who will tell you your game sucks, but often not in especially helpful ways, so I’m trying to tear my own game to shreds and find everything I can to criticise and improve. So I present to you my initial thoughts on everything that is rubbish about the GTB interface for battles (and obviously this acts as a todo list for the next patch…) Click the image below to enlarge

Let me know if you think of other stuff in the battle GUI (or any part of the game) that is unclear, confusing, or could be improved.