Category: game design

Soo… GTB has got some nice beta coverage in a lot of different places. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, but paranoid and delicate little chap that I am, I naturally get drawn towards criticisms or suggestions for improvement. One that I had not expected, (but in hindsight agree with) came from the rock paper shotgun preview which stated:

Because I’m not someone that ever pays attention to numbers or stats regarding game content (36 hours gameplay? for who? at what difficulty? at what speed?), I tend to have a bit of a blind spot to that topic in my own. To my mind, the campaign is just a teaser saying ‘here are some of the things you can do with maps’, assuming that even if 1% of the buyers ever made a map worth sharing, the number of maps would be huge.

However, it is fair to say that people don’t necessarily want to play user-made maps, and that obviously the person most fluent with the editor is me, so it makes sense to provide enough maps for people that user-made ones are entirely optional.

To that end, I’m happily chiseling away at the coalface making more maps. I’m 90% done on two new ones, a daytime snow map, And a nice evening desert battle.

I’m trying to be as inventive as possible. The snow map, for example has two main routes. One is short, but surrounded by concentrated enemies, the other is torourously long but the enemy locations are more scattered. So far, after many test battles, I can’t say that either route is an obvious choice, it all depends on your play style and unit choice.

I’ll almost certainly add more maps before release, especially once I get into the swing of creating them. The shadowmaps and the balancing take most of the time. So if you already bought the game, you have 8 campaign maps, and 2 more will appear in patch 1.04, hopefully this coming weekend. I’m hoping to add some more after that too, but I always try to be very conservative when it comes to promising stuff until it’s actually done.

If you bought / are considering GTB, how important is the number of singleplayer campaign maps to you?

A picture speaks a thousand words, and a video draws a thousand pictures?, or whatever… But here is a video of me explaining and showing how the new ‘divisions’ feature for Gratuitous Tank Battles works, and how to use it. I’m quite pleased with it. It will be in patch 1.003, which after a little bit of final testing will be release tommorow.

Like A dork I broke my wireless router today trying to install a new aerial booster. BAH. Tomorrow an urgently ordered new one shows up. There goes a days sales :( Plus hopefully my much wanted new desk, which is very English and wooden and cheesy and old fashioned, but it will suit my house, which a modern shiny thing would just look odd in. Anyway. Enjoy the video, critiques and comments most welcome.

There is one big usability failing in Gratuitous Tank Battles that I need to address. It’s something even as the designer that I notice mid-battle, so it must irritate a lot of players. It’s the unit deployment bar at the bottom of the screen. It works great with 10 or less units, and functionally, it handles hundreds, because it has a scroll bar and you can also rapidly zip through it using the mouse-wheel. But it has two issues:
1) It has no specific order to the units.
2) It shows you ALL your units, you cannot filter them.
I am investigating possibly strategies for improving the usability of it, maybe including some filtering options, allowing you to ‘hide’ units on it before a battle, maybe a system that lets you put together ‘armies’ of units that you can select pre-battle, I’m not sure yet.

More interestingly, I get the impression that hardly any players have realised that you can just mouse wheel anywhere over the bar and it will scroll. I obviously need to promote that more, but I think I have fallen foul of a popular designers dilemma, which is assuming the player thinks like I do. Family members always ask me how their DVD player / ipod / camera etc work, even though they have the manual and I do not, because they know I can work it out instinctively in seconds. I am a GUI ‘explorer’ and a usability geek. I am in the tiny percentage of people who have actually read ‘the design of everyday things’. I’m that sad.
What that means is, I need to remember that I am far more experimental and make far more assumptions and guesses about how GUI’s work that the player. I need to draw more attention to stuff like that.

A lot of people really liked the manual for Gratuitous Space Battles, and I’m conscious of this fact when working on the one for GTB. As with all complex strategy games, there is a ton of stuff to tell the player, and they will likely want to reference it after playing for an hour or two, in order to look-up or clarify stuff. It’s also a good place to put stuff like lists of hotkeys, or unit stat comparisons, although I probably won’t be doing the latter.

Some trendy designers would suggest that ‘a game that needs a manual is badly designed’. This is just silly. We don’t all want to play games as simple as Bejeweled, and sometimes, a separate reference manual is a good idea for a game that has real depth and a ton of features. I also like doing a manual because it means people can read how to play the game on their laptop, or a work PC, where maybe actually playing through a tutorial isn’t an option. Plus it means people who are really on the fence can read the manual before deciding to buy the game.

The manual is maybe half done. It’s mostly all there, but it will need some more images, some proof-reading, spell checking, and a second pass for actual humour and flavour text to make it more in-keeping with the blackadderish spirit of the game design. I might change my typewriter font to make it more typerwriterish, a tradeoff between authenticity and legibility. I like the idea of a 1914 army document that never got updated during 200 years of war. maybe the army spent all it’s effort on making more deadly lasers and none on word processors?

On the technical side, it looks like the server move went ok. Just quadruple checking it all before I turn off the old one. That still scares me…