Category: game design

I was looking at the conversion rate for the GSB demo (The percentage of demo downloaders who buy) and thinking I could find a way to improve it. One of the pieces of common feedback about the game was that people had no idea whether they had made good choices or bad in terms of ships and weapons.

Obviously there are all the ship and module stats and the post-battle stats, but I was thinking that it’s a bit much on the first playthrough, and that maybe something more simple was needed to give instant feedback. So I’ve coded a popup dialog on the stats screen that basically gives you four stats, based on the amount of hull damage that ships and modules do:

Thoughts? I know there are some people here who tried the demo but didn’t buy. Would this have helped ease you into things a bit?

This was a weekend diversion, I’m back on campaign bugs now…

A lot of stuff in the GSB campaign UI is drag-and-drop based. For example, if you want to merge one fleet with another, you pick up a fleet icon and drop it on the other one. If you want to move a fleet you pick it up and drop it on the destination.

The trouble is there are some situations where that fleet has moved (and thus can’t move again) but you still want the ability to drop it on another fleet in the same location. That means I allow you to pick up an icon, but only drop it on a next-door icon, which is confusing. I change the icon color to show that it can’t now ‘move’ only be merged, and explain ti with tutorial windows, but it’s not really good enough.

I think I’m going to go for a two-pronged solution. Firstly I’ll restrict the distance you can move a dragged icon if it can’t leave the system, and secondly I’ll change the icon more drastically to have a big red stripe through it to show it can’t be moved right now. That’s still not a perfect solution, but it’s a step  in the right direction, which is always a good step :D

I tried out a competing space campaign style game today, which I didn’t get into at all, but that was entirely due to what seemed a clunky interface. I don’t want people to have the same view of the GSB campaign, so it needs a lot of work. Everything has to be super-intuitive. Lots of work to do.

In other news, we wanted quotes from 3 builders. We arranged 4 to come visit. Only 2 showed up, and 1’s quote was some sort of joke. I’ve now arranged a 5th builder. What the hell is wrong with these people?

I’m back 100% on the campaign tomorrow, I’m at the stage of doing tutorial text for it, then I need some complete run-throughs. Then maybe a pre-order beta release.

I’ve also been drastically improving the games memory usage. And also some baalnce tweaking. This is what I’m likely to be changing:

nomads:
Awazem loses its cost boost, gets 8% armour boost
Duwasir loses its armour boost, gets 10% speed boost
Majali reduces speed penalty from 22% to 12%
Abbadi gets an 8% armour boost
Nomadic dogfight laser damage increased to 8
Nomadic beam laser power usage reduced to 13

general:
guidance scrambler beam weight increased to 147
EMP Shield ecm strength increased from 66 to 82
All frigate armour maxdamageabsorbable increased by 20%
EMP Missile launchers, (both types) missile speed 25% faster. fireinterval reduced 10%, ecm strength increased 10%
Decoy missile launcher weight reduced to 70

order:
Limpet launcher limpetweight increased to 8.2, cost reduced to 110

Feedback welcome. More announcements soon, hopefully.

I spent some time today on a new race for GSB. It looks like I’ll release this pack before the campaign is finished. I actually had expected to have finished the campaign and have released it by now, but it’s much more involved than I thought, so I’m still working on it. Once I’ve finished complete bug free playthroughs as 2 different races, I’ll get some people testing it for me, then there will probably be a pre0order beta thing, then release. That is probably another month (best case) of work.

So in the meantime, luckily I have artwork for a new race all complete, and am working on the data and the balance. There is nothing radically different in the race in terms of gameplay yet, but the style is interesting. The backstory is that it’s a very very old race, a bit like the dwellers from The Algebraist (Iain M Banks). Over the years, they have rebuilt their ships from the salvage of their enemies, so you will see that their ships have some rebel engines, some order engines, and various other components. They are also the first race to have multicolored ships. I’m calling them Nomads, and they basically fight out of sheer boredom on their multi million year journey across the universe. They have a cool retro look.

I was lying awake at 2AM this morning unable to sleep, thinking about new weapon and ship modules for that race. This pack will be different, likely no new missions, just the raw fleets for you to use. I had originally thought no new modules, but I think I’ll at least add some variants.

A lot of the more interesting ideas involve a ton of code, which I’d rather not do when I’m so busy with the campaign, but there is plenty of scope for module variants that work within existing parameters. I keep thinking that a very long range sniper laser with high penetration but low tracking speed and low damage could be interesting. Hopefully I’ll do some work on it tomorrow.

I found this really annoying when playtesting the campaign, and I know people have asked for it before. I want to know if this is an improvement, before I release it in a patch. People were getting vexed because they often had 5 or 6 or 20 cruiser designs of the same race (for example) and the silhouette icons were no help in picking them, so they have to use mouseover tooltips to pick the right one, which is slow. So i have experimented with adding the (cropped) name of the design to the UI: (Please click to enlarge)

Old:

New:

If you play GSB a lot, you might think “yes, I need this!”, but I’d like to know if you think it looks a bit cluttered, or messy, from the point of view of someone just trying the demo for the first time.

Edit: I tried it with a smaller font. Better? or too small?

Newer!: