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

Category: game design

Atmospheric Crop Circles

Posted on May 26, 2010

I think one of the things that makes a GREAT game better than a GOOD game, is that the great game has atmopshere. People in suits think you can buy atmosphere by spending money on FMV or lots and lots of artists, but that’s just not true. Thief 2 had AWESOME atmosphere, at a twentieth the budget of Oblivion. (guess).

One of the ways I try to ensure I get the right atmosphere into my game is to have constant reminders of the theme of the game in my head. Most of the time game development is just typing and scrolling through code, so it is easy to forget that its about lasers, explosions and battlecruisers going pew pew. That’s where headphones and multiple monitors come in. The vast majority of the time I’ve spent coding GSB has been spent either blasting the music from Star Trek or Star Wars through headphones (or out loud now :D) or having a DVD of some suitably epic space battle sci-fi playing in my extra monitor, like so:

It really helps me to stay focused on what I’m doing, and how it should feel. Good games are about feel, not polygons or features. Just Cause 2 makes me *feel* like an action hero, in ways that mere technical ability or hype or clever graphical effects never can. Thats a great feeling. The guys who do puzzle pirates have the money to take this a stage further and they do. Good for them.

The nearest I’ve got to atmospheric experiences concerning aliens today was visiting a crop circle nearby. Never seen one before. Here is me in the middle being silly

Here is the cicle taken by a proper photographer.

They are pretty dull at ground level tbh. I’m sure whatever aliens make them are not ferengi, because there was nobody selling hot dogs, or even a strategically placed big ladder that they could charge admission for, to get a  good view. “Twelve rungs up? That’ll be three strips of latinum please”.

Apparently it’s a maths equation, if the circle radii get converted to ascii. I bet it was those do-gooder vulcans.

Campaign Scrappage schemes

Posted on May 21, 2010

I’ve been slightly sidetracked recently by the release of the Swarm DLC on steam (few technical issues there) and some updates to the core game which will filter through in the eventual next patch. Meanwhile, slow but sure progress continues on the fun and games of the campaign game. Here is a current work-in-progress coder art style screenshot. I’ve just finished coding the ‘scrap ships’ UI so you can scrap ships to recover some of the money. You only get 25% of the value, so it’s a desperate measure rather than a simple way to refit the fleet. It might be useful for when you have damaged ships not worth repairing, or for when you capture enemy ships that don’t suit your current fleet.

In other news, I now no longer find the big clump of black birds that live in a tree in our garden to be cute. Bastard things woke me up at 6AM this morning. I suspect they are ravens, or maybe pterodactyls. Certainly not as cute as I recall. Jack now has my express permission to get the bastards. He’s been practicing on the smaller birds. So far it’s about 5:0 to him. Nature eh?

Todays Bugs

Posted on May 13, 2010

I found a bug today, after it was reported by a few GSB modders. I had done some cunning optimisation for my file handling months ago, where my Ini File loader code kept a file open during it’s lifetime in case another section from the same file got read soon afterwards.

It turns out that the C Runtime barfs if you try to open more than 512 files, under all circumstances. This is fine until you mod an extra 300 modules into GSB, then it just dies. So… problem fixed. Ideally my ini file code should be able to handle this better entirely, but thats for another time,

The second ‘bug’ is still underway, (point defence modules appear to not respond to damage, but in the debugger, they clearly do…) but its pointed me to a third one, that was also reported…

When a point defence beam shoots a missile, it may not work. The missile may be unharmed. In this instance the missile is still ‘claimed’ by the PD module until it dies, so no other PD module will have a second go at it.

I could fix this trivially, it’s just an oversight*. But would that make PD too powerful? It’s already prety good, albeit some of it’s thunder has been stolen by the Swarms Smart Bomb. It’s only going to kick in where you have a few incoming missiles and multiple PD modules. But that second chance to fire could save you from that vital pesky megaton missile, or Order nuclear bomb…

Thoughts?

*easily explained though. The neutron power surge generated by the point defence beam temporarily blinds the targeting mechanism of other PD modules from homing in on the positronic flux decoupler on the same missiles.


Edit: actually the PD bug is now fixed, making them fire much slower as a result, so I’ll fix the multiple-attempts  bug to compensate. it also turns out that the fire-Interval for guidance scramblers is misleading and not applicable, which explains its strangely high effectiveness, so that will be nerfed slightly too…

Campaign Game

Posted on May 11, 2010

Just a quick screenshot showing the state of the current campaign game UI. This is zoomed in on a planet to show the fleets there, the UI for building new ships and the list of facilities there. It’s all very coder-art and work-in-progress. I’ll likely not do the icons myself.

It is getting there though…

‘Fluff’ ships

Posted on May 9, 2010

Something I got coded today on the campaign game is purely visual fluff. I have a map with different planets scattered over it, and they are linekd by wormholes that only connect certain pairs of planets, so you can’t just hop all over the place.

To make it clear that those wormhoels are, in fact, wormholes, I’ve added a bunch of ships flying back and forth along their length. The impression I’m after is similar to a few scenes from Revenge Of the Sith, where you see obvious ‘space higheways’ above coruscant with lines of ships heading back and forth. I loved that :D.

Obviously, for the purposes of the campaign game, they are implied to be personal ships or merchant ships. The space navies are your department, these ships are just background fluff.

It took me about an hour to two hours to get it right. Just drawing a bunch of sprites going between two points is easy, but they had to work within the zooming and panning interface, and also have to scale with processor speed for smooth movement. Then they need variations in speed, and have different source images (in a texture atlas). Also, they need to fade out at extreme low zooms, so you don’t waste time drawing stuff that’s tiny. lastly, they need to be batched together as an optimisation so that there aren’t a bunch of texture swaps. It’s all those fiddly bits that take the time. Plus I need probably another 30 mins to put together decent tiny ship sprites for use as final graphics. Should be easy and fun :D

In other news, Democracy 2 is still just TEN DOLLARS, because due to pretty unusual circumstances, the UK STILL has no government, and I proudly boasted it would be 50% off until a prime minister met the Queen.

bah.

BTW, the competition to win that spaceship runs out tonight. I’ll pick a winner tomorrow, so enter now, if you haven’t already done so.