Category: game design

Gratuitous Space Battles right now is probably best thought of as a very complex, expanded and pretty versions of the space battle segments of a 4X game.

In other words, these are just battles, fought out between similar fleets with similar objectives, in the same way. It’s kind of like chess. In chess, the map never changes, the pieces are set in stone.

It takes a loooong time to perfectly design and balance the ‘sandbox’ that allows games like this to remain fun over a long period, nd its definitely my aim to get to that point. Howver, I’d also like to introduce a lot more variety and options to keep things interesting. I can always describe more ideas than I have time to implement but here are a few:

1) More unlocks, and modules in general. Although I sympathise with those people who dislike the whole unlock concept, I think there is some good middle ground. People who are very good at the game have lots of spare honor, and as long as there is nothing too game-brekaing, I think some extra, expensive modules might be a good idea

2) Scenario variety. Right now the ‘terrain’ options are quite limited. They aren’t really major in terms of changing tactics (25% range reduction isn’t really earth-shattering), and there are many more possibilities. Maybe a nebula where plasma weapons just do not work? or one where radiation levels mean that no fighters can survive?

3) Modding. There has been little in the way of formal mod support so far. I have some very primitive tools, instructions and general information on how to do stuff like add ship hulls. I should write this up and make it available.

That’s what I’m currently thinking of, and hope to add to the game. So if you think the missions are a bit samey and the ship design options too limited, this will change. If people have similar suggestions, please throw them out there. I love hearing peoples ideas.

I’m just uploading version 1.08 now. It fixes a numebr of bugs and minor issues, but the two big things in terms of gameplay and usability are these:
Firstly all of the variables associated with ship modules now have fairly extensive tooltips which explain their gameplay significance a bit more. This was needed because a lot of people just Escaped out of the tutorial windows, didn’t spot there was a manual and thus had no idea how ship design worked or the components interacted. Hopefully this improves that a bit, and I also stuck a big button on the main menu to launch the manual, although if you for some reason have no PDF reader on your PC, that will seem like it just quits the game. Almost all PC’s now come bundled with the bloated crapware that is Adobe reader (try this instead), and people who self-build their PC’s know about PDF readers anyway.

The second change of note is the introduction of ratable challenges. Basically I stuffed some more data in the challenge database, and you can now sort challenges by map (only for new uploaded ones sadly) and by difficulty or enjoyment. Once you finish playing a challenge you can rate it out of five for these two variables, and the average score is presented in the slightly nicer challenge browser. There is also no longer any ‘auto’ challenges, which were crap anyway, and you can instead now filter to see just your posted challenges, to see how many people have beaten your fleets :D

This is what it looks like:

I’m aiming to work today on configurable ship orders for each ship design, to make laying out those big fleets much less of a chore.

I have two big areas of gsb to fix. Challenges (adding features) and tutorial stuff. My straw poll of friends suggests that the initial mission and tutorial are what needs more urgent work. I was going to scribble this in my default ‘working.txt’ file, which is where I cache my brain, but I thought what the hell, why not just do it in public via the blog?

Current problems with the tutorial/learning stuff

• Nobody notices the manual, or reads it
• The timed ‘helpful’ popup windows are annoying and interrupt the game
• The tutorial windows are often ignored or deleted, and cannot be recalled once skipped
• The tutorial stuff breaks immersion, and interrupts what should be fun
• The game is initially overwhelming for some players, and they have no idea what to do or how to do it

I don’t want to spend weeks fiddling with this right now, but it’s clear this needs fixing. I think the first item is a lost cause, it’s a PDF manual so not easily integrated into the game, especially as I’m too stupid to have integrated a built-in web browser for stuff like that (which would be ideal). The only possible tweak would be to have the manual mentioned by a hint when the game is first run, or maybe in a loading-screen tip?

I think just ditching this silly idea of popping up windows when I notice someone hasn’t used a certain feature might be the best idea. Ideally I’ll come up with a less intrusive way to deliver that information. Maybe an easily ignored little scrolling message at the bottom of the screen? The problem is that ship design mode uses 100% of the screen on minimum res…

Maybe the tutorial windows could be a little flashing question mark window that you can click to get help, which the first time player could ignore? (until they realise they need it). That might work much better.

One of the major things I need to do is flatten out the learning curve right at the start. Possibly give the player some starting ships which *can* actually win the first battle, write off the first battle as a tutorial (or add a new ‘trainer’ mission with just one level of difficulty). I could disable  the ‘new ship design’ button at the start, and let the player just learn the basics of the deployment screen for the first battle. Battle #2 could come with a different tutorial window which pointed you at the ‘new ship’ button. If I wanted it REALLY basic, I could also grey out all of the ship orders here too…

In fact I wonder if that is 90% of the learning curve sorted? I guess that people got overwhelmed with setting up orders and designing ships? My idea is that people learn the game like this:

1) learn how to add ships to a fleet and position them (could be mission #1)

2) learn how to use orders to control ship behavior. (could be mission #2)

3) learn how to design new ships (this could be unlocked after mission #2 with extensive popup and tooltip help for that screen)

I think I’ll address the tutorial stuff with this plan in mind. For now, I’ll go through the current system and remove everything that doesn’t fit this ‘new model’.

Today was mostly spent playing the game, going through a lot of module data, reading a lot of forum posts, doing spreadsheets, and analyzing what modules and ships needing changing to make GSB more balanced. There were some really obvious screw ups that have been there for a while, such as frigate power supplies being too good, frigate crew modules being too small, and fighter torpedoes being stupidly heavy. Lots of this is now fixed and awaiting the next patch.

There has been press coverage here and there, not least here:

http://www.cyberstratege.com/magazine/2009/09/gratuitous-space-battles-en-direct-de-la-beta/

Hopefully that’s a good review, but my language skills are weak at best!

There is a ton of improvements I want to make to the game, mostly UI and online challenge-related stuff. I also badly need to ease casual players into the game much better than I currently do. This is all ‘on the list’. Plus there is a backlog of insanely cool features I’d like to add one day, maybe eventually there will be an expansion pack or something. I wouldnt mind if I was still doing GSB related stuff a year from now (providing it actually sells ok, obviously).

To people asking about GSB on platforms such as Impulse, the answer is *soon*.

I just uploaded version 1.05, and activated the auto-patching. This fixed a ton of things. The big stuff is code to prevent most of the hardcore ‘stacking’ on the deployment screen, by means of a snap-to-grid system for deploying ships (this has it’s quirks, but will be polished more later). That means fleets look more like this:

There is also a groovy new right click option for designs (mass deploy) which means you can add new ships with a single click. I also fixed about a  dozen minor interface niggles and made two big gameplay changes:

Repair modules now have limited resources, and when they run out, they stop working. This means they are no longer a long term equivalent to the infinitely recharging shields. In short, you can’t build indestructible ships just by stacking repair modules and armor

Escort orders now have variable range, meaning you can have closely knit groups of defending fighters, or squads that roam into enemy space only so far, which should mean a lot more tactical flexibility.

I’m well aware that I need to give the existing AI enemy fleets access to these new capabilities and improve their deployments as a result. However, that’s come secondary to making the game better balanced for challenges and for playability. I’ll be improving the general balancing, and all sorts of other stuff over the next few days. I might get around to a much needed beefing up on the online options too. It sucks that you can’t browse on-line high scores or stats, or easily track the progress of challenges you issued, or rate challenges for their difficulty. I have long term plans to get a lot of stuff like that in, plus all sorts of other goodies.

Here is some interesting coverage of the game over at good-old RPS

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/09/08/gratuitous-space-prattles/