Category: game design

My recent design thoughts and today’s tweaks make it clear I needed a way to see visually that lasers were just bouncing off enemy shields and achieving nothing, so I added a sort of ‘bounce’ effect to the lasers (see video below). I didn’t bother doing any fancy maths for the collision reflection, it just skews off at a slightly random angle. Does this look ok? (also there is some quite cool shooting of rockets by a point defence laser going on in the second clip).

I’m having balancing issues with some of the existing game mechanics. One of the things that I use to differentiate weapons is their tracking speed. Some smaller weapons track fast but do less damage, and vice versa. Basically the tracking speed is compared to the targets current speed, and this gives some multiplier for the ‘hit chance’.  Obviously big cruisers are slower than small fighters.

So far so lovely.

The problem is that in general, you want your ships to position themselves at a certain optimum range, and pound their enemies from a distance. In the case of the big cruisers, that means move into range, sit there and go zap until you or the enemy dies. The problem is, the minute you sit still, tracking speed becomes irrelevant. This means that when fighting against cruisers, tracking speed is basically no big deal, and the weapon with the highest damage-per-second, range and penetration of armor/shields wins.

The solutions are many and varied:

1) Have an optional ship ai-behavior of ‘keep moving’ where your ship basically spins in circles at a certain range (clunky and difficult to get a reasonable turning circle)

2) Always assume the ship is at max speed for hit purposes (might look silly)

3) Introduce a new mechanic to compensate (maybe ECM resistance?) and ignore tracking speed for weapons aimed at the bigger ships.

4) Just make greater use of balancing the existing mechanics to still make the choices interesting

I’m currently drawn mainly to 3) and 4). Any thoughts?

I’ve been busy. The first thing to mention is that there is now a web forum for GSB here:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=19

That should allow people to let their opinions and suggestions and questions run wild, and keep things a bit organised. Feel free to post whatever thoughts you have there.

Today I’ve been doing some debug GUI which is handy for finding bugs, I already found and fixed a bug where ships didn’t reselect optimum targets correctly. I also redid the tractor beam graphic so it didn’t have one aliased edge and one straight one (needed to use two overlapping textures to get it right). Plus recently I totally re-jigged the sound system for the game so the positional sounds now pan correctly as you move the camera. Last but not least, I’m adding a system where you can have race-specific weapons. Initially you will have one race to play and need to unlock others, so I’m hoping this makes for better game play because:

a() you will initially be zapped by weapons you don’t recognise or know the exact statistics of and

b) when playing as one race, you will not have access to all weapons, so playing a different race will mean adjusting your tactics accordingly.

There is so much to do, but the game is coming along nicely.

I’ve been playing eve-online again for a few days, partly as research, partly because it’s l33t. Something that struck me was the insane complexity of the game. The sheer number of ship modules available is breathtaking, and this is a game that doesn’t revolve around them as much as GSB.

The level of detail of the modules is also very high. A weapon in eve has a silly number of statistics associated with it. I quite like complex sim games, so it’s reassuring to see that there are so many people happy to play a game that has that much involvement.

With this in mind, I’ve added one of my favorite space battle concepts, which is optimum range. For example, a cruiser beam-laser will have a range of 1200 meters, but an optimum range of 800 meters. The way I’m calculating it is to leave armor and shield penetration the same for the whole range, but damage done varies by 50%. So at range 0 damage is 50%, it scales up to 100% at range 800, then drops down to 50% at 1200 where it then drops to zero.

Is that realistic? maybe to some extent, most weapons in real life have an optimum and max range. I know my bow does, although thats mainly a matter of accuracy rather than damage done. (getting hit by an arrow is bad news at any range).

I think this will lead to much more intricate strategy, In theory, one fleet could sit at maximum range blasting away and doing X damage, out of range of their enemies guns. Closing to optimum range might deal more deadly blows, but would open you up to return fire.

It also means that there is real gameplay advantage to keeping your distance a bit, which makes the game look nicer and less cluttered.

Lets continue mulling over the space shields dilemma a little. I worry that my idea of concentrated fire taking down shields might be a bit too fiddly and non-intuitive.
I also worry that its too easy to just ‘uber shield’ a ship and laugh at your enemies.
So I conclude this (please let me have your feedback):

Shield penetration should be decoupled from actual shield strength.

What I mean by this, is a ship could have say 3 standard shield modules (for example). These modules would give the ship a shield strength of 60 (20 points per module). This means that ships blasting away would need to do 60 points of damage before they got through to the armour, and then the internals.

Right now, I take the shield strength and divide it by the size of the ship, and that gives me a shield penetration value, and and weapons attacking it with a lower shield pen value than this just bounce off. This means if I up the number of shield modules, the required shield penetration value rises.

What I’m considering is having the shields strength (hit points) be additive as now, but the shield penetration value is just the highest value of your shield modules. Or maybe their average.

So you could have configs like this:

• Ship A has 3 type I shields with a total strength of 60 points and needs >5 shield penetration to actually damage the shields
• Ship B has just a single type III shield. Its total strength is only 20 but it needs >8 shield penetration to do any damage.

Note, I’m talking about damaging the shields, not going through them. You can’t actually penetrate the shields until they are down (so far). My aim is to allow for some tactical flexibility. You could protect your ships against fighters just by having a single highly reflective shield module. But defence against bigger ships would mean you take penetration for granted (penetration is the wrong word really) and concentrate on brute strength of the shield itself. It also allows me to have small weapons that arent entirely useless against shields.

What do you think? Too complex? Thanks for your comments so far, I read all of them.