Category: game design

Ok, I need some feedback on this, and I can’t shut up about it any longer. Here are my plans for multi player GSB, and they are going quite nicely in terms of being almost playable already…

GSB is a single player game with a number of scenarios each of which has a normal, hard and expert AI fleet to fight against. You will probably play each scenario several times, trying to reconfigure your fleet each time to beat the opposition. You will also gradually unlock new races, so there will be the urge to beat every scenario with every race eventually.

However, nothing beats going up against the brains of another player. The problems with a mutiplayer version are:

• This isnt a real-time game, so you would sit there for ages waiting for the other guy to design his fleet.
• Indie games dont have big sales, so finding people to play against is hard.

The solution is PBEM (play by email) but WITHOUT the email. Basically it works like this:

You load up a scenario as usual, having selected your race, and probably already with a big bank of pre-designed ships from battles against the AI. You probably have an uber-fleet that kicks ass against the expert AI already. You then click the ‘challenge’ button. This takes you to a screen where you type in the username of the other GSB player (someone you know, who has the full game), and a taunt to tell them how their pathetic space fleet will be ground to dust by your mighty lasers. You click send.

That uploads a tiny data file onto my server, where it’s stored in a database. The next time your friend launches the game, and clicks ‘refresh challenges’ he/she will see your challenge, with taunt in all its glory. He/she can then download that challenge file and play against your fleet in their own free time. Eventually, they should find a fleet that beats your fleet, and no doubt they will then challenge you back.

Obviously its possible to see how many of your challenges have been beaten, and to even track how many attempts it took. There are also tons of high score and metagame possibilities, as are the theoretical possibility of me posting ‘open’ challenges’ which get sent to everyone.

This is tons of work, especially for a net-coding n00b, but it’s in and working at the server side, I’m just tweaking client-side UI code to get it to work smoothly.

Thoughts?

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.