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

Category: game design

Alien races

Posted on March 17, 2009

I’m starting to get artwork for the second of four ‘fleets’ for the game. What this means is that it’s time to organize in code and data which ship belongs to which species.

Because this is a game about gratuitous space battles, I could go two ways:

1) I could devise very tongue in cheek backstories for each race, I was thinking of maybe having a race of brutal aliens who are psychologically driven to violent warfare due to the number of apostrophes in their names etc.

2) I could drop any pretence at giving a damn about backstory and call them generic names like “The Alliance” “The Rebels” “The Federation” “The Empire”. Etc.

I’m also toying with the idea of a random space race name generator which names your four races on first install, so that you have different names to them from everyone else.

Ho hum.

Deployment Interface

Posted on February 24, 2009

I’ve been redoing the deployment screen for the game today. I’m a bit unsure of how this bit should work. basically the flow of the game is this:

  1. Select Scenario
  2. Select ships to form a fleet for this battle (with limits)
  3. Deploy ships in formations and issue basic orders
  4. Run battle

The deployment screen is basically where you say “The Enterprise should get no closer than 5,000 meters to the enemy cruisers and blast away, while fighter wing 3 protects it, meanwhile bomber squad 2 will charge in and attack the enemy frigates”

So you need to do lots of fiddling. The current interface is shown below (click to enlarge)

The fleet is on the right, you drag them onto the map to position them within your deployment zone (light rectangle). eventually, approx enemy deployments will be shown on the map too. The sliders on the left is where you adjust the rules of engagement for each ship. This is all very fiddly because do I allow you to set multiple waypoints? And do I make the maps bigger so positions are more tactical? if I do, the ship icons will get horribly small on minimum res (1024×768). Do I abandon support for 1024×768? or allow this screen to zoom or scroll?

hmmmmmmmmmm

Better Shields

Posted on February 17, 2009

I spent part of yesterday and today working on the shield effects for Gratuitous Space Battles. The old effect was shit, but it was only placeholder. It was just a simple alpha blended sprite that draws over the ship, fading in and out as the ships hit like this:

There was a lot wrong with it. firstly lasers seemed to shine through it, secondly there was no feeling that the ship got hit from a certain angle, and there was generally not much pizzaz. The newer version is better but still needs work:

Now I have the incoming laser fire stopped at the right place, plus the shield itself has 2 layers, a feint all over effect, and an angled blast front image which faces the point of impact. I think it looks lots better. What I don’t have yet is any sparks or particles rippling out from the impact point. A simple particle shower is easy, but ideally the particles would ripple around the shield in a realistic spherical sense. I’m not sure how easily doable that si without doing it all in 3D, which is overkill.

Right now I’m working on spaceship breakups on explosions so I’m taking a break from the shields stuff.

Excellent iphone game

Posted on February 15, 2009

I don’t even HAVE an iphone, but I’m lucky enough to have played this:

http://www.ancient-workshop.com/

On someone else’s. It’s excellent. If you are one of those hip trendy kids with an iphone, you owe it to yourself to get it immediately. It’s probably the best new puzzle / thinking game mechanic I’ve seen in ages, and the polish and presentation is just superb.

It’s a puzzle game where you have to get a frog from point A to point B by moving his legs from one water droplet to the next. If you think it sounds straightforward it isn’t.

The guy who made it taught me how to code properly, and he really knows his stuff. Given the quality of this game and the amount of drivel currently on iphone, it’s CRIMINAL that this isn’t yet the #1 selling game on there.
Seriously, give it a go.

Re-jigging the ship modules

Posted on February 12, 2009

Tomorrow I’ll be stroking my chin a lot and rethinking how the modules that make up each ship are put together. I’ve got quite a long way into the game with the current system, but I have a few thoughts I need to elaborate on.

Firstly, I think I’ll add a crew requirement, and maybe a heat one too. Ship modules currently have a financial cost, a weight, a hitpoint value (strength) and a power requirement. I think it needs a little more complexity so there are some interesting choices in module loadout for each ship. I don’t want it too complex, but it can’t be too simple and a no-brainer either.

Secondly, I need to think about the number of modules per ship again. Currently they come in three sizes, for the three ship sizes. The downside of this is that I can’t currently have big cruisers with one huge fuck-off mega-gun and ten small anti-fighter lasers. I’m considering a hybrid system where you can stick a few fighter or frigate sized modules in extra slots on each cruiser. I’m not sure about that.

I’m also talking to some artists about doing spaceship sprites. I don’t think my coder art is good enough. I also finally got the GUI and code for escort orders done, so fighters can be set to stick close to bigger ships and defend them from enemy bombers.