Category: game design

At last I’ve got around to adding laser turrets to the ships, so the beams don’t seem to blast out of just anywhere any more. I’ve also added support for multiple beam origins per weapon, and for them to be different to where the module is placed on the ship design blueprint. This leaves the blueprint looking functional, whilst allowing me to spam a few laser turrets on the bigger ships. It also means you can have a battery of lasers that all zap at once. Maybe eventually I’ll introduce minor delays or other cleverness to make them seem more independent.

There isn’t really a connection between the weapon type and the number of turrets you get with it, but it has no gameplay effect, and is purely visual. So some ships have a slot that links to multiple turrets, and placing a beam laser there will ‘spawn’ multiple turrets, whereas the same weapon on a different ship gets just one.

I don’t think it matters, there is zero connection between the two phenomena in Eve online, and it doesn’t seem to bug people. The main thing is, it looks cool, and I hope, somewhat gratuitous:

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.

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