Category: gratuitous space battles

A while ago I re-designed the post-battle stats screen for Ridiculous Space Battles. I was MUCH happier with this than the earlier versions and I loved the horizontal histograms for every weapon which showed not just how much damage they did, but how much was reflected or absorbed by each of hull, armour and shields. I think it was a vast improvement on what I had previously. However! there was much room for improvement.

The biggest issue was that the list of stats chosen didn’t seem to be that helpful. If your fleet was 95% frigates, why bore you with the ‘best’ cruiser and fighter weapons? I re-designed the system to show you more interesting key stats such as the most cost-effective weapon, the ship that was hardest to damage (toughest?) and the weapons that were in use the most (or least). These stats are way more helpful:

Although that was a big improvement, play-testing showed me that a key problem still remained (which is true of all auto-batllers), which was namely ‘How can I translate what I learn from all these stats into adjusting my deployment the next time I fight this battle? This is a big problem (and it was back in the Gratuitous Space Battles days), and I have experimented a lot and come up with a solution I am super happy with!

In hindsight, the solution is obvious. Give the player a way to view want went wrong last time, when they try the level again. In code terms, this was a ton of work, but it works!

So when a battle ends, after viewing the current stats (probably best thought of as stats-highlights now), if you then want to try the level again you have a togglable overlay over the deployment map which shows the fleet you tried last time, with a ton of stats for every single squadron showing how they did.

The coloured squares and the percentages show survival rates for each squad, and you get Survived/Escaped/Destroyed percentages as a tooltip, but click on any squad to see a pop-up with a bunch more stats, tabbed into defensive and offensive data.

And at any point you can use a hotkey (or the buttons at the top of the screen) to toggle from this ‘previous battle overlay’ to your placed deployment for your next attempt at a battle. This makes it SO MUCH EASIER to look at your deployment and work out what went wrong and why, and correct it for the next battle. It is also persistent saved-to-disk data, so you can come back to a failed mission months later and still see the battle stats from your last attempt.

I know the games development keeps taking longer and longer but its definitely getting to be a lot better as a result, and I would rather ship a great game late than a not-as-great game on time. Thanks for your patience, and for following its development! Since I took that screenshot, I have had a MUCH better idea for how to make that screen even better, and I’m working on that now. This means even more work, but its going to be awesome.

I have been a bit quiet on the blog front, but in case you were wondering, yes I am definitely still working on Ridiculous Space Battles! Right now I am thinking about the ship and fleet design for the campaign game, and this is forcing me to think more about the usability of the deployment screen.

For a bit of a history lesson, here is the deployment screen from the original Gratuitous Space Battles:

There are so many things wrong with both the style and the layout I do not know where to begin, but given GSB was the first auto-battler, there was both no competition, and no other examples to be inspired by. Anyway, one of the many bad things about this UI is those circles around every turret on every ship that were supposed to show the player the weapon ranges, but in fact just look like a confused mess. Here is my current version of the same screen in Ridiculous Space Battles:

I think its so much better… but specifically I am working on the range and fire arc overlays. They only show for ship(s) that you have selected, and one of the changes I have made is to color code them as red for short range weapons, white for mid range, and green for long range. Like *anything* in game UI design, there is no perfect answer here. Red for short and green for long feels right, as long range is generally good (assuming everything else is equal). Making mid-range yellow might be a step too far in mirroring those order strips to the right, so I decided to go with white…argghh…who knows!

The problems arise a bit once you have a bigger battle and with multiple ships selected:

Now the red is showing the combined overlay of the short range fire arcs for all selected ship weapons. Be aware a ship might have 7 different weapons, and could be in a 4-ship or 25-ship squad… Its a complex thing to visualise, but its getting better!

In addition to fiddling with this overlay UI, I have also been improving the ‘ship role descriptions’ that are shown as tooltips for a ship design. I’m basically approaching the problem in 3 different directions. Select a ship…and the overlay should show you its weapon ranges on the map. Select a ship-type at the top-left, and then hover over a weapon name, and you get that big tooltip (see the one for ‘Plasma Stream’ above), which lists everything, including range. If the range is especially low or high, it gets a colour (red/green) highlight. Thats true for shield and armour penetration too…

The thirds method is the mouse-over tooltip for the ship types in the top left ‘ship-picker’. The game analyses all ship types and gives them various descriptive tags (I call them Roles in code). Those might be ‘Mixed Range Weapons’ or ‘Anti-Armor’ or ‘SuperWeapon’, or a bunch more.

My goal is to be able to help the player remember which ship design is which, so they are not just blindly spamming down a bunch of ships and hoping for the best. Ideally you have some short range ships serving as tanks at the front, absorbing enemy fire and shooting down incoming projectiles, then deeper ranks are mid-range and long range, or ships with shield support beams. Choosing the right formation and deployment should be a big part of the game.

Anyway, thats what I’m working on right now. The list of stuff to do before Early Access release does keep getting shorter (I think). Anyway, don’t forget you can wish-list the game at https://store.steampowered.com/app/3607230/Ridiculous_Space_Battles/

Yikes, this has turned into a really complex and confusing beast. I am very happy so far with the improvements, but I need to publicly brainstorm the details. Simply put, the orders system in Gratuitous Space Battles was a mess, and I needed a much better one, PLUS I wanted to add new orders to take into account the new gameplay style of Ridiculous Space Battles.

In GSB there was a whole bunch of orders, and they all apparently pretended to work together to come up with an opinion on which ship a weapon should target. Orders are per SHIP, not per weapon, which frankly is a whole other story, but I think it would be stupid overkill to have the player assigning different orders to every weapon. My whole unique selling point is BIG fleets with LOTS of ships. Anyway, the original game had orders like Attack Fighters and Co-operate, but it was never clear how they all worked together.

RSB introduces three new orders entirely. Raider (race ahead of the fleet up to a given distance to engage enemies) which is used by Fighters, Last Defense, which concentrates fire on the enemy ships that have got the furthest through our lines, and Breakthrough, which is for punching a hole in enemy defenses, and only fires on ships right in front of you (or in that row anyway).

Here is my new current implementation:

So the big things here are categories, color coding and priorities. OH YES. To explain, this ship has one ‘Special’ Order, which is to engage enemies at 2 squares range. Thats a movement order, so independent of all the targeting stuff.

The next order is ‘co-operate’. Its one of a class of (blue) orders I’m tempted to call ‘Discriminators’ or ‘Tie-breakers’. There can only be ONE of these (Co-operate, Vulture, Retaliate, Breakthough or Last Defense), and essentially they are used at the end of the process to choose which out of a series of potential targets is picked.

The Green and yellow orders are Target Criteria. They describe a target size class or a defense status (shields up, or shields down but armor intact, or down to naked hull). These orders are special because they are in priority order. (I realize now I should show the numbers!). So when the ship decides who to shoot at, it first builds a simple list of all enemy ships in range and fire arc, that match any of those criteria. (You can delete one to make the ship NEVER target those ships). Once that list exists, it then goes through the target criteria from top to bottom seeing if any ships meet that criteria…

And this is where I have a decision to make…

I can either stop the processing once it has one or more targets, then pick the best using the discriminator OR I can then keep filtering down through the list as long as I have 1 or more targets and THEN use the discriminator. I cannot decide which. Are you confused? I suspect so:

Example 1: Using the above orders, I scan my target list and find 4 cruisers and 12 frigates in range. All of them have shields. Cool! So I stop there, and evaluate them all using Co-operate, firing upon the one that is the most under fire right now.

Example 2: I scan my target list and find 4 cruisers and 12 frigates in range. All of them have shields. The NEXT criteria is Fighters. There are none in my list so I ignore. The next is armor. All 16 have armor so again I ignore. The next is Frigates. Wait! only 12 are frigates, so I prune the list. The next is Hull, all check. The next is cruisers, none found. I finally use co-operate to evaluate which frigate to fire at…

Is this dilemma even making sense, let alone deciding on a system? Its very involved. My game IS a complex strategy game, but I don’t want to rely on crazily complex tutorials. Now to be fair, Gratuitous Space Battles had a completely opaque system that nobody understood and was poorly explained and it sold a bazillion copies, so maybe I am overthinking it. But I would like to do a MUCH better job… I know SOME players would be happy to literally write code to control this stuff, and might suggest I add conditional clauses and other complexity but I think that makes the game seem more like work and less like fun…

Looking at it now I KNOW I need to add priority numbers to those yellow/green strips. Maybe they should be called Filters now Criteria? Who knows. I may need to think about this a LOT.

By the way add the game to your wishlist :D Or pester a news website to cover it! Or share a screenshot somewhere you hang out. That stuff all helps :D.