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

Category: gratuitous space battles

Gratuitous Space Patch 1.57

Posted on September 5, 2011

Just made patch 1.57 live. it will auto update over the next 24 hours, and make it to steam once a day or so has passed without incident. It’s mostly stuff to support the parasites expansion.

version 1.57
1) New Feature: Support for longer race descriptions.
2) New Feature: Modding support for custom bullets textures.
3) Support for return-to-sender capability on missiles.
4) Support for more than one plasma missile in flight at any one time, per launcher (if configured for that module)
5) Support for flak guns (bullet modules with area-of-effect damage).

More work of the gratuitous parasites

Posted on August 6, 2011

I did a little bit of work this morning on the parasites, the GSB race I’m working on in my spare time (ha!).

I added two new weapons today. One is just a tweak, it’s  a plasma launcher that fires lots of small plasma torpedoes rather than big ones. The plasma torp is balanced as a weapon that isn’t colossally effective, but it is able to damage both shields and armor. It now has a rapid-firing version (parasites only).

I also added a ‘return-to-sender’ version of the guidance scrambler beam. This doesn’t scramble enemy missiles, but reverses them, so that they fly back and destroy the person who launched them. often there won’t be fuel for that, and I’m considering making it also reset their fuel. The beam is a one shot deal, you can’t reverse a reversed-missile.

All the ship hulls are done, it’s just balancing and code now. here is another screenshot of some cruisers:

I’m also working on gameplay and GUI for Gratutious Tank Battles. The GTB UI mockups look incredible, it’s just a looooong slow process of translating them into working code.

Gratuitous Parasites

Posted on July 29, 2011

The next expansion pack for GSB is taking a while, because I’m so busym, but I did get time to at least finalise ONE of the ships in the new race. This is the Parasite Anthozoa Cruiser

Some of todays achievements!

Posted on July 27, 2011

An edited list of stuff I checked off my list today:

  1. Added the ‘100,000 copies sold’ text to the GSB website.
  2. Implemented the new menu/GUI (non-battle) music for GTB.
  3. Carried out a major rethink and rebalancing of the way weapons work in GTB, with some research, and a lot of code changes.
  4. Changed the way the AI accrues supplies in ‘classic’ TD mode. It now gets them over time just like the player.
  5. Implemented new green grassy textures.
  6. Checked the performance of the new AI code.
  7. Changed all weapons so there are more shots, doing less damage per shot, and longer durations for beam lasers.
  8. Added a new, obvious drop-unit effect to show when the AI has placed a new turret.
  9. Made fog of war an option, at least for me when I’m debugging, and probably for singleplayer too.
  10. Fixed bug where the AI kept trying to put new troops on top of existing ones in a trench.
  11. Fixed bug where the AI never replaced destroyed turrets.
  12. Managed to not get sidetracked into finishing off the ships for the GSB ‘parasites’ expansion :D

Not bad for the first day back after holidays.  I also riskily (some might say) threw some of my savings at the stock market buying shares in renishaw, a company I’ve bought and sold before, whose profits just jumped, and yet the share price dived 10%. That looked like a buying opportunity to my eyes. Fun fun…

 

 

The unthinkable? GSB micro-transactions? or…?

Posted on June 24, 2011

I had plans to do another GSB expansion pack, with a new race, much like the Nomads.

And then….

GTB has basically taken over. Combine it with ShowMeTheGames (which isn’t getting enough attention as it is) plus lots of home-life related building-stuff, and I just am not getting enough sleep. But I do have

  • Lots of GSB players
  • An artist willing to make new GSB ships.

I like to maintain control of stuff, so farming out DLC production to someone else is probably a ‘no’ right now. The thing is, the time taken to make new damage textures, new weapons, balance them, and do the whole package would be a bit of a nightmare.

So I was thinking, especially on this day that Team Fortress 2 goes ‘Free To Play’, that maybe micro-transactions are the future, and I should just leap into the market for them with GSB. I could get new ship hulls made, and designed, and have them sold as mini-DLC. Of course, the problem there is that there are minimum credit-card fees that I get charged, so anything below $4 is basically a disaster in terms of profit, making the whole thing unviable.

So I am scratching my chin thinking how viable it is to just do a bunch of extra base-race ships for GSB and sell them as a $4 mini-DLC booster pack. New federation, alliance, rebel and empire ships, by the original artist. That would take fairly minimal work, compared to the design of a whole new race. But would it make any sense? would there be a market for it?

Would you pay $4 for a bunch of new ships? I know a lot of people would not be interested, but there don’t have to be thousands of people for it to break even.