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

Category: gratuitous space battles

Online integration fun

Posted on December 9, 2009

You know what’s missing in GSB?

Yes, yes I know you want a big 4x style campaign game built around it. ONE DAY maybe, but certainly not by the end of the week. One thing that is not quite so huge and unwieldy for a short term project is the area of online community.

Player A reads a forum post by player B, and decides to issue them with a challenge that proves their point that tribe frigates kick ass. Player B is oblivious, unless they happen to be browsing the challenges and spot they have a new one, from that player. Wouldn’t it be much cooler if every time someone issued a challenge to you, beat your challenge, or played (and presumably lost) your challenge, the game knew about it, and collected those messages for you to review at your leisure?

So rather than having to go to challenges, filter by personal and check if anything looks new, you could have a little spangly message popup saying “you have new messages“, on the main menu, and clicking there would tell you what’s new in your world of GSB.

This sort of stuff isn’t *that* evil to code, even though it involves server-side stuff. I already have it all up and running, UI and all, and the server is currently processing messages as I speak (although nobody has  a game version that lets them see them yet. But I can tell that a bit earlier, superneals sent a new challenge to knightsofni, for example.)

This will go into version 1.28. At the moment it’s system generated messages, so you just get pre-defined text messages notifying you of events. If people liek it, I think it would be awesome to be able to win a challenge, then type a message for the person you just beat saying “Ha!, i beat that fleet without even using plasma. I’ve responded with my winning fleet.” of course, you need to be able to block abusive / spam messages, but I’m working on that now. Besides, anyone spamming or being abusive will get the ban hammer :D

Nearly finished supply limits

Posted on December 7, 2009

The long talked about supply limits stuff is all done and nearly ready for the 1.27 patch. That patch has some other stuff like a challenge fix, increasing the taunt to 256 characters, some balance changes and introducing a hidden, not very supported ability to manually edit the maximum zoom out distance.

Anyway, as is usual, when I do my final sanity checks before uploading a patch, I noticed a bug. And then fixed it, and tested again…and again… five times in total. And it’s still not done. The final ‘gotcha’ was the code that displays what supply limits are in place for the current mission. I have to have support for restricting new modules from expansion packs, BUT, the game can’t do it’s normal freaking out if a module can’t be found. So that needs fixing and then testing again… hopefully tomorrow morning.

This is basically phase I of the usefulness of supply limits. I’ve added them to a single mission (gravity well). This means that they will also be  in place for new challenges issued on that map. Hopefully feedback on them will be positive

Phase II will be a new route for issuing a challenge, that will wrap into a basic scenario editor. The data in a scenario is effectively included in a challenge, so I don’t even need to change the challenge format. All I really need to do is code a UI that lets the player pick a map size, the spatial anomalies etc. I already have the supply limits editor done, which is a full screen pop-up dialog. My eventual aim is that people start issuing some cunningly designed challenges with supply limits that prevent the most obvious tank/spam fleets, and encourage some clever and aesthetically pleasing fleets instead.

Tweaking Supply Limits

Posted on December 3, 2009

I’ve been doing lots of stuff around the release of the Tribe expansion pack, so I’ve got behind on work for the next patch. I ended up taking some time to re-balance a few of the least-used weapons, and do some admin stuff, like tweak the challenges code so that it doesn’t show you older challenges in the list when newer ones are available. I also got rid of some really really old challenges. Currently the list only displays up to 1,024 of them, sorted in date order now. That was always enough in the past, now it’s not, hence the tweaking.

Anyway…

I was testing out the new supply limits stuff and trying to ensure it was user friendly at the deployment phase. One of the things I needed was a way to see how much of each supply limit was taken up, and the other was exactly which ships were using up those limits. My current solution isn’t perfect,but it’s a starting point. The supply limits window is on the right, so you can still your fleet. The individual module icon bars now have a feint progress bar as their background showing you how much of that specific modules supply limit is used up. If it turns red, you are using too many and the fleet is invalid. If you click one of those strips, it will highlight the ships in the fleet currently using that module so you can see where you are using them up.

My current thinking is that when I next patch the game, with this functionality included, I will put it in one of the existing missions, so people can see how it plays out (and of course modders will be able to use it). In the lonegr term, this functionality will form part of any meta-game or maybe a map editor that gets done next.

Gratuitous Expansion Pack Released!

Posted on December 2, 2009

Ok, so it’s finally here. The long awaited invasion of the space tree-huggers* is upon us: THE TRIBE!!!!!!!!! bwahahaha

Video!

I’ve never released an expansion pack for a game before, but I think GSB was the perfect game to do so. I have no idea how it will sell. I hope to at least pay back the art costs (which are not trivial). If it does that, then I’m a happy man. Basically this is an extra fleet for the game. In theory this would be moddable, but obviously this way other people will be more likely to also have the same fleet, and it uses the same super talented artist as the others so it has a consistent look. I’m sure there will be GSB players who will buy it immediately, and some who will not see the point, which is fine because that’s what DLC should be about: Options for the player. (someone make some DLC for Company of Heroes. Russian + Japanese + Italian armeis plz)

This doesn’t add any huge gameplay changing features. It’s not the direct-control or 4x meta-game expansion people sometimes suggest. It’s just mroe ships/modules/maps.

That’s not to say some big-ass future expansion that adds meta game stuff or whatever is not going to happen. Who knows where I’m heading next after Supply Limits?

I await the verdict of the interwebs with gritted teeth. At least if people complain about the price of DLC, ‘space armour’ sounds more l33t than ‘horse armour’ surely?

Check it out here:

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/tribe.html

*used in a jovial fashion. I’m a bit of a green geek myself, so I’m not having a go.

Supply Limits Screenshots

Posted on December 1, 2009

Here is some more information on how the supply limits stuff will be presented

This first image shows the choose mission screen, after I hit the new ‘supply limits’ button for a specific scenario. (The button only appears if limits have been defined). Only modules which are actually limited are shown in the list. The new window is highlighted in red.

This next screen shows the similar window on the deployment screen itself. The difference here is the game can tell you the current number in use, as well as the limit, and the fraction of supplies used is shown by a subtle highlighted progress bar across each item. One of them is red, and this indicates we are actually using too many of that item. (not possible by dragging, but theoretically possible by loading default deployments). The extra button at the top right is the way this window gets launched, and you will see on the far left that a module which has been ‘over-allocated’ gets highlighted red.

This final screen shows the details window for a selected module on this screen. There is an extra strip at the bottom now which shows the limit and the number of modules of this type currently deployed.

One side-effect of working on this stuff is that the window at the bottom left of the deployment screen, showing a ship type and its breakdown is now decoupled from the stuff above it, showing a specific ship’s orders. What does this mean? It means that when a ship cannot be added, and is greyed out, you can now click it and see its data at the bottom left without having to deploy one. I also changed the tooltips so that even when you can’t deploy a ship, the tooltip will now still tell you it’s name.
The eventual plan for this stuff is to have customisable challenge maps, so players can put together supply limits themselves and embed them in a challenge. I’m not quite there yet, but I’ll likely hold off a while until both features are done before patching.
In the meantime, there will be an expansion pack for GSB released in the next few days. woohoo etc :D