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

Category: gratuitous space battles

Variable squadron sizes

Posted on November 12, 2009

Here is the latest new feature heading for Gratuitous Space Battles:

Variable Squadron sizes, from 1 fighter up to 16.

In theory this means you could add 16 fighters and give each one different orders!, as 16 different units :D In practice I suspect it will be used to deploy smaller squadron sizes in cruiser and frigate escort duty, or to squeeze in a few extra ships when you need to use up the whole budget to beat the enemy. In terms of implementation, the squad size goes from 1 to 16 (the current default) and its accessed by right clicking the deployed ship, as a new option just for fighter squadrons. The costs and pilot requirements scale as you would expect.

This feature is in and working, I need to update the AI fleets in the singleplayer game to take advantage of this, and fight a few challenges myself to ensure it doesn’t unbalance the game badly, plus update the manual. Any suggestions or feedback on this feature is most welcome. It’s entirely optional, you can ignore it and just deploy squads of 16 fighters at a time as you do right now.

I made a list of 24 potential new features, and this one seemed relatively simple for a ncie gameplay boost in terms fo flexibility. I look forward to seeing how it is used after evrsion 1.24 is live. The other features are still in the list!

Dealing with mice

Posted on November 5, 2009

Take a trip far back in time when dinosaurs ruled the earth and Directx 5 was the very latest cutting edge thing. Back then, the hip cool and trendy thing to do with mouse input was to use direct input. I have a pile of programming books on how to do it, and you can enjoy the handy tutorials on capturing mouse input using directinput in the directx9 (and later) SDKs.

But…

It turns out that this is not the way to do it. In fact, there are even articles online now where Microsoft quietly admits that if all you want to do is normal mouse input, you should avoid directinput altogether. To make things worse, there are a ton of features to do with mouse acceleration, button swapping, double click speeds blah blah, that are all missing and need to be implemented from scratch (as I was doing….mostly)  if you use directinput for the mouse. How come I missed the memo on this?

Like a trusty old coder, I’ve been re-using my engine for a while, and although I have a nice shiny new graphics engine I was still using directinput for the mouse, which explains the somewhat erratic and crap mouse support in GSB. But that changed today, when I finally got sick of it, and ripped it out. The next patch will switch GSB to the standard windows cursor, even in fullscreen, and it will all work much better.

One day I’ll find time to sort out the keyboard too…

Release day at last

Posted on November 4, 2009

This morning I officially declared Gratuitous Space Battles released, which means there is finally a demo, the price is up a little bit, and people can review it or try it without worrying that the current version is not representative. This game has been about a year in the making, and taken a huge amount of effort. It’s also cost more to make than any other game I’ve made, and was original IP, in a genre that I’m not especially known for, aimed at the hardcore(ish) PC gamer during a recession. In short, everything about this project has screamed “Don’t do it!”.

However, I’ve always made the games I really wanted to make. GSB was originally called ‘Dictator’ and was a sort of spiritual successor to Democracy. Things didn’t turn out that way, and I think I’ve made the right choices. It started life looking like this (once the idea of spaceship battles took over)

And ended up looking like this:

Which I prefer :D

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who emailed me, posted on my forums, and here on this blog who gave me good ideas and good feedback, and encouragement to make the game as good as it could be. I should also point out that this is far from the end of development on GSB. If the game sells, I can keep working on it, and hopefully it will continue to evolve and get bigger and better for a while yet. More on that later.

In typical crap planning, the release of my most ambitious game ever has coincided with my birthday, and with me moving house (any day now). So I’m sat in the only room in the hosue not full of boxes, and with not much but the PC and this chair not scheduled for imminent boxing. (I’m moving on Monday). I am also very tired.

Please be understanding if the website is unresponsive today or the demo has a bug in it. I’ll fix both if they need fixing, as soon as I can. (AFAIK both are fine).

And go buy it now :D

Cheers

Update at last

Posted on October 30, 2009

It’s been a while since I blogged, because a lot has been going on. Firstly there was a lot of patching and changes and so-on involving Gratuitous Space Battles. Then I grew another year older (boo!) which involved going away for a day and playing with tanks. I ended up sitting in the gunners seat of a British Challenger II tank, which was surreal, awesome, and when the guide starts talking about its planned role in nuclear war, kinda scary.

Then… I went away another night to nottinghame game city, met up with various people from game dev that I’ve met over the years, and bizzarely took part in a panel-discussion thing with feargal sharky and phil oliver from blitz games. I’d link to a video of it, but I haven’t seen it on the web yet (pls post a link if you find one).

In between all this GSB got updated to version 1.20, which was buggy, and immediately afterwards today to 1.21, which I trust is less buggy.

That version is very very very close to what I hope is the ‘final’ release version of the game. I have a playable demo setup running already (although it needs work). Don’t panic, that doesn’t mean the game will not continue to get updates and improvements, and expansions blah blah, it absolutely definitely will.

Also, in about a weeks time, I move house and knowing the incompetence of UK companies, I’ll lose internet access for a few days. It’s a busy time!