Category: gratuitous space battles

I’ve been considering a few changes to the way stuff is unlocked in GSB. Currently, winning a game with a small fleet earns you honor (based on the margin between your fleet cost and the budget) and you can spend that honor unlocking new ship modules.
In addition to that, you start the game with just one unlocked race (The federation), and you unlock an extra race when you beat every mission on normal, then another at hard, and another at expert.

There are many problems and potential solutions

Firstly, you have to play every single mission before you get to choose a new race, and I suspect people may be sick of the federation as a playable race by then.

Secondly, the survival missions don’t count towards this, which is hard to explain.

Thirdly, some really l33t players earn tons of honor easily, and have nothing to spend it on.

So I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and reading peoples views on it, and I’m still slightly on the fence about how to improve it. My gut instinct is that I should roll a whole bunch of other stuff into the current honor-unlock system. Right now, missions get unlocked by beating the previous mission, and when you unlock a race, you get all it’s ship hulls at once. I could easily make all this unlockable too, and could scale the current unlock prices to compensate for it.

That still gives me the eternal problem that some real hardcore players can unlock it easily, and there is a danger that casual players are stuck unable to unlock parts of the game that they have, after all, paid for.

Ideally, the game would find some cunning way to scale honor so that this doesn’t happen, effectively giving away some bonus honor to any players that get really stuck. OR, I could add some totally superflous crap that can be unlocked with excess honor by the hardcore (maybe slightly different ship hulls, with no gameplay implications, or something else visual, maybe an icon for their profile name on submitted challenges?)

Anyway, it’s not an easy decision.

I’ve decided to improve the challenge browser for the game before I release it. It looks a bit crap right now, and I’m currently thumbing through a bunch of server browser screenshots from other games to get inspiration.
So far my fave is this one: (overgrowth)
I wish I had a nice html style rendering UI that made this easy. Doing a whole game this size on your own is insane.

“Determinism is the view that every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.”

That’s what wikipedia has to say. In terms of gsb determinism would mean that if you field the same fleet twice, against the same enemy, then the result will be exactly the same.

This isn’t true.

I wish it was, as do a few GSB players who are doing great things with tournaments. In fact, if I knew that I could make the game work as well as it does now, but be deterministic with a weeks work, I’d do it. Sadly, the reasons why it is not deterministic go deeper than that. I spent most of today experimenting with making it work, and I never got past 6000 milliseconds of a big battle before losing synch. (Yes I know all about random seeds and how to do it. If you saw how much code is the game, you’d see the scale of the problem :()

Fundamentally, the game is not frame-rate independent in terms of simulation calculations. (although it is scaled so as to provide constant playback rates). The BIG BIG plus side of this is that games visuals are pretty darn smooth and look great, with no jitters or jumps like you sometimes see in laggy multiplayer games. The downside is it’s not deterministic.

This limits the game a bit in terms of being really competitive as any sort of online serious league style thing. However, thats not altogether a problem. The game is called GRATUITOUS space battles, and isn’t designed to be taking uber seriously. I’d love to code an ultra-complex, ultra-geeky dterministic space combat game where you even selected the rivets to use on the laser gun stabiliser panels, but the trouble is it would likely see 500 copies, and that means I’d be broke :(

Sooo…. The current limitations of GSB 1 which will always be there are these:

2D. Not 3D

No direct ship control

Not deterministic.

Everything else can be improved and expanded and bettered and tweaked. What would you like to see?

<offtopic rant>

I’m watching (as-in, it’s on in the background) masterchef. With the way these people talk, and the ominous sci-fi thriller music as they talk about cooking prawns, they take themselves waaaayyyy too seriously. I know my place, I make video games to entertain people, and play with spaceships for a living. You can do that, and take it very seriously and aim to be the best you can, without building up some big fucking hero-complex. These people are good at frying, they arent discovering DNA or serving as fucking fighter pilots. Bah! </offtopic rant>