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

Category: ridiculousspacebattles

Ridiculous Space Battles Design Goals

Posted on May 10, 2025

In case you missed it, I am doing a total re-imagining of Gratuitous Space Battles, 15 years after the first game, and calling it Ridiculous Space Battles. This is a sort-of-hobby semi-retirement project that I have got super into. I thought it worth laying out what I think is to be gained from re-doing the game.

Firstly,. yup its still a 2D top-down game being made using directx9. I know a lot of developers will think it mad not to go 3D, and mad not to use unity/unreal and to use directx 12 or whatever the latest version is (I don’t care), so let me address that first. I do not think 3D games are automatically better than 2D ones. In fact most of the time I think they make a game hugely worse. Having enjoyed the Company of Heroes and Age Of Empires games over the years, I can attest the the fact that when really enjoying the game, rather than posing to get screenshots for magazines, the best approach is to just leave the camera locked and play them as 2D games.

But oh noes! the horror! How can I not want to zoom in and see the game in a first person POV? Well I have the Battlefield games for FPS views thanks. Playing a big strategy game in 3D is just deliberately making things hard for yourself. People who make promo videos may enjoy letting the camera strafe around one of their units because ‘its cool’, but in terms of actually playing the game and working out whats going on? No. Humans are still basically 2D thinkers. Most strategy war games still work best in 2D, even if you want to use 3D meshes and 3d hardware to draw them. I prefer RSB as a 2D game.

As for Unity/Unreal. Ha. Fuck off. No. I do not want to spend these happy hours when I’m working on my dream game working out what bullshit combination of middleware actually compiles or works. I do not want to be begging developers on middleware forums to explain why their API crashes or beg for source code. I do not want a random ‘engine update’ to totally break my game, give me random crashes or just not compile, or trash the performance. I want to OWN and CONTROL all of my code. And the idea of paying a percentage of revenue? LOLZ. Its that real? I cannot imagine people being so beholden to some 3rd party. I’m typing this on a logitech keyboard. They don’t ask for a cut…

So yup, 2D and own-engine it is, at which point TBH the effort of switching to Directx11/12 is not really worth it. DX9 is the ‘sweet spot’ for 2D stuff for me, because I know it inside out and backwards. I could maybe take advantage of some newer API stuff, but the tradeoff is relearning enough code that it would become frustrating and no fun. So no. Besides I’ve made it look quite good just with directx9:

So thats the tech stuff. What HAVE I changed and why? Well basically the big changes are as follows:

Grid based deployment.

Gratuitous Space Battles had a ‘deployment zone’ but let you do pretty much what you liked inside. As I recall I ‘tried’ to prevent you putting ships on top of each other, but people managed to hack it. The result is a huge ‘scrum’ where people stacked massive capital ships into tight bundles. Little dense islands of spaceship that were insanely hard to defeat. Thats fine, thats a player prerogative, but it went against a core design principle of mine: ‘In play, the game should look cool’. When ships overlap it just looks bad. I call this ‘total-war gameplay’. The total-war games always had great setup formations, but once battle was jopined they all just looked like a punch-up in a bar. I hate that. So now ships stick to their assigned grid formations. Except fighters, that can raid ‘ahead’ of the fleet.

Fixed squadron size.

GSB let you have any combo of anything, but RSB lets you deploy units into a grid square. 1 cruiser or 4 frigates or 25 fighters. Those are your options. This simplifies gameplay a lot, and I think 95% of players never adjusted fighter squad size anyway. It also means its super easy to place really organized looking fleets. This also contributes to the ‘huge battle formation’ aesthetic.

Simplified Orders & movement

RSB units have a ton of orders, but they do not retreat to repair, nor are there any escort orders (they are no longer required with fixed formations). This simplifies things, and makes the game more clearly a game of ‘design ships and place them in a group’, rather than ‘chain together some complex orders like you are doing shader programming’. It might allow for less esoteric combos but I think it is much easier to understand and control. GSB players often wondered where the hell half their ships were going and why. In RSB its simple: The lead ship maintains the fleet position, and moves forward as enemies are destroyed. Movement of ships is only on the X plane.

Defend the line gameplay

This is the one I am not sure of. The win condition for the player is to destroy the entire enemy fleet. The lose condition is triggered if any of the enemy fleet makes it to your (left) side of the screen. Its done mostly so you have to have a proper distributed ‘line of defense’ which looks cool, but it might be too arbitrary. I will likely tweak this and solicit feedback from players when the game goes into early access eventually.

So there you have it. I made a bunch of changes from GSB. I will be doing a challenge system online just like GSB. This one will use the latest version of PHP and be way more stable! I have not started work on that yet. There are still a ton of things to be done in the single-player version yet.

By the way, if you think this game sounds interesting, it would be super cool if you added it to your steam wishlist:

Ridiculous Space Battles: how and why?

Posted on May 3, 2025

Its 15 years since Gratuitous Space Battles came out, and when I announced a few days ago that I was making this game, I said I’d been working on it for 18 months. How come? Why not announce sooner? and why am I making it, and why now?

After I made the last expansion pack for Democracy 4, I took quite a bit of time off, because I had the mad idea to build a solar farm. This literally took years longer than it was supposed to, and swallowed up a ton of time, and effort, and caused me an insane amount of stress. Even though the farm has been generating for 6 months, its STILL causing me stress and still not properly finished. To put it mildly, during this time I did not have the energy to actively and publicly be working on a new video game.

Any indie game dev will tell you that it is a super stressful job, and a very very hard way to make money. I can say with experience now that solar farm development is 10x as stressful, so that took its toll and meant there was absolutely no way I would also announce a new game. I simply could not cope with having to deal with people asking me about the game, or asking when it would be done, or telling me it was a bad idea and that I was doing it wrong. I had multiple bouts of screaming and tears over the farm. No way was I going to add more pressure or work on top.

You do not know stress until you have personally financed and managed a project like this. Gamedev is easy.

So as a sort of ‘hobby project’, I decided ‘for fun’ to make a little space shooter game using the assets from Gratuitous Space Battles and its DLC. This was a fun project to work on. I coded it all completely from scratch, with a new engine, because I actually find writing engine code (2D but using 3D APIs) to be genuinely relaxing. I know most people would not agree, but thats me. I got quite into this game, and eventually made it public, and put it up for sale on itch.io and on steam. I’ve since stopped using itch, as they ignore requests to pay developers for months, but you can still grab that game on steam:

Anyway, I enjoyed that enough that I ended up making a proper game rather than a little vertical scroller. The amount of change this early game went through is huge. At one point it was called ‘paint by spaceships’, where you basically had microsoft paint, but with brushes that deployed formations of spaceships. To this day, the game’s project folder is called PBS.

A screenshot of ‘Paint By Spaceships’

That then got changed to a game called ‘convoy’ which was like GSB but entirely about protecting a convoy of freighters from enemy attack. The Visual C++ project for the game is still called CONVOY. That then morphed into a ‘re-imagining’ of GSB, called Ridiculous Space Battles. I had decided to re-code everything entirely from scratch, because I prefer to do that rather than hack and bodge together 15 year old outdated code.

At some point I decided that re-using art assets from GSB was a bit boring, so ended up buying stock 3D art packs and kit-bashing together my own new art for the ships. At this point, solar farm dev was less intense, and I was working 40+ hours a week on the new game. I even spent some actual money on the art packs and some new textures for backgrounds and planets, so suddenly this was less of a hobby and now an actual new commercial game I would release.

I am in a very very fortunate position as an indie game developer, in that I have had a run of hit games, starting ages ago with Kudos, then Democracy, then Gratuitous Space Battles, the Democracy 3 and 4 and Production Line. I also published Big Pharma, and I invested the profits pretty cannily. Thus I made enough money that retirement beckoned. Early retirement no less! what a luxury. I then decided to spend a gratuitous amount of money on a solar farm. I do not know if it will break even yet… but even so, I am in the fortunate position of not *needing* RSB to make a huge income. I do not have to stress myself half to death chasing reviewers and streamers and youtubers. I do not have to manically work 60 hour weeks on it, or beg people for wishlists and bundles and marketing opportunities.

However…

I am now super proud of what I have made. Having a ‘second go’, from scratch, at a game idea from 15 years ago, with no financial pressure is a huge opportunity. Realizing very late that I somehow invented an entire genre (autobattlers) and never really capitalised on that is very motivating. When I look back at GSB, its a very very innovative game, but it was a first-go, and suffered from a load of obvious game design mistakes. Why not right them, and try to make the game GSB should have been? Even if it makes no profit at all, but just leaves behind a game I am proud of, and a small percentage of GSB players bought and enjoyed and brought back good memories, thats definitely a good and worthy thing.

An early design for the main menu

As of today I have not sent a single press release or told any journalists about the game. I am building up to it. The game is actually playable, and looks lovely, and I have a never ending supply of awesome screenshots. I could do a trailer right now, but I am thinking about getting new music for it before them (it currently uses music from GSB, which is…ok, but could be more modern perhaps). I also have no real release date, and a very flexible schedule and design.

I am also really enjoying writing the code for it. I updated from Visual Studio 2013 to 2022, which actually went extremely well. I am sticking with directx9 but pushing it to its limits, and doing it in a way that will be tons more stable than when I attempted it in Gratuitous Space Battles 2, which had technical issues :(. I have way better tools to develop the game now, and 15 years more coding experience. I also am happy to stick with top down 2D graphical style. GSB2 did mock-3D lighting and I don’t think it was worth it. Sticking with simple 2D gives me other options to ramp up the crazy spectacle, and its working well.

I’m already pleased with how the game looks, and it will only get more ridiculous

So yup, expect a lot of technical coding blog posts (and design ones) over the next few months.! In the meantime you can add the game to your steam wishlist now :D

Announcing Ridiculous Space Battles

Posted on April 29, 2025

So yup… I’m announcing a new game. I don’t say that often these days! For the last eighteenish months I’ve been working on a project as a hobby that turned into a serious hobby that then turned into a full time thing, and has now become an actual game that will be released on steam this year (into Early Access anyway), called Ridiculous Space Battles.

If that name sounds familiar, its because 15 years ago I was the guy who made ‘Gratuitous Space Battles‘. At the time, there was no other game like it, and now its become a whole genre called ‘autobattlers’. Yup, that was me. I don’t bang on about it as much as I should frankly. But anyway, I made GSB 15 years ago, and a bunch of expansions. A few years later I made GSB2, which was a bit of a flop by comparison. It had bugs for some players, and I got annoyed about it, and really decided to just switch genres and make more political strategy games, publish other people’s games, and also make Production Line: Car factory simulation.

Then at some point I started building a Solar Farm.

But WE ARE SO BACK. I have had enormous fun making this game, and I have so much to say about it. I want to write blog posts, post on social media, etc, and I have been waiting until I was ready to announce it with some nice screenshots like this:

And this

The way I am developing the game is a bit mad, and worthy of a proper long blog post, but for now, I will just leave it that there is a basic website up here, and you can see the game’s steam page (and wishlist it!) on steam here. Also if you are on social media,. any retweets or posts or likes are welcome on this post on bluesky and this one on X. Thanks!

More updates coming really soon :D.