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

Gratuitous Space Battles: The outcasts is released!

Posted on January 11, 2013

Yup, you noticed I’d gone quiet about the new Gratuitous Space Battles expansion? Well it’s always like that in the days leading up to a release, while a bunch of admin stuff gets done. But lo! The latest expansion pack for my scarily popular space strategy game is now on sale. Here is the official launch trailer (also in HD, view on youtube to see in all it’s glory):

The website for the new DLC can be found here:

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

With this new race, I went with the idea of a cybernetic race who had been shunned and thrown out for their practice of biological/mechanical integration. I was thinking about all kinds of stuff, partly the tales from Star Trek:DS9 of ‘the founders’ being exiled and chased from worlds by ‘solids’, also partly the many different versions of the backstory of Doctor Who’s cybermen, and also the race of ‘krikkit’ in the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, who seem like ncie people deep down, they just can’t cope with the thought of other species. My vision for the outcasts is that they are nice people at heart, they just suffer from a major persecution complex over the whole ‘cybernetic’ thing, and are determined to wipe out every non cybernetic life-form so they don’t have to feel awkward any more.

Who knows how many intergalactic wars could be solved just by some therapy eh?

Anyway, the new race comes with a few new goodies for people to play with, I suspect people will really enjoy the multi-point tractor beam and the decoy projection module, and no doubt GSB’s extensive modding community will pull the expansion to pieces, see how it ticks and start producing weird hybrid alien ships and new modules over the next few weeks. I hope so anyway. I’m also very pleased with the visual design of the ships for this race.

here are the obligatory buy links.

buy buy

Please help if you can by tweeting or facebook posting, or forum-commenting on the new race. It’s all much appreciated. For those of the social-inclined there is a Gratuitous Space Battles facebook page here.

Deep Space Corruption

Posted on January 8, 2013

Soooo… there I am innocently watching an episode of star trek:deep space nine (I think it was called rapture), and ok, I’d had a single glass of wine…but…

There is this scene where kassidy yates, ex maquis supporter, and recently released from a six month prison sentence as a result, comes back to visit the station commander Captain Sisko, who is the ‘hero’ of the episode. She says she has nowhere to stay and he says ‘you can have your old quarters back, they are just as you left them. I have some pull with the station commander’.

What the hell?

sisko

So much for a wonderful utopian post-scarcity federation future. Why are the bajorans trusting these mobsters? One might reasonably assume that ideally the allocation of sleeping quarters on the most strategically (and quite possibly economically) important star bases in the galaxy would be taken very seriously, and allocated on a basis of need. But oh no. The station commander has reserved a suite for his ex-girlfriend and convicted terrorist.

Now replace ‘sisko’ with ‘berlusconi’ and ask how acceptable this sort of thing is. What next? the captain hosting bunga-bunga parties in the holosuites?

Something is rotten in the state of Bajor.

Saving and Loading

Posted on January 3, 2013

How I envy developers working on arcade games, or anything that has a very simple game ‘state’ that can be easily saved and loaded with no grief. For the game I am currently working on (announcement later this month), it’s a bit of a pain, because the actual game ‘state’ is horrendously involved, and every single byte of it has to be loaded and saved perfectly. The problem is mainly due to my tendency to code systems that have a huge number of objects that all have pointers to each other, in complex and arcane ways.

In theory, stitching everything back together after a load is fairly easy, but in practice, it’s a bit of a pain, and the REAL pain is to know that it has all worked perfectly. if 99% of the pointers are right, and 1 isn’t, then I have a horrible dangling bug somewhere…

My current process for preventing this is to have the game completely save out it’s state and load it’s state back in every turn (it’s a turn based game). At the moment, due to arcane debugging issues this is horribly slow, but eventually will be super fast. At least doing it this way means that during development I’ll spot any save/load inconsistencies really quickly.

I’m aching to get on with some GUI stuff to make it look nice, but I’ve learned the hard way that I have to put that off until the foundations work better. Better to have it stable now, rather than fix it later.

Sim City 4 rekindles my inner stats geek

Posted on December 31, 2012

I’ve got totally addicted to Sim City 4. The new version will have to be something very special to make me prefer it to this classic. I enjoyed it thoroughly upon release, but have recently rediscovered it’s charms. Weirdly, it’s performance on my PC is not great. I strongly suspect that this is because it is a game running on an assumption of single-core PC’s, in a single thread, or maybe running on an assumption of low polygon-throughput, given it’s interesting approach to hybrid 3D-2Dness. I would truly love to wade through it’s source code.

simcity

One of the things I find most interesting about SC4 is the extent to which it is sandbox and freeform driven. The player is given a toolkit for city building and left to get on with it. It really is a (pleasant) throwback to ‘make your own fun’ which I find thoroughly refreshing after playing so many modern games, which amount to a checklist of ordered tasks, and a booming voice saying ‘hit this key’ ‘now hit that key’ ‘well done, have 1,000 gold stars for hitting the key we just told you to hit’.

I hate that.

Sim City 4 has no achievements or high scores, or todo lists or much in the way of targets or quests, and I find myself remarkably capable of setting my own. My first city has floundered a bit financially due to my insistence on building an entire metropolis powered by wind turbines. (Annoyingly there are no economies of scale with them :(). My second city is achieving an almost OCD level of sadness with it’s ordered grid system and widespread use of monorails. I didn’t need a ‘wind energy badge’ or a ‘monorail achievement’ to encourage me to play or have fun in this way.

It’s also helping me to understand how some players get REALLY into optimizing their fleets and ship designs in Gratuitous Space Battles. You have no idea how much bulldozing and re-designing I’ve carried out to get the optimum layout for my monorail system :D