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

Responding to beta preview opinions…

Posted on March 28, 2012

Soo… GTB has got some nice beta coverage in a lot of different places. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, but paranoid and delicate little chap that I am, I naturally get drawn towards criticisms or suggestions for improvement. One that I had not expected, (but in hindsight agree with) came from the rock paper shotgun preview which stated:

“GTB’s eight episode campaign might be playable from two perspectives, incredibly challenging at the highest difficult level, and supplemented by an arsenal of user-made maps and challenges that grows by the hour, but you may still find yourself feeling short-changed.
Though community-crafted levels are always a convenient click away (assuming you’re online) and are rated and commented upon by downloaders, sorting wheat from chaff can still be hit-and-miss.
Cliffski’s inspired Blackadder-meets-Rogue-Trooper fantasy needed more space and time to grow. “

Because I’m not someone that ever pays attention to numbers or stats regarding game content (36 hours gameplay? for who? at what difficulty? at what speed?), I tend to have a bit of a blind spot to that topic in my own. To my mind, the campaign is just a teaser saying ‘here are some of the things you can do with maps’, assuming that even if 1% of the buyers ever made a map worth sharing, the number of maps would be huge.

However, it is fair to say that people don’t necessarily want to play user-made maps, and that obviously the person most fluent with the editor is me, so it makes sense to provide enough maps for people that user-made ones are entirely optional.

To that end, I’m happily chiseling away at the coalface making more maps. I’m 90% done on two new ones, a daytime snow map, And a nice evening desert battle.

I’m trying to be as inventive as possible. The snow map, for example has two main routes. One is short, but surrounded by concentrated enemies, the other is torourously long but the enemy locations are more scattered. So far, after many test battles, I can’t say that either route is an obvious choice, it all depends on your play style and unit choice.

I’ll almost certainly add more maps before release, especially once I get into the swing of creating them. The shadowmaps and the balancing take most of the time. So if you already bought the game, you have 8 campaign maps, and 2 more will appear in patch 1.04, hopefully this coming weekend. I’m hoping to add some more after that too, but I always try to be very conservative when it comes to promising stuff until it’s actually done.

If you bought / are considering GTB, how important is the number of singleplayer campaign maps to you?

Gratuitous Tank Battles beta patch 1.003

Posted on March 25, 2012

Right… Gratuitous Tank Battles just got patched in it’s beta again. People who have pre-ordered and have a copy will get auto-updated the next time they run the game for the first time in the day (if that makes sense?)

Here are the changes:

1) Fixed bug where sometimes shadowmaps were not being generated at all for custom maps and downloaded maps.
2) Fixed bug where challenges on unedited maps failed to cunningly re-use existing shadowmaps.
3) Changed costs of augmentations to be either 5 or 15 for type II improved ones, infantry now only pay 1/5th of these costs.
4) Fixed bug where editing the appearance of an existing unit and saving it was not reflected correctly in the unit picker.
5) Air raid siren no longer loops
6) Fixed size issue for the unlock window under certain circumstances.
7) Fixed bug where music did not resume on alt+tab during a battles post mortem.
8) You can now no longer accidentally scroll the map with WSAD or pick any new units once a battle has ended.
9) Nightvision and route-display buttons now correctly toggle if you use hotkeys for those features.
10) Text boxes now correctly supports ,+£$%^=[].
11) Fixed some bugs relating to unit designs saving and also loading in of unit text descriptions.
12) Exiting the map editor now takes you to the battle browser screen, not the main menu.
13) Fixed typo on defend button tooltip.
14) Fixed bug where support units could still give bonuses after deconstruction.
15) Fixed some typos in the manual and tutorial and elsewhere.
16) Fixed bug where overwriting an existing design left a temporary copy of the old one usable until the app quits.
17) Removed empty tooltips on badge editor.
18) Blueprints icons for support modules now show the greyed-out icon as a hint.
19) You now can no longer use duplciate augmentations, or two of the same type on a single unit.
20) Renamed the user profile button to profile/online so it's clearer where social stuff is.
21) Module comparison window now greys out and shows locked icons for modules you are yet to unlock.
22) Minimap and buttons no longer work, or buttons change mouse if the minimap is hidden by the player.
23) Fixed bug with mismatched icons & tooltips after deleting current unit design then changing hull.
24) Added new 'division manager' feature to control what units show up in the deployment bar during a battle.
25) deployment bar now consistently sorts designs by their type.

I had thought there might be just one more patch after this before release, but some testing yesterday discovered a bunch of minor things I need to fix which were not already on the list, so it may be another 2 patches at this rate. Thats without adding any more shiny :D

Divisions in Gratuitous Tank Battles

Posted on March 23, 2012

A picture speaks a thousand words, and a video draws a thousand pictures?, or whatever… But here is a video of me explaining and showing how the new ‘divisions’ feature for Gratuitous Tank Battles works, and how to use it. I’m quite pleased with it. It will be in patch 1.003, which after a little bit of final testing will be release tommorow.

Like A dork I broke my wireless router today trying to install a new aerial booster. BAH. Tomorrow an urgently ordered new one shows up. There goes a days sales :( Plus hopefully my much wanted new desk, which is very English and wooden and cheesy and old fashioned, but it will suit my house, which a modern shiny thing would just look odd in. Anyway. Enjoy the video, critiques and comments most welcome.

Redshirt game video blog

Posted on March 22, 2012

You know about redshirt right? It’s positech game’s first foray into publishing an indie game made by another developer. You might want to check out this new video blog (below, or the official website or facebook page.

unit deployment and undocumented features

Posted on March 20, 2012

There is one big usability failing in Gratuitous Tank Battles that I need to address. It’s something even as the designer that I notice mid-battle, so it must irritate a lot of players. It’s the unit deployment bar at the bottom of the screen. It works great with 10 or less units, and functionally, it handles hundreds, because it has a scroll bar and you can also rapidly zip through it using the mouse-wheel. But it has two issues:
1) It has no specific order to the units.
2) It shows you ALL your units, you cannot filter them.
I am investigating possibly strategies for improving the usability of it, maybe including some filtering options, allowing you to ‘hide’ units on it before a battle, maybe a system that lets you put together ‘armies’ of units that you can select pre-battle, I’m not sure yet.

More interestingly, I get the impression that hardly any players have realised that you can just mouse wheel anywhere over the bar and it will scroll. I obviously need to promote that more, but I think I have fallen foul of a popular designers dilemma, which is assuming the player thinks like I do. Family members always ask me how their DVD player / ipod / camera etc work, even though they have the manual and I do not, because they know I can work it out instinctively in seconds. I am a GUI ‘explorer’ and a usability geek. I am in the tiny percentage of people who have actually read ‘the design of everyday things’. I’m that sad.
What that means is, I need to remember that I am far more experimental and make far more assumptions and guesses about how GUI’s work that the player. I need to draw more attention to stuff like that.