Cliffski's Blog

As with all games, actually making it tears the design in all kinds of directions. This is one reason why people who try to get a lead designer job based on lots of paperwork and no actual game often come up against a brick wall… No game design survives contact with the code.

So… I’ve been working on the online challenges for GTB. It all now basically works, in it’s basic form. When a battle ends, you can post that battle as a challenge to the server, for everyone, or a specific user. This is only valid if the map is a new one you designed (or edited) or if you played as attacker.

The other players can now browse a challenge list, select and download your challenge map. They can they play on it as attacker or defender. This is where it gets fidgety..

If you played as attacker, and uploaded your battle as a challenge on a default (pre-built) map, and someone downloads it, it’s pointless them playing as attacker, because effectively, nothing has changed. They are just playing the normal map.

If, however, they play as defender, things happen as expected. they see YOUR units, deployed at YOUR choices of location and times, and it’s like an asynch multiplayer game. Yay!

If they edited the map, changed loads of variables and moved some props etc, and uploaded it, then it makes sense for you to play attacker OR defender, because hey, you just got a free community-based extra map to play with. Yay!

The problem is, making it clear to the player that sometimes they download a challenge and it’s only playable as defense, sometimes as either. I can use tooltips etc, and flags in the challenge database, but I still phear confusion. Plus, in an ideal world, I’d allow a player to bundle in ALL his units with a challenge too (this should be easy), so they can say “here is a normal default map, but here are my unit designs to fight against”.

I want it to all be intuitive, and although it will be awesome, so far it is NOT intuitive :(

In other news, GSB ipad is coming along. Still ironing out performance issues. Or rather, mark is. I’m just blogging about it :D

Gratuitous Space Battles had a fairly straightforward challenge system. You uploaded your challenge, which was a combination of unit designs + deployment + orders, with maybe a few map variable, and others downloaded and played them.

As I start proper work on uploaded stuff for GTB, I realise it’s a bit more complex and tricky. My two aims are for you to be able to:

• Upload or play against someone else’s unit designs + attacking ‘recording’ of their units, when you are playing in normal tower defense mode.
• Upload or play with someone else’s custom designed map, including whatever graphic resources they have included within it

Of course, there is immediate scope for overlap, where someone designs a new map, plays as the attacker against adaptive AI, and then wants to upload both the map, and their recording of their attacks, and units, so you get to play against new units on new maps. I want to support this (obviously) whilst not letting the UI design of it get too clunky. I’m only starting to consider the real implications now.

Another major consideration is encouragement and ease of use. I need uploading your forces to be absolutely trivial to do, and encourage everyone to do it. I also want to minimize the traffic going to and from my server…

Currently, I have an edit button for every map. You can edit the map from there, and save it out as a ‘custom’ scenario. Once you play that scenario, like any scenario, you have the option to upload it as a challenge. This feels horribly clunky.

I guess ideally, that at the end of a battle, you should be prompted to upload a challenge, and if you select yes, you can choose (where applicable) if this is a ‘map-only’ upload, or whether it also contains your unit designs and deployment timings (assuming you were the attacker).

And given the way my system currently works, with zipped uop folders, it wouldn’t make any difference anyway, People would download a map, and if it had player recordings included, they could be used, or not, entirely up to them. If no ai designs are present then the adaptive AI automatically chooses from any design (by default they are restricted to that scenarios AI designs).

I think that sounds ok.