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

Gratuitous Space Patch 1.57

Posted on September 5, 2011

Just made patch 1.57 live. it will auto update over the next 24 hours, and make it to steam once a day or so has passed without incident. It’s mostly stuff to support the parasites expansion.

version 1.57
1) New Feature: Support for longer race descriptions.
2) New Feature: Modding support for custom bullets textures.
3) Support for return-to-sender capability on missiles.
4) Support for more than one plasma missile in flight at any one time, per launcher (if configured for that module)
5) Support for flak guns (bullet modules with area-of-effect damage).

Tileable textures

Posted on September 1, 2011

These days all the talk in fashionable FPS 3D land is of megatextures. Huge sprawling one-off textures where you effectively spray paint a level with gay abandon,l with no fear of overdraw or re-use because the art budget is huge and only pro-artists will ever make a level.

I can’t do that.

Partly because I do not have the art budget, but more interestingly because I really want it to be EASY for people to make their own GTB levels and share them. I’m not expecting people to own photoshop, or have art skills, so they need to be able to just click some tile-able textures into place and press upload.

This is a pain, because graphical expectations have risen since age of empires II, and it’s ilk. These days, much is expected from terrain, and foliage, and so on. I can never expect GTB to look like company of heroes in this respect (100x the art budget), but I’m working hard on making it look acceptable, at least.

Much of today was spent fiddling with path textures. Nobody likes my glowy paths, so having them more apparent ‘in-world’ rather than UI is the aim. Also, I’ve been adding surrounding ‘blend’ textures to smooth the stuff like trenches into the world, so they look less like a display at the Hampton court flower show. I’ve only done it for trenches so far, turrets need a ton of work to do it.

This is how it looks so far:

 

Gratuitous Level Editor

Posted on August 29, 2011

The GSB ship editor sucked, and the custom scenario interface wasn’t a Picasso either, mainly because in both cases, I insanely bodged them at the last minute, actually using mere text files to make the assets during the games production.

Now I am less insane, I’m using a built-in level editor for GTB from the near-start, which means there is plenty of time to polish it, and indeed it will be a major component of the game. I’m hoping to encourage almost everyone who plays GTB to make their own maps, and share them, LittleBigPlanet style, rather than fencing it off as something only the hardcore modders do.

That’s the current (placeholder UI art) level editor. It has a ton of features in it. Today I was working on code that lets you take an existing level from the game, and save it out as a new custom map, whilst editing loads of parameters for that battle, hopefully in a quite straightforward manner.

Actual level editing, such as setting paths, territory for unit placement, and all the scenery, is already done, although it needs a real usability makeover before it’s considered shippable.

In other news, I got a new ipad build of GSB today. Definitely making progress, but getting a huge complex PC sim like GSB onto the ipad is no quick and easy port. It still needs some work. As does everything.
I have a day off tomorrow, hence my manic working today :D

Planning out Gratuitous Tank Battles Development

Posted on August 28, 2011

This is one of those brain-dump blog posts where I just use the blog as a public todo list…

Major Things I need to do for GTB (still remaining)

  • Support for creating new custom maps from scratch and saving them to your local disk as new singleplayer maps. (includes final work on the map editor, and support for browsing custom maps, rather than the campaign maps)
  • Support for uploading new maps as scenarios for other players to download. (system for describing a map, verifying it is valid, ensuring no content is modded, listing it in the online database, and for clients to refresh that database quickly and smoothly).
  • Code for online profiles and stats checking, player friends lists, messaging and leaderboard stuff. (Possibly including regimental banners and descriptions, and integration of that into loading screens).
  • Code to support auto-updating for direct-bought copies, with registry-enabled paths so we don’t need to tell installers wheer the game is any more.
  • Tutorial, and method to reset it in the options screen.
  • Manual
  • Re-checking the unlocking system and choosing unlocks.
  • Support for modding. Allowing new unit variations, new hulls, new ground and prop textures, new sounds.
  • Integration with steam achievements (assuming steam approves the game) and maybe other steam features.
  • Integration of final art assets for battles, and construction of the singleplayer campaign maps, enemy units.
  • Integration of final, improved menu GUI to remove all that GSB placeholder stuff from the unit design screen
  • Optimisation
  • Bug testing
  • Play Testing and Balancing

The list doesn’t see quite so terrifying when I list it like that. Maybe things aren’t as huge as they seem. I should probably start thinking about releasing some screenshots at some point.

Stripping back the game to a simple start

Posted on August 26, 2011

I’ve been having a few days of angst (ok a few weeks) regarding game design and ‘fun’ in Gratuitous Tank Battles. I guess I was panicking at the intangibility of ‘fun’ and thinking I might be constructing a huge and very elaborate ‘system’ and ‘simulation’ rather than a game. Essentially, it became clear to me that the game was a bit too much like company of heroes and not enough like chess.

Now COH is a great game, but I think it suffers a bit from unit-balance hell. This is something GSB really struggles with, especially for new players. Chess, on the other hand, is awesome in this regard.

Chess only has a handful of unit types, and their capabilities are simply explained. Chess is all about the complex interactions between simple units. This is a good game. COH and GSB are about the super-complex interactions between complex units, and a huge number of them. This is a deep, but also hard to learn, and possibly frustrating game.

I’m pretty sure I’ve sorted it all now :D. Essentially, GTB needed the starting game stripping back to very few unit types. Maybe 9 units to attack with, 9 to defend. That already makes it a fairly complex tower-defense style game. The joy of GTB is that there are so many more layers for the player to explore beyond that basic game. For example:

  1. After the player has got the hang of the basic UI and mechanics, we can flip things and make them the attacker instead of the defender. yay!
  2. After that, the player can unlock extra units on top of the starting nine. Yay!
  3. After that, the player can start to customise his units, choose different modules for them, and also edit their colors to look distinctive. Mega yay!
  4. After that, the player can try different game modes (Rush, or possibly waves rather than continous attack). And also try online challenges (eventually).
  5. After that, the player can fiddle with the built-in level editor and design their own maps either to upload and share, or to play against the AI. Woohoo!

So, if I can get that basic 9 types vs 9 types defence game working just great, then I am pretty convinced everything else will fall into place quite nicely. It just needs a ton of work, but that doesnt bother me at all. I’m just keen to get the initial mechanics of the early game to be perfect, and I made decent progress on that today :D.