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

Better Smoke Clouds

Posted on June 23, 2010

Sooo…

On my list of stuff I think looks not good enough, for me to improve when I am ahead of schdule and ‘treating myself’, is the black smoke clouds left behind when ships explode (mainly cruisers). They always looked a bit poor, and were just a handful of big sprites that rotated and faded in and out.

I’ve spent a good few hours investigating techniques and ideas and ended up with this:

Looks better in motion. Despite a lot of reading about fluid dynamics and mega-particles and other stuff, I ended up just using spinning sprites again, but this time with tons of refinements, in terms of different sizes, generation delays, greater sprite contrasts, and using sine waves to control spin speed degradation, sprite size growth and also now have 2 distinct groups of them in different size distributions.

I also experimented splitting them into layers so ships could fly through the smoke, underneath half of it, but it looked a bit wishy washy so I junked it. There is some extra fillrate involved in doing this, but I don’t think GSB is maxxing out many video cards right now, and this does look better to my eye.

Also, retreating now works 100% in the campaign game. Just need to have a visual retreat countdown timer and some tutorial hints for it now.

“Tough on the causes of space battles”

Posted on June 22, 2010

Today was budget day in the UK. The chancellor abolished the plans of the last government to bring in some vague idea of subsidies for UK game developers working on ‘culturally british’ games.

Instead, amongst other things, he reduced the rate of company tax by 1% from next year.

I’m pleased. Even if my games were clearly ‘culturally british’, I’d have to have applied for the subsidy, no doubt by filling out forms that would take days, then probably have to meet someone and pitch for the subsidy, involving me travelling, then debating and arguing, and hoping that some stuffy civil servant in a suit doesnt assume I’m some dody shyster just because I wear jeans and work from home. I bet I’d never have earned a penny from it, although administering the system would doubtless have kept a few civil servants busy.

On the other hand, cutting taxes for all businesses, just makes Positech games 1% more competitive automatically, without any effort involved by anyone. It’s the smarter move, in my opinion. This seems to be a minority view, there is much gnashing of teeth by ‘industry spokespeople’. I’m surprised anyone thought that a pre-election promise to cut taxes would be honored by a different government.

I got retreating working in the campaign today (yay!)

I painted the bathroom door! (yay!)

I paid my years company tax bill today. Even though the online payment system was broken so I had to mail a check. (boo!)

Unhappy with lighting stuff

Posted on June 21, 2010

I did some campaign stuff today, but also tried to finish off my weekend stencil buffer fun, had a brief flirtation with shadows, and got loads of stuff working, but was not happy. Basically my plan was to be able to take an image and draw it so it only appears on the ships. This would work for light sources, as well as shadows.

It worked! using pixel shader version 3, mind, but that would be togglable. The downside is, it looked crap, mainly because the ships are just sprites, and shadows therefore just splat over them rather than ‘rolling’ and it looked fake, and maybe worse than none. The lighting glows stuff looks better, but still bad. Using normal maps for the ships is theoretically possible, but insane amounts of grief, especially because it wouldn’t work on the turrets without re-doing them all. Bah.

Here is how it looks, if you can even tell. There is a brighter light glow around the laser bullets, as they move over the ships.

It sucks, and I am determined to get the game looking better than this. Also looking at other potential effect improvements…

Stencil vole floorboards

Posted on June 20, 2010

I was determined to not do any actual *real* work today, what with it being Sunday. but because I love coding, and silly graphical tweaks, I spent the day fiddling with stencil buffers, to no real avail. Originally, I was hoping to do some code where explosions happened ‘within’ the ships rather than just stuck on top. I sort of got it working, but it didn’t look as good as I wanted, so I switched to another idea for different stuff that involved stencil buffers, and wasted hours trying to get that stuff working.

It’s *almost* working now, through another method, but tomorrow I’m back at work properly. Partly because I will lose some time this week anyway due to going to London to give a talk on indie stuff on Friday, and probably spending monday doing my powerpoint presentation for it. That meant *buying* Microsoft office 2010 to install powerpoint*. It’s pretty cheap! (if you don’t want outlook) and I haven’t bought a copy since 1997, so I’m due an upgrade!

In unrelated news I’m also meant to be varnishing the bathroom floor, which first means getting some floorboards filled in with new bits of wood. I just know that is going to take ages. The varnishing is trivial, as I used to do it for a living. It’s the trying to make a piece of wood fit another piece of wood that I’m not keen on. Plus… Jack has got very good at bringing live voles in from the garden then chasing them around the house. Grrrr.

*I assume powerpoint files run on pc or mac interchangeably?

Campaign game todo list

Posted on June 19, 2010

Just a bit of a public brain-dump from the campaign stuff I’m working on again.

things to do:

  • Handle situation where your fleet retreats from battle, at the same turn that the AI invaded the retreat destination and conquered it.
  • Better handling of retreating mid-battle, rather than letting your fleet insta-quit the minute you see the enemy.
  • Code to scale the AI so that it attacks less at the start of the game, and puts off a homeworld invasion until much later. Also, maybe some tutorial help hints to advise you not to leave the homeworld undefended.
  • Investigate why the threat level of systems seems to rise too quickly.
  • Give a loyalty boost to any planet where your fleet just repelled an AI attack
  • Add some sort of method for the player to see which other GSB player supplied his opposition fleet, and maybe give feedback on the enjoyment.
  • Overall difficulty balancing code to prevent a cakewalk or being quickly and decisively crushed.
  • Tutorial hints needed on when and how to repair ships
  • Feedback at the end of turns on loyalty and threat changes
  • Better UI to show that the current recruitment and cash earned from systems is being scaled by loyalty

In other news, I’m apparently going to be giving a  20 minute talk at the World Of Love Indie game conference next friday in London. Eeek. Public speaking etc. Scary…

I’ll probably talk about the business side of selling direct on the PC, because not many people have succesful experience of that, so it might be interesting to some people. I hate being known as ‘the biz guy’ as much as ‘the piracy guy’. I’m a game designer and coder really, but there are lots of people who talk about those topics. Ho hum.