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

robot video

Posted on April 2, 2010

It was an april fools joke clearly. Annoyingly I don’t have the trek license :(

As compensation, here is a video of a robot folding a towel. This is how it starts, with folding towells. It ends with laser-armed mechs as our masters and humanity their slaves…

Robot towel folding

Gratuitous Space Battles Gets Star Trek Licence

Posted on April 1, 2010

I’ve been wanting to announce this for ages but legal shenanigans take forever, and if you saw the NDA I had to sign, you would think it was the script to the Lord Of The Rings.

Anyway…

After a lot of back-and-forth, and a lot of paperwork, and a lot of very long phonecalls at unearthly times of the night (here in the UK) to paramount legal people in the US, I can finally announce (and there will be a proper press release to follow) that there will be an official re-release of GSB with the official Star Trek License.

Basically the game will get a makeover and a re-release under a new title (to be confirmed, but probably Trek Battles). The artwork for the game will be provided directly by those talented chaps who actually do the CGI for the Voyager and Enterprise series, so the ship models will be polygon perfect copies of the renders used in the movies and TV shows.

The exact list of races that will get released in the initial game is still to be determined, but guaranteed inclusions are The Federation, Borg, Klingon and Romulan.

The game will be available for the PC and XBox 360, with a release date set for ‘fall 2010 whatever that means.

Expect to see a more legalese worded press release on the games sites in the next few days, but there is nothing to actually look at yet, so no screenshots. I’m stopping work on everything else related to GSB to work immediately on integrating the trek-specific weapons to make this new version.

Obviously I’m like a kid in a candy store, and hope this brings GSB to a whole new, and bigger audience.

Set Phasers to kill!

Human Contact

Posted on March 31, 2010

I spent today mostly working on campaign stuff. One of the features in the campaign game is that player-designed fleet deployments show up as rival fleets in the campaign. So rather than just facing a fleet designed by me, and always the same, in a given battle, it’s a fleet someone else designed. Another GSB player.
As I play-test this, I find it really cool. I have no idea what each enemy fleet will look like until they appear, and it seems somehow ‘more exciting’ than the idea that its AI-designed, or a fixed fleet designed by me.

Why is this? And is this just me?

Playing against other people is often described by PC gamers as way better than playing against the AI. When you ask people why this is, there are a lot of reasonable explanations about humans being better at adaptive strategy, more creative, and with the ability to actually suprise or confuse the player. Certainly this is true of most RTS games and FPS opponents, at least currently.

I do wonder though, on how we will feel in five or ten years time when AI is that much better. There is nothing to stop AI analyzing every RTS or FPS players movements, and ‘evolving’ play strategies that mimic real human players much more accurately. In twenty years time do we really think that we will be able to tell if our RTS opponent is AI or Human? Assuming we don’t, will we *still* get an inexplicable buzz of excitement knowing it’s another squishy human rather than some clever AI?

I really think we will. There is something very primitivly rewarding about pitting yourself against (or co-operating with) a fellow human. We can’t speculate much about the motives or emotions of some AI, but the thought that there is someone, somewhere who just got their fleet pulverised by ours is just somehow much more rewarding. Blowing up AI pirates in eve is kinda fun, but blowing up other players who then have LOST their ship, is awesome, albeit a bit cruel. What do you think? Do you think it makes a difference if you are directly, or indirectly (think spore) playing against real human beings?

Surely not more stats?

Posted on March 29, 2010

I’m afraid so:

I’ve added filtering by module type too, with the pie charts that show the damage done. This isn’t also filterable by ship, so it isn’t totally uber, but sod it, this is a game, not excel, it has to end somewhere :D

What this new view lets you do, is (for example) select just your frigate plasma torpedoes and see that actually 95% of their shots missed, whereas only 35% of the cruisers torps missed. That might be a good thing to know…

Hopefully tomorrow I can spend a lot of time tweaking the UI for this, and testing it extensively. At some point I need to declare the stats upgrade done, so I can concentrate on play balancing for a few days. Then after that it’s back to the long discussed and hugely involved online thingy.

More Stats and general update

Posted on March 26, 2010

I’m currently balancing a bunch of stuff. here are my short term plans and current work:

1) Update to GSB (free patch) which improves the stats after a battle

2) Re-balancing of some of the more useless hulls and modules to make them more usable (bundled in with the stats patch, most likely)

3) Another race expansion for GSB at some point ( a paid DLC thing again).

4) The much discussed online-enabled challenge campaign  meta game thing.

5) GSB on Mac.

Here is the second view of the stats stuff. Pie charts FTW! I haven’t done any funky highlighting for them yet. This is basically the same data as the view over time, but aggregated as a pie chart. What this means is you can still filter it at both axes by changing which categories of damage to include (ignore all missed shots, for example), or changing which ships to analyze. In theory if you wanted to know what percentage of shots from The Millenium Python penetrated the shields of the USS Dubious, you can just click some optiosn and see that right away.

Click to enlarge, feedback most welcome. I’m going to investigate doing a graph of total hitpoints voer time as well, because that should be relatively easy now.

Or I might do some silly chart animations first :D