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

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

Gratuitous Stats! (work in progress)

Posted on March 23, 2010

Right, so I’ve got totally distracted from my online-enabled metagame cleverness to improve the dowdy old stats screen for GSB, which we can all agree sucks right? Anyway, here is my current flimsy work in progress: (click to enlarge)

So an explanation of whats going on:

The graph shows  the damage done by every shot fired in the game, broken down into ten categories, which are missed, reflected by shields, damage to shields, damage to armor, hull damage, for both damage delivered (to the enemy) and received (from the enemy). The UI lets you toggle any of those categories on or off with a mouse click. Added to this, there are ship-pickers in two columns, with your fleet on the left, and the enemy on the right. By default all are enabled, but you can toggle each ship/squadron on or off. If you toggle them off, they get eliminated from the graph, which also auto-scales the Y axis to show things in better detail.

So if you want to know what effect your fighters have, you toggle off all the ships on the left except your fighters. if you then want to know what effect they had against enemy cruisers, you toggle off all the enemy ships except the cruisers. You can analyze it down to single pairings of ships if you like.

I’ve just realised I totally missed out damage ‘reflected’ by armor. I must add two new categories… bit of a squeeze now.

This isn’t the final screen, there is lots of minor UI tweaking to do, and it will have a more relevant title, plus I’d like to add options to view pie charts and other bits and pieces. Ideally I’d add little tags you could mouseover for events such as cruisers being destroyed, to put the charts in context. What I’m after is first impressions and feedback. Do you think that this is already an improvement on the old screen? I do, but I’ve spent 2 days on it so I’m biased :D.

My current plan is for this to just be in a patch, no add-ons needed. I am planning on a third new race expansion for the game at some point, because they seem popular and I love seeing new spaceships in the game :D.

Stats junkie?

Posted on March 21, 2010

Are you a stats junkie? I reckon that many gamers are, and given how popular games like Fantasy Football can be, I assume that there is a lot of scope for stats-junkie games. One of my original visions for Gratuitous Space Battles was WAY more stats-junkie than it currently is. I kind of let the side down a bit when I did the post-battle stats screen. If I could justify it, I’d like to work on that some more.

In my minds eye, the post-battle screen is like google analytics, but for space battles. You would be able to view the data in all sorts of different ways. A pie chart of which ships dealt the most damage? A bar chart showing the damage done by each weapon type. A line graph showing total damage inflicted over time, and showing hit points remaining on each side over time…

I’d find that pretty cool :D.

The only slight niggle in my mind is that if you make that stuff *too* good, then the people who will mico-manage and analyze every last weapons turret will have an even bigger advantage over the more casual player who just slaps on a few laser turrets and enjoys the show. In a sense, I don’t care about that, because the game is designed to be predominantly a single player game and sandbox, rather than highly competitive. Also, I’d imagine that all data is vastly open to interpretation, otherwise my obsessive poring over google analytics stats would have made me a dotcom billionaire by now. Still, if it takes being like this or this to be rich, I’ll stay poor.

Anyway, stats junkies? are you out there?

Venturing further into online bits

Posted on March 19, 2010

Today I didn’t write a single line of  C++, but did code a lot of php, which is the language I use for the online challenge management stuff in Gratuitous Space Battles.

On thursday I spent a lot of time blasting out the music from Star Trek : First Contact while I scrubbed out my chalk board and drew my vast plans for the future of GSB, or at least, the next DLC/expansion thing. After a lot of hand waving, I’m currently planning on a cunning meta-game style campaign that slots into some of the existing challenge data. It’s going to work a bit like spore, in that it becomes ‘massively singleplayer’, with other peoples content (in this case fleets) appearing in your game.

So far, so easy. That’s not a problem. The tricky bit turns out to be that although I let people mod the game (and that will continue), I can’t have a modded fleet turn up in someone elses game, because at worst, it could crash thinking “cannot find ‘bobsZapGun’ module…”

The solution, (which doesnt check for data changes as such, but does check for simple additions), is to write code which verifies that a players fleet only uses content that exists in the main game. To do that, php code was needed to crack open the binary challenge data and go through each ship hull and module name and check they really exist…

and to get THAT to work, I needed php code that would analyse all the data in the game and create a database of all the ‘valid’ entries, so that it can compare one with the other. That way if I do some module changes or new add-ons, I can just run some php and have the ‘valid data’ table automatically updated.

This is a lot of work in order to just get something totally under the hood and invisible working, which is code to ensure no modded content ends up in any one elses campaign, causing a crash. There is a ton of other work required. The good news is that a lot of this same code might be possibly leveraged at a later date to scan the high scores for modded content (and reject it) and could even remove the need to tag challenges with the add on packs manually as players do now. All fun and games….

In other news I just did a BLIND taste challenge and I *can* tell the difference between cadburys and morrisons chocolate buttons. (Cadburys taste smoother).

Humour?

Posted on March 17, 2010

I had no power for a while today (electrician doing much needed work on the 18th century museum we call a fuse box). As a result, I ended up trying to work with just a laptop on batteries and no web access. That meant time spent coming up with damage descriptions for modules as part of the campaign game.

I have decided to try and make them slightly silly sounding, a bit like the module descriptions or comms chatter. I have words that amuse me, by making me think of the Star Destroyers from Star Wars, but designed by wallace from Wallace and gromit. It’s not a huge leap. I can imagine wallace asking chewie to hand him the ‘hydrospanners’.

So the damage descriptions often mention the ‘primary flux sprockets’ or the ‘fusion inhibitor flaps’, and other things that blend trek-like technobabble with wallace and gromit style silly-tech.

I am aware that a lot of reviews quite like what I guess must be my sense of humour. I am not sure what the majority of actual gamers think. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of GSB players are 14-18 year old boys who love space battles, and thats awesome, I was that boy. I have a cupboard full of action figures to prove it. I took star wars pretty seriously. It was totally the most awesome film ever and ewoks were not teddy bears and leias hair was just FINE and not at all silly.

To my mind, the best example OF ALL TIME of perfection in the balancing act of being funny to 30+ adults and cool and exciting to under 16 kids was the original Batman TV series. Watch it as an adult and its a hilarious parody of how kids view crime fighting. Watch it as a kid and Batman ROCKS and is AWESOME.

Holy Scriptwriting!