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

Penny Arcade Traffic

Posted on September 28, 2009

In case you missed it, GSB got mentioned on penny-arcade, which was awesome. It also brings in some decent web traffic, and I reckon generated about 100 sales (no way to be 100% sure). This is all very welcome indeed, it helps feed jack and jadzia, and as an afterthought, me. Here is the blatant stats-porn: (filtered by penny-arcade as a referrer, so the graph spike isn’t relative to my normal traffic!)

I’m working on more interesting spatial anomalies for the game today, and tomorrow (at least) That will involve rejigging some fleets, some balancing etc.

Repair Drones

Posted on September 27, 2009

It’s amazing how much extra effort had to go into this over the last 48 hours…

Repair drones have always looked a bit cool, but not been much help to the player. The problem is, their only tie to the core simulation was their quantity. Every repair module gave you a ‘swarm’ of repair drones, and once your ship took some damage, you would see them hovering around and looking like they were welding the ship back together. The problem was, they didn’t actually achieve anything froma  visual point of view.

Thios was worse than a visual bug, because it means that when you play against an enemy fleet that has lots of ships which make strong use of repair drones, you cannot tell if that enemy cruiser is on it’s last legs, or just cosmetically burned, yet at 100% hull integrity. Surely this had to be fixxored.

So now (behold the youtube vid below), those drones (as well as having nicer welding effects) do actually weld those damaged bits of your ship back together. To make it REALLY obvious in the vid, I built a ship with three repair modules, so until the repair supplies run out, it’s pretty nippy at welding stuff back together.

Let me know what you think. I reckon it not only looks better, but will make playing against repair-spammed ships much easier and more enjoyable. (in terms of learning from the battles. The simulation is unchanged)

Another patch, some web stuff…

Posted on September 24, 2009

Today I released version 1.12 of GSB. That fixes a ton of AI stuff, and a lot of minor UI niggles. It is pretty handy that beta testers compile lists of little UI things they notice (that as developer, you tend to become blind to).

Fixing bugs is relatively stress free, it just takes time and effort, and concentration. Improving Ui stuff, new features and new graphics are all quite stress free too. The really scary stuff seems to be balance changes. Everyone who plays the game uses different tactics, and no matter what you test, the nanosecond you release the new patch, people find some cunning way to design ships that takes advantage of a loophole you hadn’t even thought of.

That sort of stuff is inevitable with a game that involves competition, but it does make it pretty scary and time consuming to ever change anything. I concluded that missiles were not good enough, and that fighters flew too fast, but there are a dozen ways to fix both those issues, and every change has its side effects. Still, the game is much better balanced and playable that it was on first release, and despite minor niggles, I do think that on the whole it gets better with each patch. (If not, I’m wasting my life!)

In other news I added a flash widget to the GSB website that scrolls through images. It cost me actual real money! I’m no flash expert, so buying a pre-made component was worth it for me. I normally don’t like flash on websites, because it seems a bit gratuitous but…

Fixing the AI orders (again)

Posted on September 22, 2009

Some cunning GSB players noticed that the orders were not working correctly in terms of attacking certain classes of ship. If you deleted the ‘attack fighters’ order, the desired behaviour was that the ship ignored fighters until there were only fighters left.

This bit of code was broken and basically needed re-doing. Now you might think it’s an easy algorithm that goes like this:

Go through each intact enemy ship
Pick the optimum one out of the classes we should shoot at
If you still have no target...
Go through each intact enemy ship
Pick the optimum one ignoring class.

Leaving aside the inefficiency of parsing the 300 enemy ships twice each time, this isn’t as simple as it looks, because a lot of the time a ship will fail to find a target within range. Thats because all of the ships its ordered to fight are across the map. Ideally the ship trundles over and shoots them. So the criteria for actually picking a target differs from the criteria for establishing whether or not there are any valid targets. Plus, the idea that once all the frigates and cruisers are dead, that EVERY TIME I look for a target I have to do a dummy run through with invalid orders is just untidy and slooow slooow…

So I ended up coding a convoluted complex system which (as convoluted complex systems often are) is way faster than that. Basically Fleets keep track of if they have any ships of each class. Whenever new ships show up (survival mode) or a ship dies, the fleet recalculates that data. if the data has changed, it tells each intact ship in the fleet. Those ships then compare this against their orders, and deduce whether or not the orders still stand. If they don’t, they tell all their turret AI’s to ignore class-based orders from now on. This involves practically no overhead during a  typical target-acquisition call (which are very frequent)

That took a lot longer to code, debug and test than it did to type here :D

In other news, I fixed some dodgy server-side code that prevented challenges being deleted. I’m amazed more people did not whine at me that the ‘delete’ button on a challenge basically did sod all. It now works :D

How complex?

Posted on September 20, 2009

How complex should a game be? Obviously it’s a huge question dependent heavily on genre. Most simulation games are pretty complex. Turn based strategy can be uber complex, MMOs too. Flash games are often very simple and iphone games can be simpler still. Is it a question you can even attempt an answer to?

I think an interesting take on it, is “what are you asking?”. Too complex can mean two things:

“This game is too complex to enjoy”

“This game looks too complex. I’ll pass”

Similarly:

“This game is very simple”

“This game is too simple to be worth buying”

There are loads of games out there I might find fun, that I would not buy. There are also games out there that look awesome, and incredible, and wonderful, and I would not buy them either, and it comes down to complexity.

Take a game where you make a single mouse click to time a guy swinging a bat to hit a ball (there are many, some involve penguins). As a web-based flash game, this can be fun. You might even waste a whole lunchtime on it. But ultimately it’s throwaway disposable fun that we all know someone coded in a weekend. It’s very unlikley you would pay more than $0.99 for it at the very very very most.

Now, Take Eve online, or any of those Hex Based wargames. Or, take Empire: Total War. These are all great, awesome games, with TONS of stuff to do, incredible depth and complexity, but tbh, life is just too short for me to play them. I played eve for years, playing an hour a day or more, and never more than scratched the surface. I never got far into 0.0 space. In E:TW, I played ONE campaign game a third of the way through, then gave up. It was taking ages, and there was too much to do.

The weird thing, is not only are games like that more complex than they need to be in order to get a sale from me, their complexity actually has a negative impact on my chances of buying. Even though I know it’s irrational, I am put off buying them because I’d actually resent having paid for content I’ll never see or use. (ironically I do own E:TW anyway, but I’m aware of my own niggling feeling about it).

I’m probably not alone. I think almost everyone has a ‘complexity’ curve for games that influences their purchase decision. We all regard some games as too trivial or simplistic to buy, and some are too overcomplex and involved to buy. Obviously mass market games need to be in the sweet spot at the top of the aggregate curve. Niche developers like me can cater to the other extremes, and GSB possibly heads slightly towards ‘too complex’ rather than the opposite.

What I find a lot of game devs forget is that a game can be fun, enjoyable, playable and cool, and well made, and addictive and generally excellent, but a LOT of people will play the demo and never buy it, because they resent buying a game that seems like it’s too simple in form.

Are you one of those people, or is it just me?