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

Polish, Interface, bug fixes

Posted on August 4, 2009

I’ve got a lot done today, it’s just hard to pin down exactly *what* has been done. Lots of small fixes went in, and some fairly obscure bugs were caught (like the ECM effect noise lingering after ships died, or the ECM effect not being skipped if its entirely offscreen).

I also carried out a bit of a tidy up and revamp of a ton of small issues on the main deployment screen, which is where you may spend about half the game time, and added a whole bunch of tutorial messages. GSB is one of those games that looks great in videos, and people trying the demo will likely want to see things blow up right away, and thus skip all those helpful messages about selecting ships and zooming the camera. The new system watches how you play, and (for example) if you haven’t used the camera zoom after 20 seconds, it will freeze the game, and pop up a quick one-time message prompting you with a hint on how to do it.

I think thats the best way to handle these things. Every FPS on earth teaches me to use WSAD to strafe, to right click to reload, or to hold down shift to sprint or crawl yada yada. Why can’t they give me a few simple tasks, and only bore me with laboriously crap and slow voice acting IF If turns out I don’t already know most of that stuff.

People learn at different speeds, and in different ways, and games should eb flexible about making sure you tell people how to play, without patronizing the hardcore.

I might be moving house soon, meaning I’m dealing with estate agent stress. I just *know* that the moving day will co-incide with release day for GSB. It’s an inevitable conspriacy to kill me through stress.

Even Bigger, Better Explosions

Posted on August 2, 2009

It’s no good doing a game called gratuitous space battles without serious ship explosions. My current benchmark explosion is this one from revenge of the sith:

I’ve watched it hundreds of times, and taken about 30 still frame captures from the DVD to use as reference. I have quite a complex particle and effects system for GSB, and it’s coming along nicely. Currently, the average cruiser will have 17 distinct events as it explodes, not counting the release of escape pods

Those 17 events are scripted like this:

[explosions]
1 = 0,128,80,EXP_FRIGATE
2 = 11,97,149,EXP_DESTRUCTION_PLACED
3 = 20,199,205,EXP_DESTRUCTION_PLACED
4 = 20,196,238,EXP_DESTRUCTION_PLACED
5 = 101,108,41,EXP_DESTRUCTION_PLACED
6 = 120,143,163,EXP_DESTRUCTION_PLACED
7 = 200,47,189,EXP_FRIGATEBREAKUP
8 = 210,0,0,EXP_STARTBREAKUP
9 = 270,128,128,EXP_CRUISERDEBRIS
10 = 274,53,226,EXP_DESTRUCTION_PLACED
11 = 290,59,229,EXP_DESTRUCTION_PLACED
12 = 310,171,209,EXP_DESTRUCTION_PLACED
13 = 388,61,204,EXP_DESTRUCTION_PLACED
14 = 400,128,175,EXP_FRIGATEBREAKUP
15 = 400,128,175,EXP_PLUMES
16 = 400,128,128,EXP_BLASTGLARE
17 = 900,128,128,EXP_ANGLED_DEBRIS

They relate to particle effects and other graphics. So there are a number of different particle emitters called from different points on the hull, then at 210 milliseconds after detonation the sprite starts to tessellate into pieces. At the same point, the damaged hulk texture starts to cross fade into existence behind it, and the hulk components start to drift.  At 270 milliseconds a shower of permanent debris is spawned. At 400 milliseconds, plumes of wandering particles appear, accompanied by a bright flickering white glare which also generates a shockwave blasting existing debris out of the way. A final shower of temporary particle system debris is triggered right at the end.

This is all configured per-ship-hull, so different ships can detonate in different patterns and styles.

It looks cool :D

Update on current position of GSB

Posted on July 30, 2009

I’m trying to get towards a pre-order/beta situation, but I don’t want to rush anything. The game looks quite nice (I intend for it to look nicer,e specially the UI), and technically plays ok, but there are quite a few bugs and minor glitches right now. Here is what is currently on my immediate list to address:

  • Fighters sometimes retreat to their deployment zone (I thought I’d removed that code) and then just sit there. I’m considering letting fighters auto repair over time when not under fire.
  • Enemy ships actually occasionally path find off of the map. The game still works fine, but not seeing the enemy kind of sucks. The background is one big image, not a tile, so infinite scrolling can’t easily happen…
  • It’s possible that none of your weapons can penetrate your enemy flagships shields, or more likely, you don’t have enough fire-power per minute to actually knock the shields out entirely. I’m considering a number of fixes for this, because it can lead to infinite stalemates. One possibility is letting every weapon do some minor ‘leakage’ damage through shields. maybe just 2-3% of normal damage.
  • The code to unlock levels as you go along is broken
  • Some of the smoke particle effects look really bad. Something has gone wrong a bit there
  • I’m considering how to code an ‘alpha-strike’ order for ships, that basically says ‘try to co-ordinate your fire with a number of other weapons from you or other ships to blap in one go’. This is no mean task, and opens up the can of worms that orders are per-ship, not per-weapon. Hmmm.

So I’m pretty busy :D And this is all ignoring the graphical fluff I desperately want to find time to add to the game, plus other gameplay modes blah blah.

Much better deployment UI done

Posted on July 26, 2009

I’ve made good progress today and yesterday, despite distractions by Anno 1404, and being a bit ill. Here is a screen showing the new deployment layout. The UI needs polish, but this is how it looks.

I’ve got proper selection and multiple ship AI-editing working now. This means you can drag select, or double click select (no shift-add select yet) a group of ships, and then add a new behaviour to them all (if the behavior exist, it doesn’t matter) remove a behaviour, or edit the parameters of existing ones. This means that rubbish copy+paste stuff is gone, and you can edit groups of ships as you would expect to, including selecting a whole bunch and moving them as a group. The icon with a + on it creates a new ship design in the editor. I’m aware that it looks like a health icon, and I intend to redo it… I’ll also move the ‘main menu’ button to bottom left where it clearly belongs.

Also, I’m reliably told that AI ‘behaviours’ sounds weird, and programmy. Does ‘Orders’ sound better? I suspect it does. It’s only a GUI change.

Start of UI re-design for Gratuitous Space Battles

Posted on July 24, 2009

Here is a small screen of the new Deployment stuff for gratuitous space battles so people can tell me how I’m doing it all wrong :D

The fleet design screen and pre-deployment configuration screen are all gone. Now there is basically just this. The player chooses a battle to fight, and that brings them here. The difficulty setting selector will sit at the bottom once added. The strips at the top show the current fleet cost and pilot count as a fraction of the limit for this battle. A basic fleet is already shown (only for mission #1, other missions will start with an empty fleet). On the right hand side is a picker showing your current ship designs, and eventually some new icons over here will allow you to create totally new designs (launches a separate window).

How do you add new ships to the fleet or remove old ones?

Answer that in your head first, then feel free to tell me what you thought up.

My current solution is that you basically try and drag one of those far-right icons onto the map. It turns immediately into a ship silhouette of that type, and you can place it anywhere in the deployment zone (highlighted). if you drop it anywhere else, it’s deleted. To remove an existing ship, you just drag it out of the zone.

I will also include hotkeys and maybe a right click context menu to edit a design, delete a ship, rename a ship etc. This will all be in the manual, tooltips and tutorial windows, but I hope it will also be intuitive.

Thoughts? Gaps in the UI, font choices etc, are all place-holder and will be finalised later. At the moment, It’s a case of getting the general flow of things right at last. Work-in-progress UI’s rarely look awesome!

My idea is that this represents the ‘design’ of this battle. You can drag ship designs to and from the battle here, launch the ship editor from here, and generally this represents the central hub from which you play with this map.

In total, the game is going to be 4 areas:

  • Main Menu (goes to options screen, online stuff etc)
  • Select Battle screen, with a simple list of missions
  • This deployment screen, and its associated full-screen ship editor
  • The battle screen, where you view the real-time battles.