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

Website updated with FAQ and new screenshots

Posted on June 6, 2009

Yesterday I got the GSB website updated a bit, adding the final logo for the game and some small new screen shots and a FAQ. You can see it here:

http://positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/

And the faq is here:

http://positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/faq.html

As well as that, I also got the last few bits of GUI done, so the in-game GUI now is generally the final one, not the crappy one in the BBC video, although I’m hoping to add various bits of polish to it here and there. I also have a tutorial to do, and need to code in support for switching screen resolutions as well. From then on it’s back to play balancing and final weapons and data for the simulation.

The screen resolution system will probably support a number of fixed resolutions to choose from, if your card supports them. In the past, I’ve coded games that basically ask the card what it can do and let the player pick, but that can be hellishly awful to support, as some cards return about 100 options, and some can be obscure. Right now, the game needs 1024×768 minimum, but I might try and squash it to 600 for netbooks.

I definitely aim to support at least one stupidly big res, probably 1900 1200 res. If your video card can do it, the game will look real nice at that size.

It’s like BBC, but with me on it

Posted on June 3, 2009

They have put that video on-line about piracy for which they came to my humble abode and interviewed me. It’s quite short, and I lose track of what I said, because they dubbed over it hilariously in Spanish, but there it is:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/ciencia_tecnologia/2009/06/090528_video_pirateria_dc.shtml

screeny:

I look much taller on TV. Actually I don’t, I look like a typical sad dork in his bedroom playing video games, and it’s one of the few times I get to see just how little hair I have left, but thats showbiz I guess. On a slightly more relevant note, theres about 1.25 seconds of me playing GSB, albeit with some horrid debug GUI and a placeholder splash screen. I think they dubbed some tacky dance music over it too, as the music isn’t in yet.

If you are like me, you will be suprised to hear someones voice who you have read things by but never heard. I think subconciously we all assume people whose voices we don’t know sound like us. It must be said, than in real-life, I’m not quite so spanish :D

User Interface

Posted on June 1, 2009

Today was day one of working on th proper UI for GSB. Until now, it’s been a GUI that I put together using my rubbish coder-art. Doubtless a lot of coder-art will make it into the final game, but I have at least some decent artist-drawn l33tness going in now. The general ‘look’ reminds me a bit of the mechwarrior games. I’m pretty happy with it, and am looking forward to transferring all the old placeholder GUi over to this new and better style.

There’s no point in showing screenshots of a half-implemented UI when everyone is watching coverage of E3 and the big corporate console games. It seems that it’s now official that the new Lionhead games main character is called milo. If you peak around the config files for Kudos and Kudos 2 you will see that the player is referred to as MIlo internally by the game. In fact, Kudos was originally called Milo.

Plus my second cat (who died) was called Milo.  Co-incidence? It must be something they put in the lionhead donuts.

Anti-Missile weapons

Posted on May 29, 2009

Currently there are two anti-missile weapons in Gratuitous Space Battles. Point Defence Lasers and ECM beams. The point defence laser basically tracks incoming missiles and just zap them. They always hit (at the moment) and take one out. Of course, they can be overloaded,e specially by multiple-warhead missiles, but they are pretty cool. The other one (ECM beam) does exactly the same, but rather than destroy the missile it scrambles its guidance system and there is a cool wibbly wobbly effect as it veers everywhere. In the final game, the choice between them will probably be some sort of crew/power/cost/weight trade-off.

The thing they share though, is that they can ONLY target missiles that are aimed at their ship. You can’t have an ECM frigate at the spearhead of your fleet zapping all the incoming missiles to screen your capital ships from attack.

Clearly this sucks.

The solution isn’t trivial though. There are a LOT of ships in GSB and a LOT going on. if I’m to enable anti-missile weaponry to select from any missile on the map, that will involve a lot of processing. My mind is agog with quadtrees and other methods of limiting the amount of times each weapon has to do this:

for(each missile)
{
are_you_the_closest_one?
}

etc. It would normally be a trivial thing, but it’s something that isn’t in the game yet because it hasn’t really been necessary. The question is, do I write some big generic system that every piece of taregt selection will reference to find the nearest object? if so, that involves a fair bit of re-work, and it’s likely to be a several-cups-of-tea and a free morning sort of problem.

How the (sort-of) multiplayer will work

Posted on May 27, 2009

Ok, I need some feedback on this, and I can’t shut up about it any longer. Here are my plans for multi player GSB, and they are going quite nicely in terms of being almost playable already…

GSB is a single player game with a number of scenarios each of which has a normal, hard and expert AI fleet to fight against. You will probably play each scenario several times, trying to reconfigure your fleet each time to beat the opposition. You will also gradually unlock new races, so there will be the urge to beat every scenario with every race eventually.

However, nothing beats going up against the brains of another player. The problems with a mutiplayer version are:

  • This isnt a real-time game, so you would sit there for ages waiting for the other guy to design his fleet.
  • Indie games dont have big sales, so finding people to play against is hard.

The solution is PBEM (play by email) but WITHOUT the email. Basically it works like this:

You load up a scenario as usual, having selected your race, and probably already with a big bank of pre-designed ships from battles against the AI. You probably have an uber-fleet that kicks ass against the expert AI already. You then click the ‘challenge’ button. This takes you to a screen where you type in the username of the other GSB player (someone you know, who has the full game), and a taunt to tell them how their pathetic space fleet will be ground to dust by your mighty lasers. You click send.

That uploads a tiny data file onto my server, where it’s stored in a database. The next time your friend launches the game, and clicks ‘refresh challenges’ he/she will see your challenge, with taunt in all its glory. He/she can then download that challenge file and play against your fleet in their own free time. Eventually, they should find a fleet that beats your fleet, and no doubt they will then challenge you back.

Obviously its possible to see how many of your challenges have been beaten, and to even track how many attempts it took. There are also tons of high score and metagame possibilities, as are the theoretical possibility of me posting ‘open’ challenges’ which get sent to everyone.

This is tons of work, especially for a net-coding n00b, but it’s in and working at the server side, I’m just tweaking client-side UI code to get it to work smoothly.

Thoughts?