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

Splines and how to sell GSB

Posted on April 26, 2009

I’m looking into using some splines for a few things in GSB. The thing is, I need super-fast splines, which I haven’t found yet. Still… it’s my task for the day.

I’ve been reading more and more about the whole piratebay trial and peoples attitudes to it, and their attitudes to intellectual property and copyright. I’m a strong believer in IP and copyright. I’m glad they exist, because they are what enables people to make movies like Star Wars and TV series like Star Trek. I’m glad we have those things.

But increasingly it seems like it’s the ‘general consensus’ that copyright is somehow evil, and that people should have the right to copy anything they want for free. I find this really sad, because there are only two alternatives for me in the future:

1)Use some really harsh-ass DRM to try and force people to pay for the games rather than pirate them. or

2)Somehow engineer all my games so they are based around being on-line to play them, or micro-transactions.

I’ve always lied the idea of micro-transactions because I believe they give more freedom and options to both the gamer and the developer, as long as you can’t ‘buy’ an advantage in a multiplayer game. However, the idea of designing a game to be always-online annoys the fuck out of me. A lot of people have flaky web connections or game outside or on the train, and it also means I have all those people hitting my server all the time they are playing. Plus it means doing a ton of web coding I don’t especially enjoy.

Ironically, there *is* a lot of really cool ways to integrate GSB on-line, which I have at the back of my mind, and would probably do anyway if I was more familiar with web coding. Unfortunately, I’m now looking at this sort of thing as essential and inevitable because I just don’t think you are going to be able to sell singleplayer games on the PC within a  year or so. Stardock recently discovered that even original PC strategy games without DRM get pirated to oblivion, and supposedly stardock are the good guys.

I like singleplayer offline games. I just wish our friends in sweden and their pals hadn’t done such a good job at making that whole genre almost unsellable :( Nice work guys…

Emergent L33tness

Posted on April 23, 2009

I was just testing a new laser blast graphic I added to the game, and had two big fleets of cruisers and frigates flying towards each other blasting away like mad, and noticed that the front frigate (which was under serious attack) seemed to be drifting backwards.

This puzzled me, because although i did once code support for reverse thrusters, I turned it off, and knew anyway that ship didn’t have any,

Then I realised that it was the physics of the blast effect. The number of enemy blasts piling onto the ships hull was not only damaging it big time, it was knocking it slightly backwards. I had forgotten that could happen :D

I wish this game was finished already so I could just sit down and edit some cool videos of stuff like that…

One of the main changes today was for fighters. To get a better sense of huge ships, I scaled all the fighters down by a fair chunk. Now when you add a fighter squadron, you get 16 ships instead of 9, and they are smaller. It does seem to look a lot better. The cruisers never looked big enough before. The AI is pretty fast and it doesn’t seem to matter with a few hundred ships per side, even with all guns blazing.

Things going zap

Posted on April 22, 2009

I’ve got lots of minor stuff done lately. Tiny animated welding drones that hover around damaged ships when they have auto-repair systems are now done. Plus I added a very basic scoring UI. (some art, such as the playback buttons need to be done properly. The whole battle section is pausable, and you can toggle the UI off entirely to just watch the fun.

Look: things going zap:

I need video clips of amazing space battles. Or decent hi-res images. Post any links here if you have them.

Gratuitous Empire Selection

Posted on April 21, 2009

I’ve got a new ship added today, plus fixed some turret-related fun, and got the interface in for the race-selection screen, where you get to actually choose who to fight as (subject to unlocks). Small screenshot below:

Because that sort of thing isn’t as much fun as coding new weapon types or improving the visual effects, I might treat myself to improving some graphical stuff for the rest of the day. I’m looking forward to the time when all I have to do is balance the weapons and arrange basic ai fleets to fight against, but I suspect that it’s a long while to go yet.

Difficulty levels and other ‘wrapper stuff’

Posted on April 20, 2009

I’ve been trying to avoid acting too much like a graphics junkie and getting some work done on the gamey stuff instead. I’ve put in difficulty levels today, and also made some decisions regarding what race of aliens the player controls.

The main part of the game currently has ten missions, basically defined by a certain backdrop, of a certain size (some maps are bigger than others) which some other variables such as nebula effects on shields etc. These levels also define the maximum fleet size (in ship and pilot terms) and which race the player fights against.

So today, each of these missions has three enemy fleets rather than one, the normal, hard and expert AI fleets, which are of differing sizes. Obviously the bigger fleets are harder :D. During combat, the enemy AI is the same as yours, so the difficulty comes purely from the force that is fielded against you. I may get around to the AI evolving its own fleets, but thats a whole can of worms.

There will be some ‘other stuff’ that will give the game longevity beyond those 3 fleets in 10 different missions, but I’m not talking about that stuff yet :D

The other thing decided today was that the player will fight the game as ‘the federation’ which is a ferengi inspired race whose backstory I’m still mulling over. Once you have beaten every mission on Normal, you will unlock the Rebels as a selectable playable race for each mission, beat them all on Hard and you unlock the Alliance, Beat them all of Expert, and you unlock the Empire. That’s the plan anyway. Any thoughts?