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

Re-jigging the ship modules

Tomorrow I’ll be stroking my chin a lot and rethinking how the modules that make up each ship are put together. I’ve got quite a long way into the game with the current system, but I have a few thoughts I need to elaborate on.

Firstly, I think I’ll add a crew requirement, and maybe a heat one too. Ship modules currently have a financial cost, a weight, a hitpoint value (strength) and a power requirement. I think it needs a little more complexity so there are some interesting choices in module loadout for each ship. I don’t want it too complex, but it can’t be too simple and a no-brainer either.

Secondly, I need to think about the number of modules per ship again. Currently they come in three sizes, for the three ship sizes. The downside of this is that I can’t currently have big cruisers with one huge fuck-off mega-gun and ten small anti-fighter lasers. I’m considering a hybrid system where you can stick a few fighter or frigate sized modules in extra slots on each cruiser. I’m not sure about that.

I’m also talking to some artists about doing spaceship sprites. I don’t think my coder art is good enough. I also finally got the GUI and code for escort orders done, so fighters can be set to stick close to bigger ships and defend them from enemy bombers.

Optimising the mayhem

The last few days have been spent on optimising the space battle code. Basically I mad a dcision that the battles were not vaguely big enough, and needed to support a bunch more ships, especially now given that you can zoom in and out. That meant there would probably be some bottlenecks as I scaled up the number of ships, and it’s been a few days of identifying them and sorting them out.

Everything now runs way faster than it used to. I had a lot of really inefficient texture-setting code that was setting textures for objects and trying to render them offscreen. Now I’ve bunched lots of the particle stuff into a single texture atlas and optimised away all the offscreen stuff, it works much better.

What I haven’t got done yet is any LOD stuff, which is ironic seeing as though my first AAA industry job was on the ‘infinite polygon engine’ of lore. I really need to get some higher detail particle effects for close-ups, and I think I might massively ramp up the number of damage textures and similar stuff for when you zoom in. As always, the problem will be fading it all in nicely so you don’t get ‘popup’ whilst retaining the performance benefit when you are zoomed out.

Plus I’ve started the very early work on the screen where you deploy your ships pre-battle.

Great space sim

It seems small indie companies can still turn out very competitive space sim games. check this out:

http://starwraith3dgames.home.att.net/evochronlegends/about.htm

I tried the demo earlier and was very impressed. I’m not sure how big the company is, but for a non-famous developer this is pretty awesome stuff. It’s good to play new space games right now, when I’m working on artwork for my own space game. BTW, finally got zooming in and out working fine, so the game has a bit more visual depth to it now. All I need to do now is make sure everything still looks good at twice the size (or four times the size), which probbaly will take weeks…

PRICE WARS : Episode I

The indie games community is ablaze with much shouting about how one of the big portals (I won’t link to them) has just cut the price of every single game to $9.99, and is offering a lot of them for $6.99.

Where the developers notified in advance, consulted or given the option to opt out?

NO.

Some portals (the ones I prefer to deal with) are really good like that. They treat the relationship as a real partnership, they credit you correctly and link to your site, and try to co-ordinate any sales or promotions with you. Other portals act like WalMart treating it’s suppliers, and basically regard the game developers as people producing cattle-feed.

This price war is going to be a major kick in the nuts for people whose business plan amounts to “make what these big publishers want, and take what they offer me”. I have to say, it was predictable a long way off. I even wrote an article be-moaning the complete lack of independence amongst so-called ‘indie’ developers a while ago.

For me, the solution was easy. I don’t consider my games to be disposable throwaway match-3 clones and do not want to be priced the same as a game that even a child finds boring after 20 minutes, so I’ve sent out the emails that remove my games from that portal. I know another indie dev has done the same thing. We have decent direct sales, and we base our businesses on selling through multiple channels at the same time. This is true independence, when nobody can tell you what games to make, or dictate terms to you. This week, people with strong direct sales were able to breathe a sigh of relief that they are not 100% dependent on portals.

We live in interesting times.