Focusing on polish ahead of iter 12. So bug fixes, gui fixes, touch ups etc. Had a playthrough and that yielded about a half a dozen notes on tweaks.

The recently added “mouse over” info in tactical mode is really a great addition. Originally the mouse over info (eg: put the mouse over an asteroid base to see its name and crew count) was to help the player in selecting objects, but now has evolved into its own very neat feature. For example putting the mouse over an asteroid base lets the player see not only its name and crew count, but also its resources (and +- changes in them), shipyard queue, research queue. Thus this means that instead of the player having to look at 3 different screens the player simply has to mouse over the base to find out the summary information. This means that the player gets to hang out in a more active state (zooming around and mouse overing on objects) rather than a more passive (sitting in the shipyard or research screens). A really cool feature I believe, and I have to admit (somewhat sheepishly) that I didn’t expect this big of an impact, though it now seems obvious.

The dynamic of the player having two roles – the warrior and the leader is taking shape niceley. Meaning that the player can engage in ship to ship combat in ship mode and while waiting for these engagements will be managing the empire. This is a good sign that I’m very happy to see.

Added “hit pings” (when a weapon hits an object) to tactical and re-did the tactical explosion “pings” (when an object gets destroyed). Quite the improvement, but now I’m on the fence about the “projectile” tracers that appear in tactical when a weapon gets fired. The goal is to show the player that an object is firing on another object – but not portray the exact direction and position of the weapon, so this gets a bit lost I think, I’ll probably leave it in for iter 12, but may remove it in later iterations.

Regarding the “hit pings” they are a neat effect, but because I want to differenciate tactical from ship modes – I don’t want every hit to appear in tactical – while I do want every hit to appear in ship mode. Tactical is the “information/strategy” mode so the point is to show the player that an object is getting hit, but again not portray the exact quantity and points of hit, so what happens is that the pings are limited to one every n number of seconds (currently I believe it is every 0.8 seconds). This is moddable as are the explosion and hit pings.

Some balancing issues: I split the Correa Frigate into two variants – the G and the T – the G variant has the 4 turrets, while the T has 2 turrets and the torpedo tubes. Before the ship had 4 turrets and the 6 tubes, kind of an overkill and the role was a bit muddled. The two “new” ships got a new point defense turret to add some more fun/use to them. Overall this is a neat change – the goal is that the G is the more direct ship, but the T is the more firepower though at a overall longer time and risk – because torpedos take time to reach their target and can be shot down. This will be a bit of a challenge to balance out.

Speaking of balance – right now it is pretty bad – this is because (all of the) frigate ships do too much damage too fast. I am going to tweak the projectiles that the frigate turrets to have a slower velocity – but overall the same range. Hopefully this will allow for many improvements – including making fighters more useful since they are nearly always hit by offensive frigate turrets – which are intended to be used versus large craft and not fighters. Because the projectiles travel so fast they are able to hit fighters with ease. Gotta fix that. Lots of issues remain, but that is the name of the game.

Mostly doing some polish, lots of little things – bug fixes, AI tweaks, visuals, gui, etc. Have mostly ran out of things I want to do for iter 12 so going to hold off on some larger things for the next iteration.

Speaking of the next iteration – the rought plan is to polish up ship switching (instead of blindly toggling ships you’ll get a little menu sorted by class of ship and distance to current position). Then work on AI and then allow for traveling to different “sectors” via the rock gates.

The AI work is probably the most interesting basically I want to work on “ship postures” – right now they are defensive and aggressive, and this setting determins at what range the ship will engage enemies, but I am planning on changing this to engage and pursue. Engage means engage nearby (without using gravity drive), pursue means ok to pursue far away (ok to use gravity drive). Ships will by default be engage, this will hopefuly eliminate some issues where player ships may fly off to far away places and promply get slaughtered by the defenders. Basically the goal is to make the AI more predictable.

Been working on visual feedback in tactical mode – so now you’ll see “pings” that represent objects being destroyed while in tactical mode. You’ll also see little streaks representing weapons fire. Both are placeholder particles and are in a bad need of re-work, but for now I’ll ignore them.

Also I’ve added “nav points” – basically you can create a sort of a virtual navigation beacon – and you can move this nav point and issue a go to commands to ship by selecting ships and then right clicking on the nav point. Via this you can organize your ships a bit better. If you move the nav point ships that were going to it will be updated as well – giving you a sort of a real time command over ships, I think its pretty neat

Because you can also select and focus the camera on these nav points – you can quickly zoom around the map to points of interest. For example maybe nav point 1 is your home base, and nav point 2 is an enemy base you want to keep an eye out. Press Alt 2 to select the 2nd nav point then press Alt 2 and your camera will move to look at it automatically.

I’m mostly running out of ideas for neat control features in Tactical mode, I think they are fairly solid now, so after this weekend I’ll probably focus on more visual feedback, then tweak some AI stuff, polish some and we’ll have iteration 12 to play with.

Got most of the “issue commands to individual turrets” done in Tactical mode. I always wanted the player to have control over individual turrets – to allow a scenario where the player might tell 2 turrets to attack an enemy to the right and 2 to attack an enemy to the left – or whatever combination of turrets and enemies based on the actual battle scenario. I think this gives an added layer of control and strenghtens the RTS game play. So now when the player selects a ship or a station that has turrets – the turrets will appear in tactical mode, when the player clicks on a turret or turrets (player can chose multiples via holding down the shift key) and then issue orders like normal (right click on an enemy target) to the turrets. The other options that now become avaiable to the player after selecting a turret or turrets is making that turret a primary weapon meaning that if the fire trigger/button/etc is pressed the turret will fire when under the player’s command. The final option with turrets is to set their “roles” – if you recall turrets can be set to be missile defense, offense and a few other roles.

Basically just like you can order ships and tweak their AI and orders in tactical mode, you can order turrets. Hopefuly I’ll be able to balance out the gameplay that this is actually useful to the player, I have to make sure that fights last long enough and are strategic enough to warrant this.

Now I’m turning my attention towards putting in more visual feedback in tactical mode, so if a ship gets hit or a ship explodes, I want the player to see some little damage pings or what not in tactical mode, making it a lot less dry and a lot more informative than before – where a destroyed object would simply dissapear in tactical mode.

Another cool thing is that these changes will faciliate easily putting in other “tactical objects” – for example navigation markers and objective markers/highlights. The ETA for iteration 12 is the end of the upcoming month – so the end of June. Looking forward to it!

Got diablo 3

For those wanting to play with their favorite indie game dev my battle tag is: Chaosavy#1836

I try to avoid putting the more “emotional” aspects into this blog, but here goes, my “hope reserves” took a huge hit with losing Drew, and this is a big factor. I try not to dwell on things and for the most part I’ve always been successful at this in my reletively young life. This however is a bit different of a story because this project is a big part of my inner life – I constantly think about it – so Drew’s passing is a constant presence due to the huge link that still exists. Not only losing a friend, but also losing a sounding board, a constant source of feedback, praise, criticism, and many aspects that were a constant back and forth which gave me much energy and sharpened planning and goals. It was basically a guarantee that this project would get good art, that I would get more than I asked for in terms of the visual and the game world, that my good ideas would be enhanced and bad ones questioned, that new ideas would come in – and be supported by a great degree of dedication. I was living in a dream come true and for the most part I was aware of this, I did appreciate it and still do.

Now I find it hard to make decisions on the future of the project because I’m not sure if artistically I can do (eg: get the art to support) the things I want, so it is sort of this negative presence that I have to shake to continue in a more determined and forceful way.

The project is continuing and will do so, but it would be stronger if I had a better sense of direction. I hope that I’ll read this entry in the near and distant future(s) and see it as another challenge that I overcame – the challenge is always internal – I believe that I (and humans in general) have a lot of the tools we need – we just have to use them.

Added visualizations for these commands – so for example if you want to know what ship A is doing… click on that ship and you’ll see if its patroling, turning, moving some place. This also includes the ability to see multiple way points – if they were specified via the newly re-vamped move command. Speaking of which you can now also initiate a move command via right clicking on an empty spot on the map – much like every other RTS does Something that was very much missing from the project.

I’ve also added “keyboard grouping” for ships – yep again – much like every other RTS does – press CTRL + 1,2…0 to designate selected ships to a group, then press that key to select those ships. So you can designate a defensive fleet, offensive fleets, support fleets, and quickly select them and issue orders. So far so good on these commands, but lots of polish is needed. More command and tactical visualizations on the horizon: gravity drive hops, hold command visual, mouse over info (now that right clicking an empty spot has a different function – need to show player what they are right clicking on), and hopefuly I’ll get to “combat” visualizations in tactical mode as well – ships firing on one another, taking damage, and exploding.

Working on tactical commands, here’s a quick recap:

Added a “Wait” command – sometimes you may want heavy assault shisp to go in first and more vulnerable marine frigates to wait a minute before entering the battle field.
Added a “rotate” command and put in a visual representation of where the ship(s) will rotate to.

What’s interesting about the wait and rotate commands is that these are “top level” commands – so wait will always jump to the top except when the command is rotate, so for example you could tell your ships to wait a minute before heading into battle, but in the meantime you could tell them to rotate so that their turrets get good firing angles prior to heading in.

Re-did a bunch of the tactical gui – added the above commands and the other ones (patrol, hold etc) to “buttons” which will eventually be turned from text into little icons to save space and to lessen the learning curve.

Next up is re-doing the move command and then issuing individual orders to turrets – so you could issue a wait command to your frigates – send in the fighters to distract your enemy – tell the frigates to turn a certain way, issue commands to the frigates turrets – then order a move command to strafe the battle field with turret fire Hopefuly these commands will satisfy any budding space tacticians
Feel really excited about adding in these commands.

Well its been about 2 weeks of little to no activity. Few factors at work here: its always a bit difficult to get back into the project after releasing an iteration (the question becomes what to do next), the end of a school semester, had a final exam yesterday (one (Summer) more to go till degre…) and of course Drew’s passing.

Yesterday had a fairly rough time, everything I started seemed to go badly, either I wasn’t very interested in that aspect or it was evading me due to lack of concentration, today was much better, I have a fairly good focus for iteration 12. Tactical mode enhancements. Focusing mostly on giving the player more control over ships. First few steps: a hold this position and patrol this position commands. Next up issuing go to this position via mouse right clicks and other misc commands to let the player communicate with his/her forces. Hoping to also put in the ability to issue individual turret orders – eg: in Tactical mode click on a turret – then right click on enemy.

So feeling good about the weekened right now – coding useful and interesting features, and back on track. I’m thinking that Iteration 12 is about a month and a half away going to try to focus on its scope to release it in a fairly timely fashion.