Monthly Archives: August 2011

More happenings

If you follow the change log forums (change log for iter 9) you’ll notice the iteration 9 post is pretty sparse. Although from the view count there’s only 8 of em so you probably don’t. Those 8 views (at the time of this posting) are probably mine:)

My excuse is that I’m in finals week for the summer session. I was assigned 3 papers to do and I’m on page 8 of the required 10 of the last paper. Luckily my plans for iteration 9 are pretty modest, putting in the research system into the game. This actually is mostly gui/interface work which is already done, a free wekeend and it should be done :) Research is fairly similar in function to the Command Ship upgrades screen so that helps as well (a bit of copy and paste coding here and there).

Happenings

Currently working on the research portion of the game. The player will be limited to what ships and stations can be built at the beginning, you’ve seen it all over. Gives the player something to do and choices to make (should I build ships for offense? or stations for defense?) It also gives me the chance to control difficulty (knowing what forces the player will have at the beginning) and game pace (don’t have to worry about the player having destroyers for a bit, so don’t have to send destroyers against the player).

Currently the corvette type ships are pretty useless compared to the frigates, one of the most noticeable thing is that they die way too fast in comparison. So if the player can’t build frigates yet, corvettes have to be the initial bulk of the fleet, giving them a chance to be utilized and then properly slotted into the fleet in the future (the player has a chance to appreciate their potential). Once I put in the instant action mode (scheduled for iter 10) I’ll have a chance to do game balancing, see how frigates stack up against other frigates, and how corvettes do against frigates. This will give me a chance to make sure each ship is useful.