Like any good blogger, it’s been quite a while since I’ve updated here. The reason is that I fell into a common trap for aspiring game developers – I tried building a game that was way too big. Every advice article on game development tells you to make small, simple games like puzzlers or basic arcade games. Unfortunately, when I think about building games, I tend to envision grand scale sandbox worlds full of adventure, so my “small” game was just going to be a open world role playing game with infinite replayability and all sorts of other cool stuff.

I’m also heavily inspired by artwork, so when I saw some cool looking isomorphic style game screen shots, I thought I would try to build a game like that. I actually spent quite a lot of time trying to build a generic turn based combat framework first, but soon discovered that having concrete visuals for my game gave me a lot more motivation. In the end though, the movement on the isometric grid became a pain because I was using a weird coordinate system.  I also realized the project was just way too complex to ever get finished, and I didn’t actually have any great ideas about how to make turn based fantasy RPG combat particularly fun.

To make movement simpler, I switched to a top down perspective, and drew some inspiration from the Roguelike variety of games. I read that roguelikes are one of the few types of games where a single developer is capable of producing a full game. This is generally due to the fact that these games use simple ASCII display characters instead of real pixel art, but I ignored that fact and figured I’d see what I could build.

It started out pretty simple, and it helped that I had a nice tileset to start with. It took a bit of work to make the tiles display properly (it automatically figures out where to draw each type of wall), but the result looked quite nice. Next I added a few monsters to walk around (luckily Slick has built-in A* that made this very easy).  Then I decided it looked too much like you were walking around through a well lit mall, so I added some lighting… much better! Finally, I added a stats and inventory screen which is actually more or less usable.

I quite like how the game looks as you wander around through dark corridors, but to make this into a full fledged game will still take a lot more work. I started reading up on procedurally generated dungeons, since the idea of building all the game maps myself makes the task even more intimidating. I’ve tried the BSP based dungeon generation technique described here a bit, but haven’t found something I really like yet.

These have been a fun pair of projects, and I’ve learned a ton from both of them. For me, I don’t really build games with a goal of completing them, but instead with the goal of learning some interesting things along the way. It’s a great creative outlet.

But, I am trying to learn one important lesson from all this work — it really is best to try a SMALL game design concept!

So I’m already starting my next project which will take this lesson to heart… perhaps in another six months I will have learned the important lesson of “sticking with a project until you complete it”….

I played around a bit with my space combat demo the other day and found that it was actually a lot more fun than I had remembered.  Trying to shoot at the enemy isn’t very exciting, but just flying around can be quite entertaining. I’ve been trying to think a little more about ways to make the game more fun and realy take advantage of the good parts of the game.

What is fun:

• Weaving in and out of enemy projectiles
• The smoothly zooming camera system

Not so much fun:

• Repeatedly shooting at an enemy while it sits there and shoots you
• Losing the sense of speed (mainly happens when there are no planets within your field of view)

Here’s what I think might be fun

• Change from 1v1 duels to having lots of small enemies trying to stop you as you race towards some goal
• Have asteroids or some other obstacles frequently in your way to give both a better sense of speed and more difficulty
• Have periodic 1v1 boss fights that require you to target the boss’ weak points and recognize its attack pattern

I’m not entirely sure how these fit together, but it could make sense if the idea is that you are making some last ditch effort to break through some enemy defenses to reach their main capitol ship. I’m mainly worried about the programming aspects of implementing these ideas — the primary reason I wanted to make a space game was to be able to avoid complicated things like collision detection and fancy AI!

So I’m not sure how this will work out, but the ideas have inspired me to start working on the code which otherwise had been abandoned for about 6 months…

The Idea

You are the captain of a small space craft. You must head out into the galaxy in search of fame and forture. To this end, you can capture hostile ships, trade goods between planets, and explore uncharted territories. Will you help expand the empire of your own race, or will you be mercenary pirate, plundering any ship foolish enough to cross your path? Something along the lines of Sid Meier’s Pirates, but with space suits and funny looking aliens.

Progress so far

• Parallax starfield gives nice 3d movement effect
• Ships move/rotate with proper physics
• Keyboard controls player ship
• Ships can shoot lasers
• Seeker AI that follows player and shoots when close enough

Milestone 0.5 – Basic Combat Test Cases

• Enemy ships attack, die, and respawn
• Player can take damage (should respawn after death)

The first step will be to figure out whether combat like this can be fun, or whether I need bigger/more/different ships of some sort. Drawing inspiration from the ship to ship combat in the original Pirates is tricky, since that combat is very slow.  It seems silly to just have big ships sit next to each other and shoot, so we need something a little more interesting.  To start, I am testing small ship dog fights which require a lot more movement. At this point they look cool, but I’m not sure if there is any real strategy or enough fun.