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Miscellaneous

Crazy ideas that might just work

So, having something equipped in each slot is pretty much going to be a thing. The thing I'm toying around with now is turn rate. Call me crazy, but, it just doesn't feel right to have the same turn rate for the entire game. It actually feels slow on those faster drives!

I'm not sure if equating it to the character's speed works that well, though. I mean, the ship's velocity seems pretty insane-fast at speed 11. Which... could translate to tiles traversed per second? It's pretty hard to calculate at that speed, and with no grid to go by. Though, I'm pretty sure than in the context of turn rate, the 11 would translate to 11 degrees per second. On the flip slide, the slowest drive has a speed of 5, so, 5 tiles per second velocity and 5 degrees per second turn-rate.

Thing is, I don't want to mess with the lower-end stuff at all. Just the upper end. So, the following code-snippets... 


module Angle_360

  def self.TURN_RATE

    case self.MAX_VELOCITY.to_i

    when 5, 6

      return 5

    when 7, 8

      return 6

    when 9, 10

      return 7

    when 11, 12

      return 8

    when 13, 14

      return 9

    when 15, 16

      return 10

    end

  end

end



class Game_CharacterBase

  def move_straight(d, turn_ok = true)

    case d

    when 2

      @mov_velocity -= Angle_360.SLOWDOWN_VELOCITY_PER_FRAME

      @mov_velocity = -Angle_360.MAX_VELOCITY if @mov_velocity < -Angle_360.MAX_VELOCITY

    when 4

      @mov_angle += Angle_360.TURN_RATE

      @mov_angle -= 360 if @mov_angle > 360

    when 6

      @mov_angle -= Angle_360.TURN_RATE

      @mov_angle += 360 if @mov_angle < 0

    when 8

      @mov_velocity += Angle_360.VELOCITY_PER_FRAME

      @mov_velocity = Angle_360.MAX_VELOCITY if @mov_velocity > Angle_360.MAX_VELOCITY

    end

  end  

end


...is what I'm coming up with, and the turn rate feels manageable to me! Also, I thought it would be appropriate to set the angle of the player's ship to 0 degrees after choosing to Explore? I dunno. Might be a moot point in the end. Still, I want to test this a bit more before doing another release. Plus, I'm half-expecting a review that could point me to other issues to address!

Miscellaneous

Stream of consciousness - The new Jam, and the old Jam

With McBacon Jam #2 on the horizon, it is exceptionally tempting to upload what I have, and call this "done". I dunno, there might still be things that need to happen, but, I really can't see me adding anything to this game? I dunno, maybe it's just stress getting to me.

Though, it's hard not to be proud of this game, and how far it's come from it's McBacon Jam #1 offering. On the other hand, I sorta hate myself for taking over the game almost single-handedly. I can't help but to worry what the response will be to this game if when my team-mates come back, and see what I've done. I mean, we had this vision of the game, but, I pushed it aside. Perhaps it was only natural, though. As my team-mates became scare, and as mine was the only vision to reference, it took over. Maybe I'm just worrying over nothing as per usual.


I suppose a lesson to be learned from this game is that of perseverance. I'm certainly grateful for the work that was done when the team was together. It might have been interesting to have seen that game we envisioned come to life! However, as Real Life reared it's ugly head, the team more or less dissipated. Perhaps one would have looked at what still needed to be done, and, in a bout of frustration after noticing that the other members of the team weren't coming back any time soon, flagged the game with the dreaded "cancelled" flag. However, one can clearly see that such was not the case. I'm not saying that there wasn't frustration to be had. Of course there was! However, I did what I could with whatever skills and resources I had. I may have even learned a thing or two!


Er, didn't mean for this to be motivational. Anyway, I have a few days yet to think this over until McBacon Jam #2 starts, and I do... whatever it is that I end up doing for that.

Progress Report

Today, on "Marrend Can't Playtest This Game Without Changing Something"...

I altered commodity prices to be slightly closer to the base values, and I think trading might actually be slightly fairer! My test-runs didn't delve terribly deep, but, I didn't do any missions, and fights were able to set me back quite a bit!

Though, on the flip side, generic missions pay out a bit more on a per-jump basis! Given the processing involved in determining difficulty, it might be interesting to see which triggers first, number of missions done, or total net worth. Arguably, I should want the total net worth thresholds to be roughly equal to the value of the number of missions completed thresholds, given the average jump-length of... I would have to look that up. However, the net-worth thresholds are currently linked to equipment costs, so, yeah, EXPERIMENTATION!

I'm not sure how much of a good idea this is, but, it was somewhat a concern of mine that, once players max out their equipment, the game was a complete joke. There are now enemies that can compete with maxed-out players at the highest difficulty level, but, they only appear during missions.

Miscellaneous

Stream of consciousness - Of finishing, and concerns of communication

Just one more story-mission to write out before I go over them all one more time, and make edits where/if necessary. I still want to replace graphics, but, I'm figuring this is getting pretty close to being done!

Though, I still worry about communicating combat interactions. I've seen a number of comments about how battles are too hard, but, no specific information as to how players get overwhelmed. Part of that is my own fault for not asking for specifics, so, derp-fail on me. I did, however ask a player via PM about it, and the issue there was about getting blown up by missiles. Which is actually really useful information for me. See, enemies fire missiles only if a player's energy is at, or below, 25%. So, either I wrote the condition wrong, or the condition returned true. I can easily check the former (from what I can tell, it works as intended), but, if it's the latter, then that's a communication problem concerning how to recharge energy. Or, maybe, I should say how important it is to keep energy high? Though, players should be able to notice that they tend deal more damage to enemies that have less energy, and tend to take more damage as their own energy depletes. They should also notice that the Dodge action recharges energy.

Perhaps I'm looking at this in the wrong frame of mind. This is clearly a developer-knowledge vs player-knowledge conundrum. Of course, it's obvious to me to keep energy above half, but, would it make sense for the average player? Given the evidence of complaints, I'm gonna have to say "no". Which means the question then becomes how to resolve this in a way that the player knows what's going on (or at least has a basic understanding of what's going on), preferably without disturbing the game's flow. I suppose some kind of tutorial fight at the beginning of the game might work for this purpose? Hrm...

Announcement

Myriad developments

First, let's do a quick recap of what's been done.



No longer can players lug around 99 copies of each item! Players are limited to having a total of 100 items. This might include the "Myriad Cypher" quest-item as well (which could easily be moved out of the database, if the need arises), but, I'm not really worried about that right now. There was also an odd bug where the sale-window was also effected by this limit (pretty hard to explain!), but, I think it's been removed.




I'm getting a weird bug where players are able to buy a 0-quantity item (even though the selection appears as "disabled"), but, for the most part, it looks like shop-quantities are functional! As soon as I figure out how to swat this bug (How the hell did I disable menu-items with the teleport script in Okiku?), I'll send out a demo to various playtesters with plot missions disabled (battles as well, perhaps?) to see exactly how stable all these systems are.


While this is all normal and fortunate things that have happened (which is totally an off-reference to an upcoming game I might be am looking forward to), there is one piece of news that might be of most interest!

  • Public demo release!?


The thought-process is that, after the upcoming bout of playtesting (and whatever fixes need to happen because of it), to have three playable story-missions. At which point, I send this out for public consumption. It would still be very much a demo, but, I'm too excited about this game to keep it private much longer!

Miscellaneous

Musing of the moment

I sometimes wonder if there is not something to learn from the development of this game. Particularly for newbies people who think that having a team means everything for a game. I mean, the game started as a team effort, sure, but, most of the team seemed to have left. I wouldn't dare to suggest to anyone to do as much editing of the base-code that I've done with this game because I am insane, but, having the vision and determination to see a project through to the end has got to be worth something.

Perhaps it is too early to have such thoughts. There's still quite a bit of work ahead for this game before it can be called "complete"!

Game Design

Testing encounters, difficulty

My recent test-battles against three mercenaries was a bit tight! Though, given that they hit the hardest with gun-attacks, I'm fairly satisfied with these results for now.

The next test is getting into encounters in-game. Enemies can come in groups of two or three, with the chances supposedly favoring groups of two. So, making sure that it actually favors the two-group encounters is what I'm gonna be looking at.

Also, I've thought a bit about when the game's difficulty should go up. The obvious way is to link it to how far along players are in the story, and link equipment availability to story-progress. Another way is to link it to how many missions players have completed, and link equipment availability to that. There is also the alternative of basing it on the total assets owned by the player. This wouldn't be just a simple check for credits on-hand. It would check the value of current equipment, the base value of whatever is in cargo (Not what players bought it for, mind. Trying to keep track of that would just be... UUUUGGGGGGH!), and any extra equipment that is not equipped. The exact processing of how to do this would be something I would have to research, no doubt.

As glorious as the net worth idea could be in theory, I'm heavily inclined to linking difficulty (and equipment availability) to total number of missions complete. Though, the question to ask would be how many missions would I expect players to do? I can probably count on players doing the story-missions, but, I'm very, very, largely assuming players are doing non-story-missions along side of story-missions. I suppose what I could do, is set mostly-arbitrary difficulty-breakpoints for the demo-copy, and ask my playtesters for feedback on how badly I guessed it works out for them.

Request

Playtest the hell outta this?

Yeah, it's totally high-time this gets playtested. A few notes to those interested in playtesting, or are already on my hit list.

  • Demo will require VX Ace RTP

I'm not really sure how big the game would be with the necessary files installed at this juncture, but, until this is COMPLETE, this will be true of all outgoing demos.

  • Game-length

To the best of my knowledge, the game only lasts up to acquiring the second mission. I can suppose that such can take up two twenty minutes, but, it's really up to one's play-style.

  • Stuff I'd like you to ignore

Most notably, battler graphics, and the "Explore" splash screen are placeholders. Things I intend to replace at some point. I'm not quite sure what with, but, yeah.

  • The list of playtesters

I have not placed anyone as a playtester to the gamepage as of yet. However, from the last blog, I have Cap_H, Cashmere_Cat, and pianotm as playtesters.

If you want your name added, or removed, from this list, let me know via PM, or as a comment!

Game Design

Rumors of main menu hacks

As with the last reply I made in the previous blog, I've been chipping away at the rumors. I have three items in each category, and all are in-game. I haven't really been testing them, though. Probably my most proud accomplishment with this latest stuff I've been doing can probably be best explained with...



...a screenshot. Note the lack of "Skills", "Formation", and "Equip" options, as well as the inclusion of a "Load Game" and "System Map" options. I dunno, call me lazy, but, pressing F12 to return to the title screen, and loading the game that way, never really appealed to me. Also, there was at least one game I played (demoed?) fairly recently where the title screen scrolled (or otherwise animated) a bit before the options popped up (and even then, the "New Game" option was the default selection), and it was just annoying that I couldn't just load by goddamn game already.

Anyway, with these menu changes, players are no longer allowed to exchange equipment mid-flight. Mostly, this is to limit the number of times the bug that sets hp/mp to 1 would come up. That said, the equipment scene does still come up after accessing the Ship Outfitter at any planet. I've done some processing to ensure that hp/mp is not set to 1, however, the difference between maximum and minimum hp and/or mp should be retained. Though, I admit to not really testing that theory too much, as, at the moment, I'm just dead tired.

Miscellaneous

Maybe a BAD smuggler with some NICE contraband!

I'm not quite sure what triggered it, but, I was working on the "rumors" file when a thought occurred to me: Contraband isn't really that illegal. Right now, there's no "penalty" for shipping it. It's just like any other good on the market right now. Since encounters activate after a system-jump, would it not make sense to include a Conditional Branch (or four?), that checks too see if contraband is in the player's cargo bay, and initiate an encounter with police/local militia/the Confederation/what-have-you?

I'm not quite sure what kinds of properties the police would have. Actually, I may want to revise the properties of rebels and mercenaries to make them slightly fairer, but still a threat to deal with.

As for the "rumors" file, itself, the plan is still to fill it with 50% game-tips, 50% flavor-text, 50% complete junk, and 100% random. I have yet to write entries under the "flavor-text" category, but, I'm trying not to worry too much about it at the moment.
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