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5
Nov
I often find myself asking the question, ‘What is innovation?’, the actual definition is ‘The act of introducing something new.’ which is as unhelpful as it could possibly be. Innovation to me is the act of creating something that breaks out of the boundaries of what exists already.. But is that always possible? My main project over the last couple of weeks has specifically been the mail system, arguably one of the most important features of any game, the home of communication and team work, bringing people together for the common good of the galaxy, as simple as this may sound, it is indeed no small task. I’ve done a lot of research into the matter, and created several prototypes each behaving in entirely different ways, I’ve tried the ‘Split Panel’ approach (the concept of clicking on a mail and reading it immediately below), I’ve tried threading views with a full collapsing tree of Subject -> Replies -> Mail, I’ve tried ‘New Window’ techniques, and all of them with their own distinct benefits have quite a few flaws as well. I’ve reviewed 10 different mail clients (some harder to uninstall than others!), 15 different mail websites, eventually realising that simplicity is best, the easiest mail clients to use had very simple yet powerful interfaces. For Shadow Wars we aren’t looking for folder views, extensive filtering systems, multiple window reading or sophisticated spam management, we’re looking for a very simple read and reply system. This got me turning back to the previous DarkGalaxy system, excluding the bugs, this was a reasonable solution, and can be easily tweaked and improved to fit a new game. Add styling to easily determine read from unread, attach the ‘Notifications’ as mentioned in my previous blog post, include some nice features like simple BB Code for formatting, mail forwarding etc. And you have a powerful mail client. Innovation is a powerful word, it conjures up thoughts of creativity and stepping outside the box, but on a few occasions after doing the research and demos, you may feel that you’re standing a few miles from said box, when it wasn’t a bad box to start with!
10
Oct
One of the first things which needs to be considered when designing an interface for a web-based game is the architecture of the display. I’m going to use DarkGalaxy as a place for comparison as it’s something most of you are familiar with and can hopefully relate to. One word which is being constantly thrown around TE HQ is ’simple’. A lot of ideas and plans get thrown out at the drawing board simply because they are too complex, not from the development side but instead from the usability side, but how do we evaluate this? It comes down to a few simple rules:
These points may seem pretty obvious, but unless you specifically analyse each one before development begins, you may end up wasting time at a later date trying to improve behaviour, or possibly worse, leaving it as it is. Lets take the following scenario as an example, I’ve just received an important mail which I have to read immediately. I’m currently in the middle of organising a planet, lets look at the DG way of handling this:
This is somewhat considered the ‘Standard’ way of handling mail, and I’m sure you would forgive us for following this methods for Shadow Wars, but lets look at our criteria, We have 5 or 6 clicks (including returning to the start point), you loose your spot during planet management, the prompt for a new email is vague (lack of info as to who mailed you from the initial look meaning you cannot spontaneously decide whether to ignore it), including page loads it can take a few minutes to reply, and it’s mail, so there isn’t any unnecessary input. In most cases it’s easier to have a separate browser window to handle mail. So we spend some time taking a closer look at this, looking for ways to streamline the process and make it more accessible. One of the solutions is as follows:
With those small steps, we’ve significantly simplified the ‘dynamic mailing’ procedure, and have given the user the ability to easily interact with mails, as well as the choice to easily ignore them if they lack importance. It will still take a moment to download the full email, but you’re receiving content which is directly relevant to what you need (as opposed to having to download the entire mail list). This hopefully gives you an idea of some of the approaches we are taking to improve the online turn-based experiance, and make Shadow Wars a fun game to experiance and play.
9
Oct
Non-Combat Ships There are four non-combat ships. The colony ship is important early on in the game, allowing you to expand your colonies to the planets and asteroids surrounding your homeworld. The trading ship provides a means of transferring much needed resouces between those worlds. As the game progresses and you start to encounter hostile fleets and worlds, you may wish to build up forces to invade those worlds. The drop ship carries troops to invade hostile worlds. Finally the jump ship is a special ship only worth building later on in the game. It can establish new wormholes between planets. If protected heavily and deployed where most needed, they could easily tip the balance in a long running game. Colony Ship Trading Ship Drop Ship Jump Ship Colony Types A planet is large, with the most room to build all the different structures, but has a low abundance of Mass & Energy. An asteroid on the other hand is relatively small with little space for structures, but has a high abundance of Mass & Energy. Planet Asteroid Colonization Invasion Inter-Planetary Travel Inter-Stellar Travel
5
Sep
Ships There are only three combat military ships in the game: Fighter, Bomber & Battleship. These provide a rock-paper-scissors type approach to combat that should simplify the system for new players, but hopefully still make the game tactical enough for die-hard players. To invade hostile colonies, Drop Ships are required to carry the attack Droids. A Colony Ship is required to settle a new planet. A Trading Ship allows resources to be transferred for free between colonies in different systems. Figher Bomber Battleship Combat When a fleet moves into the same square as a hostile fleet, combat occurs. All ships fire simultaniously in combat. Allied fleets (those of the same faction) will combine into one huge fleet as do those in the opposing faction. Combat is resolved each turn, on the turn, and does not always result in all ships from one side or the other (or indeed any ships) being destroyed. To improve the chances of success in combat, it is useful overwhelm the hostile force using overkill. Overkill
4
Sep
Military Command Each player must choose early on whether to go for a military role or merchant role in the game. The military ranks can be purchased at any time, although they must be purchased in order. Each rank improves the speed at which military ships can be built, and enables purchase of selected military ships. Military Rank (Major) Military Rank (Colonel) Military Rank (General) Merchants Guild Guild Rank (Member) Guild Rank (Trader) Guild Rank (Master) Resources There are going to be three resources in the game: Mass, Energy & Credits. Mass and Energy will be quick and easy to get a steady income from, however Credits are more difficult to get hold of. Mass is essential early on for building structures and ships, while those who concentrate on energy will be able to benefit more from the special abilities. Credits are generally useful, especially for emergency situations, however they are harder to get lots of and the rate of exchange when trading is poor. Credits Mass Energy
30
Aug
Game Types When you first join a game, two major game types will be available: Casual & Dedicated. Casual games will be a configured to be more beneficial for new players or those who are not able to play regularly. Dedicated games will be configured to be most beneficial for those players who are experienced or able to login daily. There will also be tournament games regularly for those die-hards who want to challenge for a title and cash prizes. These games will typically be very short and intense, and only a few players can play in each game. A tournament can also be set up at any time between players who wish to do so. These games will take place in very small galaxies. Casual Game Type
Dedicated Game Type
Tournament Games
Officials To control the rate at which players can aquiring planets or create new fleets, officials must be hired to administer them. These measures protect newer players by giving some guarantee that a number of planets will always be available to colonize or even invade. Dedicated players will still be able to aquire planets more quickly than casual players, but not take more than their fair share. Officials can be hired at any time, if you have sufficient credits. They do take time to hire though as well, so don’t think you can just hire them at a moments notice in time to colonise or invade, you will need to plan in advance. Planetary Governer
Fleet Admiral
17
Aug
One of the most important features of Shadow Wars is the galaxy layout. Rather than the traditional Dark Galaxy ‘anywhere-to-anywhere’ model, the Shadow Wars galaxy has a much more intuitive layout. The basic idea was to restict travel to specific wormholes between solar systems in the galaxy. This makes movement very linear and creates battlegrounds where the major travel route bottlenecks are located. Writing a system like this seemed relatively easy, but once I started working on the project a few issues came up. The first was linking the systems together. The algorithm i wrote aimed at linking each system to its nearest 3 neighbours. This worked fine, but once i rendered the links on an image an issue was immediately obvious - some of the links crossed each other, messing up the visual experience. To solve it I checked ALL the existing links when adding a new one, not adding it if it crossed any existing link. The second problem was not only a visual problem, but a show-stopper. If the galaxy was not densely enough packed with stars, isolated collections of stars would be generated, small islands of stars, not conneted to the rest of the galaxy. To solve this I added a special checking algorithm that identified all the islands of stars in the galaxy and connected them together by their nearest systems. These initial algorithms and a demonstration applet were actually written last year. This code has been pulled out, cleaned, polished and improved, and now its ready to back the new Shadow Wars game. I added a little image-generator utility to the code so i could quickly generate galaxies and play around with the settings. Here are a few of the generated images to give you a little more of an idea of what can been done with the layout. As there are two factions in this game, take note of the green/red - these colours are there to represent the starting positions of the players in the two factions.  The galaxy systems (including faction colours)  The galaxy systems (including factions & wormholes linking them) There are quite a lot of options that will allow the galaxy to be made larger or smaller, increase/decrease density and number of lines (wormholes), and number of systems per faction. The above example has 2000 systems, 500 for each faction (red/green) and 1000 neutral in the middle. Here is another example with 600 systems, 200 for each faction and 200 neutral in the middle.  600 systems, 200 for each faction  600 systems, 200 for each faction (only two wormholes per system) I’ll play around with the settings, perhaps make a really crazily large one and a tiny one for fun
11
Aug
A lot of people have been asking if we are working on anything specific, and the answer is, well, yes.. Yes we are. ShadowWars was originally slated to replace DarkGalaxy as a dominant Space Based Strategy, we’ve taken what could be defined as a lot of the problems with the DarkGalaxy game play, and tried to improve on them as much as possible, resulting in a game which is much easier to pick up and play, and is more balanced. Below I’m going to list a few of the features, and attempt to explain the reasoning behind them. Please note: All information provided here is subject to change during game development. Endless GameplayOne of the things that gets frequently brought to our attention about DG, is the inability to complete games due to the turn limit, one of the first things we want to do with ShadowWars is just give an end condition of “total annihilation”, and leave the game running permanently until this occurs. This has been made possible with faction based game play (see below), and allows games to last weeks / months maybe even years if people continue to fight the good fight. Faction Based GameplayOne of the bigger problems in DG is the ability for a single large alliance to just dominate, the goals were to get as many good people into your alliance as possible, resulting in what could be defined as ’superpowers’ in the universe, if any small alliance stepped in the way, they were trodden on, and newer players to the game were having difficulties getting any sort of foothold without submitting to them. The concept behind factions, is that there are only two opposing sides fighting against each other. The concept of alliances will still remain inside the greater faction, but you can only war against those on the other side. This essentially allows for ’squads’ of people forcing their way forward (see Navigation below) and working together towards the end goal. We will be looking to add bonuses for working in an alliance, so it’s not something to be completely ignored, but those at this point are changing frequently. This allows players to not only go lone-wolf if they choose, but it gives them a chance to make an impact in some way. Linear Navigation
The change to navigation is quite substantial, we will be moving from the current system, and making something new and shiny. We’re basing the entire game in a single galaxy, which happens to be dark (just a coincidence :p). We’re running around the idea that to get from A->C, you have to go through B. Each system will have several planets, and at least one ‘SpaceGate’ (Name subject to change) connecting it to nearby systems. You will go through the gates, travel across a systems, then go out the gate on the other side, then rinse / repeat until you’ve reached your destination. To make things interesting, it will be possible to place fleets on either end of the gate, and have them ambush opposing fleets coming through. This adds an interesting dynamic to the game, as due to navigation paths, there may be some key systems which should be defended to the best of their ability, but at the same time, the opposing faction will be working together to destroy your block and exploit it as a good entrance into your territory. This is where teamwork comes into play heavily, the fighting will be a tense back and forth in the center of the galaxy.. Oh, and to add to the fun, there will be no homeworld protection, it will take a LONG time to get back there and the journey will be full of peril, but flanking them would be hugely beneficial to your faction! At the end of the day, pictures speak louder than words, so there are some example images of something that’s been worked on. Again, this is FAR from complete, it’s more of a test application which we’ve been playing about with, but should give you a reasonable idea of what i’m talking about. Click the thumbnails to expand them. Simplified GameplayTo help keep new players participating in games, the game mechanics are going to be easier to understand, to that end, we hope to drop the number of resources down to two (maybe three), but there will be no location population, and we’ll also be doing away with research. Game cues will prompt users on how to do things, and a UI featuring more modern web technologies (for example, drag and drop) will allow the user to do things like edit queues easily and efficiently. We will also be dropping the number of combat ready ships to a handful, and adopting more of a ‘rock-paper-scissors’ approach to combat, but maintaining enough depth for the hard-core strategists to put their skill to use. Admittedly, there will be a lot of questions / comments about this subject specifically, please feel free to voice them in the comment section, please remember that all comments are moderated to avoid inappropriateness. Thanks for reading
4
Aug
Something I’ve learned (possibly the hard way), over the past few years, is that playing games in a development environment is absolutely no substitute to playing the games against other people, which, at the end of the day, makes a lot of the decisions made personal. I can sit here for hours and say “Yep, they would like this”, but I’ve never really stopped to ask the question “But would they?”.. So, with this in mind, I’m hoping to extend an olive branch back to the community with some posts known as ‘Ask the Players’, where I chuck out general ideas, and you form them into something a little more specific, not only to see if we are on the same page, but to allow the creativity flow both ways. There may be some ideas which your thousands of game play hours may be able to contribute and have taken on board. To allow for everyone’s voices to be heard, i wont be asking for technical implementations, or for users to produce code (I’ll be handling that myself!), but instead just general descriptions or if you’re feeling creative, a few images, and with a little luck, I’ll be able to generate something which meets most peoples need. Obviously, I have full discretion on the features / functionality implemented, and may not be able to give feedback on every suggestion, and you may not see every suggestion plugged into the next produced game either, but I’ll endeavour to have the best suggestions implemented in some form or another, so when the new games come along, we’ll have something which is intuitive, accessible and easy to play for everyone. The first ‘Ask the Players’ will be coming in a couple of days, so stay tuned!
18
Jul
Welcome one and all to the new TurnEngine blog, a place where myself and Zedd can dump random thoughts, on both a general and Technical level with all those who hope to keep track of the development process. The blog is separated into different sections (indicated on the right), although everything we post will be presented on this page, if you’re not interested in the technical details, you can just hit the ‘General’ link and see all the English (as opposed to geek) posts. We’ll try and make sure everything goes to the right place All comments will be moderated by myself, to help prevent the same spamming here we occasionally see on the forums (you know who you are :P). We also provide RSS feeds on this blog, so feel free to subscribe, and be notified whenever we make a new post Enjoy! |
