This week I took time off from my personal projects and basically worked a lot and focused on Path of Exile.
As a part of that, I did build a small simulator that modeled the damage output of the Path of Exile bleed mechanic, but it’s not something I plan to share with the world. Here’s a screenshot:
More of the same, I predict. I’m taking a brief break from game dev. But I wanted to continue posting here so it is easier for me to transition back into active dev work.
This week I spent time re-envisioning the space game. I have been really unhappy with the state of the game and not finding the “fun” that I want out of it. Over the last week I did make substantial progress and I have a new path I’m taking.
Here is the UI for the new, combined “Mining Fleet”:
The new capital ships can serve as an orbital body for smaller ships:
Here the fleet is mining:
Lastly, I am working on adding a game progression feature to the mining fleet, which is engineering & crafting. The idea here is that every capital ship should provide some core “growth” mechanic for the game as a whole. For mining, this means converting resources into projects and components, which can be used to upgrade your capital ships. More on this later.
My motivation for this project has waned significantly. I think I am reaching the point I reach with a lot of these projects, where I have yet to “find the groove” in making a game I enjoy making and playing. This is an expected and not at all surprising outcome.
As a result, I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks working on it less and trying to redevelop my interest in it. I make games as a hobby, not a profession, and it competes for my spare time. I am also a Path of Exile player, and there is a big content patch later this week so I expect my “game playing” time will reduce my “game making” time. Again, this is good. I do this for fun, and so it competes with other fun things.
I have been thinking about returning to an older project of mine, which was another idle game involving an RPG overworld. I don’t think I will, but the fondness with which I look upon the work I did there is a reminder that part of my loss of motivation on these projects is that I simply get tired of looking at them. So, maybe the time focusing on other hobbies over the next couple of weeks will renew my motivation.
Here’s some screenshots of my older project:
Definitely had “good bones”. Might come back to it.
No video this week. I will resume posting videos when progress continues.
This week I spent some time doing pixel art and VFX for a new feature in the game: capital ships. I’ll admit that this week was more of a “fun tasks” week, which basically involved me spending some time doing art, and obsessing over some unimportant but otherwise satisfying visual presentation stuff.
I have wanted for a while to add a feature to the game that gave players a more important “ship” to manage. Right now all ships are very small and perform specific isolated tasks. I think upgrading these ships should be noncomplicated, perhaps either automatically occurring with experience level and research projects. But I want an experience in the game where the player can “kit out” a vessel with modules, better engines, etc. So, I had this idea for capital ships:
I started by looking at some references from sci-fi movies, tv shows and books, as well as other artwork. First I blocked out a “massing” to get the size right:
Added some details and more sense of volume, as well as thrust that matches the engine design:
More details:
I posted a YouTube video update as well:
This week I spent a large amount of time designing and implementing a new ship type: Research Vessel. This ship allows the player to generate Research Data, which, upon accumulating 100,000 units, becomes a Research Point. Research points are then used to purchase levels in various Research Projects. Under this system the player will gain enhancements for other game mechanics: ship performance, access to new orbital improvements, enhancement of those orbital improvements, etc.
There is a new UI screen that shows the status of research data accumulation, points, and projects:
With the introduction of research the game is beginning to feel more engaging – there’s more to look forward to for the player, there are more decisions to be made (which ship type should I spend my next license on?), more goals (completing projects). That said, the game still feels very empty, and I really need to identify a way to flesh out the resource acquisition and processing. Currently there is acquisition (mining), sorting (the sorter), and that is the terminus.
I would like to experiment with processing, perhaps adding an Orbital Autofactory building type which can produce materials of various types. I have mentioned this before – turning Iron Ore into Iron Plates, for example. This will require significant design and development, as I have not yet implemented player-built orbital improvements. Currently the player starts the game with a Spacedock, an Orbital Warehouse and an Orbital Sorter. The UI for these buildings is just a series of buttons at the bottom of the screen, and it will not scale well for having a large number of improvements. I need to consider an icon-based system (perhaps a grid, almost like an “inventory” of building types. Maybe they have different sizes? I’m imagining a Diablo-style inventory system. Literally thinking “out loud” while I type this.)
Finally, I need to consider the credits system, which is currently the only “money” in the game. I need to decide how this will be used, if at all, and what the benefit to the player is.
I am back with a video update this week. Click below to see the Research System in action.
This weeks update is brief, due to a lack of visible progress on the game. At the end of last week I predicted this week would be “design heavy” and result in a lack of visible progress, but I feel that progress was even less than I predicted, for several reasons:
I have decided to try implementing Research Ships as an early game mechanic to give the player something else to care about while waiting for miners to produce resources. I don’t want to dramatically increase resource acquisition in the early game, nor dramatically reduce resource costs, as this might trivialize later game scale. As such, I began implementing a research ship. Which leads me to problem #2.
From the outset of this project I have just been dumping increasing amounts of logic into the AI Update() tick for mining ships. The problem is that a substantial amount of what mining ships do can be generalized for all space fairing vessels, be them ships or stations. At this point I had a choice: continue adding more complexity to this already monolithic piece of logic, or refactor. I chose the latter which leads me to problem #3.
There are a lot of AI design patterns for games, and it’s not really my area of expertise. I have implemented a few of them over the years but I wanted to do a better job this time. Part of why I make games is because I want to refine my command of the artform. So I spent a lot of time looing at the work of others, and made some prototype implementations of a few approaches:
To make the week more interesting, my primary development workstation began having issues with the CPU overheating. After reapplying the heatsink and fan with a fresh clean layer of thermal paste, it was still not able to stay cool. Ultimately I bought a new cooler (liquid based) and now the system is running both cooler and quieter. Unfortunately that took some time.
There were some minor UI improvements. Mostly minor fixes here and there, such as:
There will be no video update this week as I have nothing to show, and the game doesn’t even compile at the moment!
I will finish the AI fixes this week, and see if I can get the early game research system working. I hope to have a nice big video update a week from now.
This week I spent some time implementing numerous UI fixes and improvements, feature gating behind game progress, and prototyped out some of the design ideas I proposed last week.
I am encountering new design challenges, which is that there’s not a lot to do at this point. The game goes into an idle state very quickly, and you will be bored earlier. Periods of time where there isn’t much to do are a hallmark of the genre, but every good idle/incremental has an initial “hook” that grabs the player and says “hey look at this! you want MORE of this!”. Generally idle games can be pretty “high touch” during the first few hours. I’d like to find a way to make the early hours more enticing, and so I will spend the coming week thinking of ways to do that. The void of space is pretty hard to overcome, though.
Overall, this week was dense with lots of accomplished small tasks. I expect next week, being largely a “design heavy” week, will not involve a lot of visible progress. But maybe a spark of inspiration will change that. We will see.
In summary, over the last week I accomplished:
The new license acquisition system:
Drone Assembly UI:
As always, see the video below for a more in-depth view.
Click below to watch it on YouTube:
This week I spent time working through design issues I identified last week. Mainly, how to complexify the resource gathering pipeline, the ship license system, and some of the UI. I’m still struggling a bit with some of these concepts, but I’ve gotten far enough that I can work through them by building prototypes and seeing how fun they are.
This week I:
I did not meet my goal of completing the gather-build-gather resource loop this week, but I accomplished plenty on other fronts and feel good about that. This coming week I will work on the licensing system, and begin UI planning work for ship/improvement construction.
Watch the video below to see this week’s work in action.
This week I worked on a lot of core mechanical issues. Last week I set a goal for myself: have the core gameplay loop working, so that I can collect resources and spend them to buy more ships. I give myself about a 50% success on this one, as the ships now collect resources, return them to the nearest Orbital Warehouse (OW), and the OW user interface displays them. What I did not accomplish is the purchasing of new ships. This currently still costs the player nothing, as I have spent a lot of time throwing ideas against the wall to figure out how I want the cycle to work.
Originally, I wanted “credits” to be the core currency. An ever-rising number that you make by selling resources. The loop is then: build ship -> obtain resources -> sell resources -> buy more ships. This felt transparent and boring, and I have decided that I’m going to add resource processing to the game, in the form of orbital improvements that can turn X resource into Y.
For example: miners collect “Raw Minerals”, which is basically “mineral rich dirt”. These need to be sorted in an Orbital Centrifuge, which will fill up “buckets” of various ore types until the progress bar is full, and the player will obtain 1 ton of that ore type. The ore shows up in the adjacent warehouse, and then can be picked up by an Orbital Metals Refinery, which can turn the ores into various products. Much of this still design stage, though I have worked on some UI mockups.
This coming week I would like to implement the Orbital Centrifuge and Orbital Metal Refinery, allowing production of Iron Plates, which will be used to build ships, upgrades and orbital improvements. If I end next week with those two buildings fully working, I will feel accomplished.
It’s me, tatsumi_oreo, aka tatsumi, aka Tatzen, aka John Hargrove. It feels good to be posting something to the v-rpg domain after all these years. Half the reason I’m doing this is for that feeling alone.
Over the last couple of decades I have left a trail of abandoned game development projects. Probably 100 of them. I don’t think that is an exaggeration. I average 5-6/year, and have for most of my adult life. So, probably approaching 100 abandoned projects. Anyway. I have a new victim!
I am currently working on a small project based around space fleet management. I play a lot of idle and management games. I like making numbers go up. It’s a simple mechanic. Key components of the genre are:
The current vision is that you will start with a small amount of credits, which you may use to purchase your first mining vessel. You may assign this vessel to mine a planet. Rarer resources will be located in the extreme reaches of the solar system. The mining vessel will have a fixed storage (related to its low tonnage and optimized-for-drilling design.) In the early game, your ship will fill up with a small amount of resources (perhaps several tons), and then fly this back to earth where it will be delivered to your orbital warehouse. At this point, the player may liquidate the resources into credits. The credits may then be used to expand the fleet.
Over time it may become apparent that the mining vessels are good at mining and bad at transporting things. This will necessitate the production of large shipping vessels, which are quite expensive (for balance reasons), but can do the business of moving goods around the star system while the miners are performing mining operations. This will require construction of an orbital warehouse around the mined planet.
I have a lot more to share but I don’t want to make this into a design document. So with that in mind I will lay out some quick points:
No demo yet, but here are some screenshots. 
We’ll see. Over the next week I am working on the core gameplay loop. By next week I would like to be able to show the full loop of resource, acquisition, ship construction and money-making. Perhaps even building of orbital improvements, but that might not happen. Hopefully my day job is not crazy this week.