I refuse to let this project slide just because I don’t have as much free time as I used to.

This is the latest version of my combat prototype. It is nearly ready to release, but after playing a bit tonight I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s not enough feedback about who is doing what. I’ve got bars on the screen for how long it will take a unit to finish its current action (the white bars at the top) and bars for how many hitpoints each unit has left (the red bars at the bottom) but there are no hit animations so it can be hard to see who is doing what to who. I think I should fix this before I release it, so a few more days.

I also want to get some sound in. I think that will go a long way towards making the game more exciting, and also giving more feedback.

So, progress is being made. I haven’t given up on the project. And I’m close enough to finishing this prototype that I can look forward to doing pretty stuff with math again.

I’ve been unwell with various badness for the last four days or so, which is why I haven’t been posting. I’m feeling much better now.

Star Revolution is coming slowly. The thing that is stopping me is that for the last three or so programming sessions I’ve been stomping bugs in my GUI system rather than writing new code, which is getting old fast. Hopefully I’ll get that debugged this weekend and if I push hard I might even finish the whole combat prototype. Wouldn’t that be nice?

I am Star Revolution! Check me out! No, seriously, check me out!

I know, I know, it doesn’t look like much…but these are all black triangles that prove that my new state system, gui system and font system all work.

I really like the font…I found it here (by Googling “bitmap font” and clicking on the very first link). It’s evocative of Starflight without being quite as limited as that font – it has true lowercase and descenders, for instance. This is going to be the official Star Revolution font unless everybody stands up and says they hate it for some reason.

I have also surreptitiously begun work on a tool to create individual planets. It needs some work (for one thing, I need a better understanding of Perlin Noise) but it’s coming along and I expect to have something much more impressive to show you soon.

Also note that I’m not numbering my hours. I have abandoned the idea of writing SR in 40 hours; it’s simply too big. I’m sure I could write a version of SR in 40 hours, but I want this game to be worth playing, unlike Inaria. So I am switching tactics. Instead of a fixed amount of time, I am simply saying that the game must be completed and published by July 31, which gives me three and a half months.

It’s been interesting to realize exactly how tied the design of the game and its interface are. I really want to get a layout for Star Revolution, but in order to do so I need to nail down exactly what I want the player to be able to do in the game. And that means making some decisions.

For instance…do I let the player walk around planets? Some games of this genre do, and some don’t. Games that focus on the trading and combat, like Elite and Privateer, do not allow players to walk around planets; they simply abstract the planet out to a series of menus.

But games that focus on role-playing style elements (conversations, quest objects, etc) tend to allow the player to run around the surface of planets. Starflight 1 and 2, Star Control 2, and the MegaTraveller games all do this. In the case of the first three, planets are barren except for minerals, random lifeforms, and the occasional trade post – there’s no indication of the settlements of sentient beings at all. MegaTraveller takes the exact opposite tack – visiting a “planet” means visiting one city on that planet, with all of the cities in the game being constructed out of stock buildings in different arrangements. You can’t leave the city and walk around in the wilderness…I guess the designers don’t know why you’d ever want to.

Now, the reason I need to hash this out is because of a derived question: what is combat on the surface of a planet like? Or perhaps I should generalize: what is combat outside of your ship like?

Shall I just ignore it and say you can’t get attacked outside of your ship?
Pros: Very simple to write.
Cons: I learn nothing. Doesn’t feel particularly realistic or satisfying to the player.

Should I have the player stay in a land vehicle the whole time and perhaps allow that vehicle to fire lasers on enemies?
Pros: Still pretty simple to write. Could be fun if I do it right.
Cons: I learn very little. Could be not fun if I do it wrong. Doesn’t feel very realistic. Means the player’s characters can never go inside any building in the world.

Should I allow the player’s characters to walk around individually and create a man-to-man combat system?
Pros: Could be very fun if I do it right. Been wanting to write this combat system for a while. I’ll learn a lot.
Cons: This means that I will be writing two completely different combat engines for this game – one for space combat and one for man-to-man combat. Not only will this be a lot of work, it could raise the complexity of the game too high (I have been wanting to try to keep the game simpler and more accessible).

Another serious problem will be helping players keep track of the immense amount of data these types of games typically throw at them. I don’t just want the interface to allow the player to call up old conversations (that’s easy); I also want it to help them remember where that particular planet with particular features was. Remember, that’s how Lister lost the Red Dwarf: “They’re all the same, those little blue-green planetoids! Blue-green and planetoidy!” This means special indicators on the starmap for which systems have been explored and which haven’t, as well as screens for calling up the data on every planet in an explored system. Lots of complex stuff, but the alternative is to require the player to take tons of notes, which most players aren’t willing to do any more (and let’s face it, neither am I). Besides, if you really were in the 27th century, you’d have computers to help you remember all this stuff.

It just seems like the more of these questions I answer, the more I have to do. This game is shaping up to be far bigger than Inaria, both in programming and in content, and I certainly hadn’t anticipated this.