Title says it all, really. In case you’re not convinced:
This is the saga of the largest, longest possible game of the largest-scale, longest-lasting space strategy in years, and after six weeks and around twenty-five hours of play, it’s finally over.
*Yes, I know it’s from a few years ago. But it’s awesome.
…since we released the 1.7 update to Distant Star, and I thought I’d let you folks know how things are progressing. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from this release, both positive and negative.
A lot of people seem to be liking the changes to gameplay mechanics — systems that used to be way too complex are now only slightly too complex, and that’s apparent in that more players are exploring pieces of the game they’d previously ignored. The new planet upgrade system and revamped tech trees seem to be a success, as well.
By far the two biggest complaints we’re getting about 1.7 are the removal of the Cephala (did no one care for the Apparat?) and the limited number of technologies available for research. I may not have stressed this enough earlier — we’re definitely keen on adding in several additional races. We’re focusing our efforts right now on making sure the game’s design is stable in the long run, as well as adding back in things like new races, new ships, and the like.
As for the limited number of techs, we’re looking at releasing an expanded tech tree as part of 1.7.1. However, the tech tree is closely intertwined with every mechanic and subsystem in the game and most of what we’re doing right now is going through those systems and making sure they work from a design perspective. Some of those changes are straightforward and going to be quite quick to implement — but some of them are a wee bit larger (and thus correspondingly more awesome) and so may take a little more time for us to do them justice.
We’ve got a pretty good list of improvements to focus on for our next release: a gentler tutorial and overall better new player experience chief among them. We’ll be rolling out a little new content of some as-yet undecided form, plus iPhone 3G/Second-gen iPod Touch support and a few other bits and bobs we think you’ll like.
It’s been crazy-exciting to see Distant Star perk up over the last few weeks. I’m really enjoying the emails and feedback you folks are leaving (as is Stephen, who’s currently compiling the be-all-and-end-all spreadsheet of things that need improving in Distant Star). Keep ‘em coming, and let me know in the comments what else you’d like to see in 1.7.1!
So, a couple of weeks ago, those of you who follow us on Twitter may have noticed we were having a trial day at a co-working space in Edinburgh (the kind of place where individuals can rent desks and the landlord throws in everything from heating, to electricity and meeting rooms).
Well, all three of us have now gotten full-time desk space there. It’s great. If you’ve ever worked for extended periods at home, you will know how awesome it is to move out of your own flat , escape the washing up, and get into a dedicated workspace surrounded by the people you work with all day. It’s so much easier to get up from your desk for an immediate face-to-face, than explain your way through a Skype call, or set a date for a rather distant meeting.
Of course, this isn’t our office. But it’s a smart place, and right now, it would be rather expensive to rent a glass-fronted uber-headquarters for just three people. Besides, we’re all sociable folks, and there’s a variety of interesting inhabitants co-working along with us, like freelance illustrators and web designers. There’s bound to be opportunities to source work from each other, or swap the odd bit of business chit-chat and, at the very least, surrounding ourselves with energetic people, all doing something different, is a great vibe to have around. It’s already having an accelerating effect on our enthusiasm.
Besides, who wouldn’t work in a space that has beer and Ping-Pong Fridays?
Yeah, this space even has an accelerating effect on small, white balls…
We made it! Distant Star 1.7 is out — it’s an actual thing, which you can download from your friendly neighborhood App Store. It’s an awesome update; go have a look.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
…
Ah, you’re back. So. With 1.7 behind us, the team at Blazing Griffin can finally focus on some of the bigger, crazy-cool things we’ve been planning. We’ve got a couple of super-seekrit projects in the pipeline, and we’re waiting on one. last. thing. before we can tell you about ‘em. I can’t say anything yet, but…
One is an absolutely epic new direction for Distant Star that’s got us all insanely excited. Kitkat mentioned it in a design session the other day, and the only thing anyone could think to say after he finished explaining was “Yes, please.” We think you’re going to love it. I’ll give you one hint: if you’ve been following the development of Distant Star for a while, you’ll recognise it as an idea I talked about ages back, but was too much work for me to take on then (as one person).
So that’s Distant Star — 1.7 is out, and we’re looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks of it. Let me know in the comments, whether you’re an old hand at Distant Star or totally new to this whole conquering-the-galaxy-with-giant-starships thing.
As for Super-Seekrit Project #2, well…you’ll hear more soon. In the meantime:
Full Steam Ahead!
(Late) last night we submitted the 1.7 update for Distant Star to Apple. This is without a doubt the largest update the game has seen thus far; in so many ways it’s almost a new game.
The improvements are so sweeping, in fact, that we had several long debates as to whether we should do a re-release and call this version Distant Star 2. Seriously, it’s that big a change — but I’m absolutely sure you’re going to love it. We’ve been running a beta test for a few weeks now, and of the couple dozen folks who participated in that can attest, this version of the game is definitely the most fun yet.
The biggest new thing is the planet upgrade system — you can now upgrade your colonies by building farms, shipyards, research labs, and the like. You could build a distributed empire, where every planet contributes equally, or focus planets on particular goals (e.g. build a mass of shipyards at Kuat, and crank out Star Destroyers Cruisers).
Planetary upgrades also tie in to the research system, which has been completely overhauled. Before you can build (for example) a new research lab, you’ll have to research the technology that enables their construction. Keep researching down that tree, and you’ll unlock upgrades for your existing buildings that make them better in a variety of ways.
It’s not just planet upgrades, either: you’ll begin every game with access to only a single non-combat ship, and have to devote research time to unlocking increasingly powerful combat ships. Of course, the AI also begins without combat ships, so you’ll (usually!) have a short breathing space in which to decide how to develop your empire.
Over the next few months we plan to take a good, long look at the game design in Distant Star. Between the three of us we’ve got tons of ideas for what we could do with the game, what it needs and what it lacks. Let us know what you think of 1.7, and keep an eye out here for updates!
Hello there. 
Peter has asked me to put together a cheeky wee post by way of introducing myself as brand, spanking* new member of Blazing Griffin. So hi, my name is Stephen Hewitt (Kitkat to some) and I’ll be joining the team in a Design capacity.
Right now, I don’t have a proper title so I guess I’m just ‘DESIGNER #1’, which sounds a bit like one of those red-shirt-wearing guys on the Enterprise who gets an invite down to a suspiciously peaceful-looking planet. Risk of face-sucking parasites aside, though, I can tell you folks are a cool bunch of people, so I’m looking forward to chatting to and working with you all. :)
Apart from this cool red outfit, and hand-held scanner that only works two feet away from quivering, be-tentacled life-forms, my background is working on ‘AAA games’ — I was last working on Realtimeworlds’ APB. Now suffering strange changes in scale, I’m none-the-less keen to move from those big games — with long development cycles — into shorter, indie projects, on shiny platforms with smooth curves (like iOS). I also think Blazing Griffin has got plenty of guts and enthusiasm, so we’ll be going places.
Like…
At the moment, my main focus is on Distant Star, looking at everything from the game design to usability and art style. So far I’ve had zero input into releases while I get up to speed with what’s going on, but that’ll gradually change.
While Distant Star is already out there — with some awesome work from Trevor, Peter and a host of insightful volunteer testers — we’ve been looking at the feedback and talking about where we take it next.
There’s plenty we can put on the list. But pulling a solitary thread out for now, one thing Distant Star probably needs is a clearer idea of what the strategies are (particularly as we plan to add a bunch more stuff). While there is already fun to be had, a number of game decisions made by players could probably do with clarification as to benefits and tradeoffs.
With this in mind, I invented…
A useful design tool I came up with for Distant Star was what I call the ‘Diagram of Interesting Decisions’ (or DOID). As strategy games are all about making interesting decisions moment-by-moment, I thought it would be good to create a diagram of everything a player could choose to focus on in the game. This diagram provides a overview of the key decision areas (like fleet manufacture or tech development) as well as other supporting decisions, like ‘grow population’. Where I could, I clumped decision areas that were related (for example, ‘building new technology’ and ‘awareness of comparative levels of tech’ go together).
The next step will be taking these highlighted areas and ensuring they are represented in a ‘valid’ form in the game: it must be obvious, for example, what growing population does for you, why you might choose to do this instead of building fleet for a turn, and what the pros and cons are. In short, we need to make sure players can make informed, strategic decisions, across the whole ‘decision space’ of the game.
Sounds grandiose, but while the player should just have a warm fuzzy feeling of coherent fun, designing that structure takes design organization under the hood.
With or without a fancy diagram, we’ll need to consider the decision space in relation to things like interface design (for example, key decisions should be understood as important and easy to find in the higher levels of interface. If building fleet is vital, it can’t be an obscure option hidden off in the guts somewhere).
Similarly, if an immediate, tactical overview of the whole galaxy is important for battling your opposition — quickly seeing military build-up on other planets, for example — we need to provide for that need. We can also look at any particular decision and think: what if the player decided to do this and nothing else? What are the natural limits? Is this a ‘god strategy’? Or even consider how one decision flows into another (e.g. how tech development flows into fleet-building decisions), and so on. And perhaps most importantly, simplification: making sure decisions are intuitive and fun to make, while trying to ensure the overall game is compellingly hard to master.
So there you go. I guess that’s enough about DOIDS for now — it does rather sound like an 80s arcade game.
Hi, hello, and I’m off to go play Distant Star :)
Stephen.
*there will be no actual spanking.
I’m sorry! Really!
I hate to say it, but I’ve closed the beta for Distant Star. It’s looking pretty good, from what I hear; it sounds like we’ve ironed out most of the bugs and general roughness from some of those early builds. If you’ve been participating in the beta I’d really like your comments on the version that just went out; it’s got a bunch of new UI stuff, plus tweaks and spit-polish pretty much throughout the game. Killer AI, too.
Maybe too killer? I don’t know — you tell me!
The response we received from folks wanting to beta test the game, especially from existing players, has been absolutely incredible. I can’t tell you awesome it is to fix a bug or polish up a feature, send out a build, and get email back within the hour on whether or not we fixed the bug or whether the feature is worth keeping. You guys absolutely rock; keep it coming!
PS If you’ve been active in the beta, expect an email in the next few days asking for some information from you. It’s always been my policy (and, by default, it’s now Blazing Griffin policy) that anyone who seriously helps test Distant Star should be credited by name and should get to name a planet. So, that’s your homework: name your planet!
I can't stress enough how important networking and negotiation are to making games. Sure, they don't produce a tactile asset like code, art, or audio, but don't be lured into believing that these skills are irrelevant or that they're not worth every minute you spend honing them!
Networking:
By this I mean socialising, introducing yourself to the game industry at large, and just generally meeting some awesome game devs, both online and in real life. Twitter is your friend!
Get out and about - its great fun. Ever met anyone that worked on the original titles of Tomb Raider or Broken Sword? They have epic stories to tell and a plethora of wisdom to impart. And don't forget other indies - most of them are either going through, or have gone through, similar situations. The number of pitfalls you can avoid by simply asking for advice are innumerable.
Also look out for industry events. We've been attending meet-ups with IGDA Scotland and GameDevEd (Edinburgh developers), as well as anything related to digital creative industries and games in Scotland (and a few in England). The only reason Blazing Griffin is functioning and growing at all at the moment is because of the people we met at these events and, in turn, the people we met through their extended networks of contacts. We've recently had another team member join us (intro pending) and this was because of being able to ask around when the time came...
Negotiation:
Why do we believe negotiation is so darned important? Why include it with a post on networking? Because, if you've attended all these wonderful social events, have a huge network of contacts, and want to work with or hire any of them, you'll have to clearly communicate your intentions and then negotiate terms that suit both parties.
Making games is not about making a single individual's dreams and aspirations come true, it's about realising the vision of every team member. So you'll need to find out what those visions are. If there is no compromise or negotiation -- no finding out what everyone wants to achieve individually, as well as part of a team -- it's likely you'll not be a team for very long.
Bit pointless having an epic vision if it's not something everyone wants to share in...
Seems Monday Blogs is becoming Tuesday Blogs...
We’re pretty much feature-complete for Distant Star 1.7. It’s been a long, long road, but totally worth it — I can’t wait to get the game out and see what people think of everything that’s changed:
We’ll be running a beta test before release, starting in the next few days. If you want to be involved, leave a comment on this post or drop me an email (trevor at blazinggriffin.com). We’d love to hear from you!
Let’s get one thing out of the way: beta testing on iOS used to be an unforgiving nightmare. I’ve run several tests for Distant Star — for the initial release, for the first major update, and for the iPhone port — and every one of them was a complete and utter pain-in-the-*.
We’ve made some major changes to Distant Star recently, including revamping the entire production, research, & combat systems, as well as re-doing most of the art in the game; naturally, we decided that it would be a good idea to run the updated game through another round of testing.
This time, though, we’re using TestFlight.
If you haven’t heard of it, TestFlight is an absolutely lovely tool for testing iOS apps. While it’s helpful on the developer side of things (I’ll come back to this later), it especially shines for your testers. Where before they had to find their UDID, email it to you, drag your hand-emailed .ipa and distribution profile into iTunes, and sync, with Testflight it’s just a matter of installing the TestFlight (web) app and tapping the ‘install’ button next to your app’s icon. Absolute magic, and you never need to have that awkward I-need-your-device’s-serial-number email conversation that’s so difficult..
On the development side, TestFlight’s pretty magic as well. Building against their newly-released SDK lets you collect really deep metrics about how and when testers use your app. It even collects crash logs and NSLogs (!) remotely, a task which used to be pretty much the most painful thing ever.
So, yeah. If you’re not using TestFlight, you should be. And if the reason you’re not using TestFlight is that you’re not running constant user-facing tests, well…
Start. Now.
Hey, folks. Thought I’d drop by and show off a few changes we’ve been making over the last few days to the UI in Distant Star. The biggest change by far is an almost totally way of interacting with planets — I’ve ripped out the old tap-to-select, double-tap-to-enter system and replaced it buttons that take you explicitly to different screens. You still tap systems to select, of course, but instead of double-tapping to enter the build queue, you’ll have to tap the shipyard icon.
The reason for this is twofold. For one, accidentally entering the build queue screen, which I used to do all the time in games, was incredibly annoying. Moving the next tap from the system over to the left a few finger widths makes entering the queue accidentally very unlikely, and doesn’t actually require any more taps than the old system.
Beyond this, though, we’ve added more stuff that you can do at each system than just build ships. You can also construct buildings and upgrades on the system itself, and see how those change how the system impacts the rest of your empire. So, just next to (well, below) the shipyard icon is the planet upgrade icon, which takes you to a brand-new screen for managing those buildings and upgrades. Good stuff.
I’ve also done some tweaking on the research screen, making it easier to read and in general more attractive. Take a look at that. Is it actually any better, or am I just fooling myself? It’s difficult to say sometimes.
That screenshot actually illustrates an aspect of the planet upgrade system I mentioned earlier as well: there’s quite a few buildings that can be constructed on systems, but at the start of the game you’ll have access to only the most basic. A big part of research in 1.7 is going to be unlocking these buildings and their own upgrade trees. For instance, one of the fundamental buildings that you’ll probably want to build on most colonies is the Research Lab, which increases the science output of a system. But, if you work your way up the Ecology tree you’ll unlock upgrades for it that enable other bonuses, like increased ship construction or a larger population cap.
Science!
Howzit all,
Time for an update…
First off though an introduction a required. My name is Peter van der Watt; I am another part of the Blazing Griffin team and am most often the wearer of the business development and artist/designer hats. We thought that now would probably be a good time to let everyone know what has been/is/will be happening at Blazing Griffin.
Past: the Founding
Until recently (read: before we joined up with Trevor and started working on Distant Star) Blazing Griffin has mostly been focusing on business planning, meeting a bunch of developers/game industry professionals up here, and basically just coming to grips with what makes a small studio tick.
These are the joys (no sarcasm!) of self-publishing and doing everything yourself. If you’re considering doing this yourself I’m sure you’ll be amazed at all the different tasks you will end up doing. All I will say about that right now (insert: that’s another blog post) is that networking and negotiating are two very valuable skills. We’ve recently become an “official” Scottish company and we are expecting to grow the team in the near future. We’ll let you know as that happens!
Something that was rather exciting (in a very nerdy way!) happened to us a few weeks ago. We went up to DareProtoPlay to have a look around, just to meet all the teams who took part this year and get a chance to play their games. Congrats to all the teams that took part, by the way!
The main reason we went was a little more specific. We’d heard that David Braben (of Elite and Frontier Studios fame) was going to be giving a talk and we really wanted to hear him speak.
This turned out to be a pretty good decision.
During the Q&A of David’s talk Trevor asked “Are there any features in Elite that haven’t really been picked up on by subsequent games influenced by Elite, and that you think should be?” which was deemed worthy of “Winner of the best question” award, for which we received this:
This was awesome for a couple of reasons. Firstly we got a signed game (which is going on the wall!) and also got to meet David, have a really quick chat to him and show off Distant Star.
The 2nd reason was because David’s answer to Trevor’s question was, in a nutshell, more procedurally generated content. Which was made sweeter due to the fact that not half an hour before this we were talking to The University of Abertay Dundee about doing some joint research into procedurally generated environments. Bonus awesome!
Present: Nitty Gritty
So what are we currently working on?
Well, we’re redesigning a large chunk of Distant Star and adding new game-play, redoing portions of the art work and audio assets, and in general fleshing out the game as it stands now.
Alongside the “actual” game development stuff we also are in the final phase of negotiations with regards to acquiring another IP. It’s a PC title, and one that we’re all really excited to work on. More on this very soon!
Future: Blue Ocean
Due to the nature of change happening within the mobile space a few major changes/additions will be taking place where Distant Star is concerned. We will be re-looking at the current business model and adapting it as needed. This will most likely take the shape and form of a free base game (very similar to the current game, actually) with paid DLC/IAP packs for expansion content as development continues on Distant Star. However, we’re still internally these changes between ourselves, and we’ll definitely keep you posted. If you’re already playing Distant star, fear not - any future changes will be released free to anyone who has bought the game.
We will also be porting the game to other platforms (insert: Android) in order for players to be able to enjoy the game on their preferred device, in conjunction with that we’ll also be localizing it into languages other than English.
With regards to this blog/dev diary you can expect a weekly post from here on out, keeping you up to date on what we’ve been up to, likely be focused on a particular aspect of game or studio development. Trevor already mentioned he will be writing a series on technical aspects (code) of development but we will be talking about art, audio and design, as well as the business issues facing small studios/indies as seen from our point of view.
That being said, it’s not our plan to stay a small studio focused only on mobile games, and I hope you enjoy reading about out trials, tribulations and victories in the coming months (and hopefully years) as we go through this most awesome endeavor!
So with that welcome to Monday Blogs and until next week….
Hey, folks.
I’m Trevor, currently the technical side of Blazing Griffin. Until (very) recently I was the sole developer/producer/designer/artist/audio engineer/lead tester on Distant Star; now that I’ve joined Blazing Griffin I’ll remain the game’s lead developer (and, of course, part-everything-else).
Beyond Distant Star, I’ll be writing a running series of posts here focusing on the technical aspects of starting up an indie game studio. I’m also responsible for building and maintaining this lovely (hack, cough, hack) website, so if you’ve any comments/criticisms/suggestions for that, let me know.
By the way, I’m trevor@blazinggriffin.com. Drop me an email, if only to say hi!
A big part of what drove us to form Blazing Griffin is our shared love of open development. Since the launch of Distant Star I’ve been keeping a running blog documenting how the game has evolved post-launch; over the next few weeks we’ll be moving that blog over here and updating it to include other aspects of the indie studio life. I’m just a coder, though I occasionally wear other hats; now that we have expanded you can expect (semi-?) regular posts on audio, art, design, and the business of running an indie studio.
Stay tuned!
A lot of game designers talk about the importance of getting players into what’s called a “flow state” — the mental state where you’re completely engaged and the interface between you and the game disappears. For most games getting into flow is (relatively) easy and usually reflects a certain acquired skill; when you’re on a kill streak in a first-person shooter or macroing perfectly in a real-time strategy game, you’re almost certainly in a perfect flow state. For turn-based strategy the situation is a bit different: how can you get into a flow state in games which are inherently slow-paced?
One way, of course, is to just make turns go really, really fast. A standard chess match more-or-less requires players to enter a kind of anti-flow state in which every move is slowly, meticulously considered; add a time element, as in blitz chess, and the game suddenly becomes about reflexes and speed rather than deliberation. Serious blitz chess matches basically require both players to keep a sustained flow state for the entire match.
Of course, it’s not as easy as imposing a time limit on turns — anyone who’s tried to play blitz chess over the internet has probably noticed that achieving that critical flow state is much, much harder. I’d argue that the interface for playing chess on a computer is terrible, at least compared to the interface for playing chess in real life. Part of what makes enables you to reach a flow state in a game, be it Call of Duty or Go, is minimising the amount of brainpower you have to waste actually executing a plan. In general, flow is about reaching a point where you don’t have to explicitly think about the game; you simply act.
It seems obvious to me that part of what keeps us from achieving a flow state in slow-form strategy games are the clunky, information-heavy interfaces we usually use. There’s only so much you can do with a mouse and keyboard, of course — but bring proper touch controls into the mix and I suspect we can really start to change things. Don’t think, don’t plan, don’t hunt for Shift-W — just reach out and tap the damn thing.
Right now I’m working on streamlining the UI in Distant Star. Partly this means optimising all of the in-game screens so that touch controls work like you’d expect, but partly it means finding places where I’m giving the player too much information and changing what gets displayed. The system for ship stats, for instance, is needlessly complex: tracking, damage, speed, armor, shields, recharge…it’s far too much information to process quickly. The interface for selecting fleets and issuing move orders is, I think, one of the few places in the game right now where it’s possible to get into something like a flow state — moving fleets is intuitive (I hope!) enough that you just don’t have to think much about it.
Note to self: more of that, please.
The final version of what will become Distant Star 1.7 is finally starting to take shape. The biggest change this time around is probably (bear with me!) the removal of the Cephala and Apparat races — so many aspects of the game have been transformed so completely that rebuilding and rebalancing one race (Humans) is just about all I can handle at the moment.
That said, there’s a metric ton of completely new or totally redesigned features coming in this release, including:
After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I’ve started in on the (not-insignificant) task of localising Distant Star for languages other than English. It’s not exactly a thrilling task, but a guy can’t have fun and games all the time. So yeah: Distant Star, llegar pronto!
Of course, the Great Research Rebalance is still happening; more news on that front (progress!) soon.
I sat down yesterday and spent a solid afternoon polishing the way systems are displayed. For a start, the trusty old -1000 / +1000 habitability scale is gone — the underlying mechanic is the same, but systems now display their habitability rating via a color-coded category, something like inhospitable or idyllic. It’s a small change, true, but it makes it much easier to inspect systems at a glance.
Another minor tweak: the game now respects your localised currency settings. Again, a tiny fix that makes things look much, much nicer.
I’m also part-way through a major change to how Distant Star plays, and thought you guys might want a sneak peek. Right now all races start with all their possible ship types unlocked, and research (in the Defense and Combat trees, at least) just upgrades these ships’ stats.
No more!
Instead, each race begins the game with only one or two available ship types; you (and the AI!) have to choose how to develop your race through research in order to unlock new options. Want to colonise? Research Cryosleep in the Ecology tree, and unlock colonisers. Want to take over enemy systems? Research Large-Scale Genocide and unlock Bombard Cruisers. You get the idea.
I know it’s been a while since the last Distant Star update, but that doesn’t mean progress isn’t happening! Far from it: I’ve been meticulously re-working big chunks of the game over the past few weeks, rebalancing ships and races, improving the game’s early stages, and changing the way tech trees work. Oh, and adding in support for GameCenter achievements.
So, yeah. Progress? It’s happening.
My primary focus right now is on de-designing the way ships are designed and researched. I’ll admit it: pretty much every aspect of ships (and the automatic combat system in general) is horribly, horribly broken. I’d originally set out to build a really clever system where the interplay between stats was obvious, and where you could tweak your ships to counter those of a particular rival; what I ended up with is just a mess of opaque, confusing numbers.
Mea culpa.
So I’m working on re-designing the way ships work; streamlining their stats from a confused mess down into a more manageable handful. I’m also changing things around so that you acquire better ships by unlocking (through research) rather than having all ships available at the game’s start and applying a bunch of small upgrades. Trust me, it’s way more fun this way — the moment mid-way through the game when you finally unlock cruisers and go on a smashing spree until the AI catches up is really satisfying.
As for the rest: tech trees, the early game, system upgrades, achievments, &c? I’ll keep you posted.
Let’s make one thing clear: I’ve wanted to write a 4X-style space game since long before I learnt how to code. The genesis for Distant Star in particular, however, came about the day I bought an (original) iPad, brought it home, and thought: “Why aren’t there any good strategy games for this?”
I’d just finished up Levelheaded, so I knew I was up to the task of putting out a game for iOS. And while Levelheaded wasn’t exactly a stunning success from a commercial (it failed spectacularly to sell) or critical (it wasn’t, let’s be honest, any good) view, the process of writing it taught me worlds about game development. Plus, it meant that I’d actually designed, built, tested, released, and sold a game — for the first time I thought of myself as a game developer, albeit not a very good one.
So I sat down that night (30 May, 2010), ripped the more useful OpenGL guts out of Levelheaded, and coded up a quick scrolling starfield. Another hacking session later and I had randomly generated star systems, some atrocious text, and not much else.
It wasn’t exactly the epic 4X strategy game I wanted to write, but it was a start. Unfortunately, the idea of carrying it on into an actual, playable game was incredibly daunting, so I put the project aside.
That’s pretty much where things stood until Mike Kasprzak announced the October Challenge. I’d been a regular participant in Ludum Dare, a 48-hour solo game development thing; when Mike posed his challenge to the Ludum Dare community I knew I couldn’t resist. Besides, I had this half-baked idea all ready to go!
What I wanted Distant Star to be, at this point, was basically a touch-based version of Sword of the Stars sans tactical ship combat. At the time the project felt like a natural fit for a month-long game jam — I had a clear idea of where it needed to go and a core set of mechanics that absolutely had to make it in, plus a laundry list of cool features I could squeeze in if I got the chance.
Ship construction and fleet movement came quickly, followed by (idiotic) AI. By the time I had my first screenshots ready for The October Challenge community the game’s visual style had gelled into something very much like the retro/minimalist look it has now. I powered through October, squeezing in three or four evenings a week; by the 24 I felt the game was almost ready, and sent out beta copies to a dozen or so volunteers (shout out to the TouchArcade forums: you guys rock!).
Based on feedback from beta testers I added in the tap-through tutorial and the notifications system, not to mention fixing approximately seven thousand crashtastic bugs. Distant Star 1.0 for the iPad (only) went live on the App Store on 13 November, 2010 and sold 82 copies (at US$1.99!) that day.
For the next two months I polished the hell out of Distant Star. While the vast majority of players seemed to like the game, I’d taken some flack from for some of the game’s rougher edges. Sporadic crashes (mostly due to hard-to-find memory leaks), buggy rotation handling, and a non-helpful tutorial were the biggest culprits, though I also received a staggering amount of amazing feedback from players who enjoyed the game as it was but had big ideas about what it could be.
I pushed several updates during this period, adding lots of new content based on player feedback (a new race, research tree, and numerous technologies). In particular, I worked on improving the tutorial system and adding in popup help throughout the game — quite a few early players had complained about the game’s learning curve, and I wanted to alleviate that as much as possible.
Since the original beta the most common question I received regarding Distant Star was “Where is the iPhone version?” I had hesitated to release (or even develop!) an iPhone port after the release of the iPhone 4, with it’s larger Retina display — I didn’t like the idea of releasing the game for a device on it had never been tested, and (frankly) I didn’t feel like I could justify buying myself an iPhone 4 when I still had a perfectly functioning iPhone 3G. In January, a friend convinced me that this reasoning was, frankly, idiotic; I took a train over to Glasgow a couple of days after my birthday and picked up an iPhone 4. The train ride back took about an hour; by the time I made it back into Edinburgh I had the game up and running, in a manner of speaking.
Getting the game running across all three screen resolutions (iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch, and iPhone 4/iPod Touch 4G) turned out to be harder than I’d expected. From the beginning I’d envisioned Distant Star as an iPad-only game — I couldn’t really see it working well on a smaller screen, and hadn’t taken steps in the original design to make it resolution-independent. Lesson learnt.
Eventually I sorted out the resolution problems and released an alpha version of the game for iPhone/iPod touch to testers on 16 March. After much back-and-forth, including a second (beta) round of testing, Distant Star 1.3, now a universal app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, went live on the App Store on 20 April, 2011.
Since releasing Distant Star for the iPhone sales have picked up astronomically. As of version 1.5 the game includes all of the core features I originally laid out; consequently, I raised the price from US$1.99 to US$2.99. By this point it wasn’t the only 4X space game in the App Store, either — it has since been joined by 9 Colonies, Ascendency, and Vincere Totus Astrum. It’s good to have company.
My favourite insight from Distant Star’s unit sales isn’t from sales at all — if you look at the number of players downloading each update, it grows considerably with each version. Not only are people playing (and enjoying!) the game, they’re sticking around to see what happens next! The day the most recent update (1.6) went live it was downloaded by over 400 existing players.
So. freaking. awesome.
There’s also a shocking difference between the game being iPad-only and being a universal app. Make no mistake, I still think of Distant Star as primarily an iPad game — but it’s clear that I’m in the minority here. My efforts since releasing the game as universal have been directed mostly at improving player experience on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Everything is backported to the iPad version, of course, but Distant Star is now solidly a mobile game. Can’t say I ever expected that.
Before the iPhone release Distant Star was selling 3-5 copies per day. Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t write the game because I wanted (or expected) to make boatloads of cash. 3-5 copies a day was enough for me to call it a total success, and more than enough to keep me rolling out updates. After the iPhone release, however, Distant Star has averaged around 25 copies a day, with that figure increasing steadily with each update. We’re not talking Angry Birds-level sales here, but that’s not the point — I never thought I’d be working on a game with hundreds of active players and a small but growing community.
I’m getting more feedback from players than ever before, and each and every time I check my email and see a new bug report or feature request (or even just a “Hey, I love 4X games! You made one for the iPhone! Right on!” note) it literally makes my day. Keep ‘em coming!
I love you guys.
That is all.
There’s a lot going on right now with Distant Star — some of which I can talk about and some of which I can’t. Right now I’m adding in GameCenter support and production waypoints, both in response to specific player requests. The most recent update, 1.6, brought a ton of bugfixes and a respectable about of new content (a new Economics tech tree, graphical fleet management, smarter AI, &c.) — most of which also originated in “Hey, why doesn’t Distant Star have X?” emails.
I’ve got big plans for the short term, and even bigger long-term plans — keep an eye out on the App Store (and in game!) for updates, and on this space for news.
— Trevor
A day late and a dollar short, but Distant Star 1.6 is off to Apple for review. For the most part 1.6 is a bugfix-and-cleanup release, with a few new features stashed away. There’s a new tech tree for economics- and trade-related techs, plus a greatly improved fleet management screen. The main push of this release is under the hood, where I’ve revamped the AI system considerably in support of (eventually) implementing different difficulty levels. As a side-effect, the AI now remembers its current mission and progress across saves, and is considerably smarter about conducting research.
Unfortunately, two of my big goals for 1.6 haven’t happened yet: better zooming (i.e. zoom relative to the current position, not the galactic center) and a new trade ship for the Apparat. Next time!
Let’s start this off with a few assumptions: if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably a fan of 4X strategy games. You’re probably something of a space geek, and you probably have a soft spot for genre classics like Master of Orion. You also probably own an iPhone or similar.
If all of that sounds true, you need to check out 9 Colonies, a brand-spanking new 4X space strategy game for iOS. Where Distant Star takes after sprawling, grand-strategy-and-exploration games like Sword of the Stars, 9 Colonies is a more story-driven take on the 4X formula. All of the core 4X elements are present — research, colony management, turn-based strategy — but with each developed in a novel (and satisfyingly minimalist) way. It may veer a bit on the casual side (as does Distant Star), but 9 Colonies is an excellent take on the 4X space strategy for iOS. Go check it out!
I’m wrapping up the 1.6 update to Distant Star, which focuses on UI improvements. Big changes include a completely revamped fleet management screen, a more sensible ‘home system’ button, plus others:
A big thanks to Rorke and Daniel, whose ludicrously detailed (and unsolicited! So excellent!) bug reports/feature suggestions led directly to most of these changes. I’ve a couple more things I want to squeeze into this update (keeping the map centered on zoom, giving the Apparat a trade ship), but it shouldn’t be too long before 1.6 goes live on the App Store. Woot!
I’ve just submitted Distant Star 1.5 to Apple for review. In keeping with the general theme of updates so far, this version brings a mix of new features, new content, and bugfixes/improvements:
…and, hopefully, Distant Star won’t be either. In the last week or so I’ve made good progress on the 1.5 update, which will bring trade lanes, freighters, and (as a result) a more complex and flexible economy. Adding in trade affects almost every aspect of the game: new technologies, new ships, new stuff happening on the main screen.
There’s a lot left to go, though — I want to make sure that establishing and managing trade lanes feels like a natural part of the game, rather than something stuck in as an afterthought. Right now, only the human race has trade ships, and the AI remains blissfully unaware of their existence; obviously, this cannot continue. I also need to make it more intuitive to establish routes, and show how much wealth they’re generating. Whether this is through some sort of drill-down economy screen or something more clever I can’t yet say.
Just a quick note to say that Distant Star 1.4 is out. This update (finally!) brings pinch-to-zoom on the galaxy screen and a new spiral galaxy generator, plus some bugfixes and memory tweaks that should make the game run smoother on older devices (iPhone 3G and equivalent).
Cheers!
Last night I had a burst of inspiration. All this time I’ve been trying to implement pinch-to-zoom in Distant Star via various OpenGL tricks, like rendering the galaxy into a texture and mapping that texture onto a screen-sized rectangle — it works, technically, but the end result always looked just appalling. My burst of inspiration, of course, was that I didn’t need to scale any textures — in fact, I could totally fake it, and the result would be easier to render and look way better.
So, umm, that’s sorted.
Anyway, I’m testing pinch-to-zoom on all the devices I own, running it through a bunch of games and looking for bugs. One problem I’ve already found is that it causes a slightly slowdown in massive games with lots of AI opponents; it’s not game-breaking, just annoying.
I’ve also backported a spiral galaxy generator I whipped up last weekend as a proof-of-concept: large games are way cooler with legitimate-looking spiral galaxies instead of the rough grid they’ve used up until now. Take a look:
I’m insanely glad to be done with the iPhone port; these kinds of gratuitous features are so much more fun to write.
1.3 is (finally) out, which means that Distant Star is now a universal app for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.
![[+]](http://r.mzstatic.com/htmlResources/5016/images/fat-binary-badge.png){kind=icon}
This app is designed for both iPhone and iPad.
57 commits, four months, two rounds of testing — it’s been a stupidly long road.
I’m still not done here, though. In the next couple of weeks I hope to take another look at zooming on the main galaxy screen and, if I’m feeling epic/ballsy, come up with a minimal diplomacy system. I’ll keep you posted.
The Distant Star iPhone beta is proceeding nicely, and I expect to wrap things up and get an update submitted to Apple within the next few days. For the most part, I’m receiving way more “Hey, it’d be cool if the game had…” suggestions than “So, this is broken…” comments, which is certainly nice.
In the interests of keeping folks informed on the inevitable feature creep, a few things that have been fixed or added as a direct result of beta feedback:
I’m forcing myself into feature freeze (no new stuff! None!) until I get this update out, as I’m aware that I’ve dithered forever over it and, really, this is getting unreasonable. A second round of betas goes out this afternoon, to make sure nothing’s broken before the release; a massive thanks to all who participated in the first round, and those now involved in the second.
Some folks in the Edinburgh gamedev scene (can I call us a scene? I think we’re a scene) are trying to re-found the long-defunct Scotland chapter of the International Game Developers Association. If you’re a game developer living/working in Scotland, especially a hobbyist/indie developer or a student, consider joining the IGDA and helping us get the new chapter off to a flying start. Membership in the IGDA is cheap, especially for students, and definitely worth the investment. Monthly meetings (like the weekly @GameDevEd), SIGs, demo nights, jams, you name it — help us get the chapter going and let us know what you’d like to see from a Scotland chapter.
Among other things, the IGDA runs the annual Global Game Jam — and for the last two years the Glasgow-based Scottish Game Jam has been among the largest and most successful jam site. I’ve been part of Scottish Game Jam every year since its inception, and it’s an absolutely brilliant experience; in fact, Levelheaded, an iPhone physics/puzzle game, is a more polished version my team’s 2009 jam game Jarhead (the rule for that jam was that a game had to take no more than a minute to play, hence the slightly ludicrous speed of Levelheaded).
If you’re interested, head over to IGDA Scotland and drop us a line, or give a twitter-shout to @IGDAScotland.
Huzzah! Distant Star for the iPhone is almost ready to go — I’m soliciting beta testers for the iPhone version over at TouchArcade. Head over there and leave a post in that forum thread if you’re interested, especially if you’re a 3G or 3GS user.
*Technically speaking, this is Distant Star’s second beta; the first was for the original iPad-only version. Does that make this a delta test, then?
Because sometimes, you just want to play in Photoshop for an hour or two instead of writing code…
Also: new typographic buttons, but that’s way less exciting…
At last! I’ve resolved my long-standing issue with App Review — to make a long story short, don’t use developer preview versions of Xcode — and finished updating Distant Star to run seamlessly on the iPhone.
Distant Star for the iPhone will be released as a universal app, so if you already bought the game on iPad you’ll be able to download it for free onto your phone. I’ve just released an alpha version to testers on the 3G, 3GS, and 4 — once I hear back from them I’ll set up another beta on TouchArcade and we’ll see how that goes. Soon! Very soon!
While 1.3 works its slow way through Apple review, I thought I’d drop a little teaser for what I’m working on next for Distant Star:
Because Distant Star was designed with only the iPad in mind, making the UI work nicely on an iPhone (with and without Retina display) isn’t nearly as straightforward as I’d like.
I just released the 1.3 update to Distant Star to Apple. The big thing in this update, of course, is the re-worked tutorial & help system — but if you’re an old hand at the game (and, by now, there’s quite a few of those!) you won’t be disappointed, either.
In addition to the tutorial goodness, 1.3 brings another new race, the mechanical Apparat. The Apparat are a robotic race, which is reflected in their available ship types; they start the game with much of the Industry tech tree already researched, making them a formidable foe early on. Unfortunately, being robots they’re not terribly creative — so they’re slower to research new technologies than the other races; on the upside, they don’t need to breath, giving them an easier time when terraforming systems.
The research screen functions a little differently, too. Instead of tapping a technology to start researching it, now tapping merely selects, displaying a tooltip with more information about the selected technology. There’s a [Start] button down in the bottom right, which I think makes a little more sense.
Damaged ships now repair (slowly!) while in orbit over friendly systems; you can speed up the repair rate by researching in the Industry tree. Oh, and armor/shield status is displayed in the Fleet Management screen, so you can check to see which ships are healthy and which are in need of repair without having to throw your ships into combat. I’ve also polished several of the textures used throughout the game; it’s not much, but the whole thing should look a little shinier, somehow.
Hope you enjoy!
By far the most common complaint I've received about Distant Star is the inability to zoom out/in on the map. I can't argue with that -- it's a pretty obvious thing to be able to do, and certainly a feature that I've meant to include since the beginning. Unfortunately, it's taking me rather longer than I expected to get it working to my satisfaction. The experimental branch of the game has pinch zooming, but something about it just doesn't sit right with me. It's a little too finicky, a little to sensitive. So I'm still working on that.
That aside, it's been way too long since my last update to Distant Star, so I tabled (temporarily!) the map zooming project and spent the weekend grooming a less adventurous patch. This update brings a couple of critical bugfixes; in particular, tapping a [Ships Complete] notification should no longer cause an instant crash. I've also added a new race and made some modifications to the habitability system -- each race now has a preferred habitability rating, so we you should see more competition between players of the same race, which I think makes sense. Humans all want to live on relatively Earthlike planets, right?
The other big thing in this update is a major revision to the tutorial/help system. That sounds unexciting, I know, but I've noticed that Distant Star, like every other 4x game in existence, is pretty off-putting to new players. Lots of people seem to find the tutorial annoying, so I'm streamlining it by moving as much as possible into more unobtrusive, tooltip-style popups. Once the update drops, anytime you see a [?] icon you can tap it to get instant information about game systems, interface elements, whatever. This system is literally everywhere in the game; I've also added popups to the research screen, so you can get more information about what a particular technology does before you research it.
I still need a few days to go through and test everything, so I'll let you folks know when I push the update to Apple. Shouldn't be too long!
Apparently my last post alarmed a few people, who read it and immediately wrote me mildly annoyed/disappointed emails asking if I was really going to stop working on Distant Star so soon.
No! Of course not!
That really isn’t what I meant — all I meant was that I’m at a loss for what to do next. I’ve got a couple of other projects I want to work on, but Distant Star is definitely one of the more fun things I’m doing right now, and as long as six or eight people are still enjoying it, I’ll keep making it better. Deal?
Anyway, the answer to the ‘what to do next?’ dilemma was obvious, once I thought about it. Why don’t I just…ask? So without further ado: which features should I focus on next for Distant Star?
I’ll leave this up for a week or so, then I’ll tally up the results and get cracking on, you know, whatever wins.
After an initial rejection by Apple (apparently games aren’t allowed to use Game Center at all if they don’t have achievements or leaderboards?), the 1.2+ update for Distant Star is finally live on the App Store. It brings all of the updates I’d talked about before (a new race, color and game speed selection, usability tweaks) plus a fix for the autosave memory leak — meaning that it should crash much less often than it might have done in the past. Hurrah.
Unfortunately, I’m sort of at my wits’ end vis-a-vis Distant Star: I’m enormously pleased with the game, but I just don’t know what to do next. I’ve got quite a few projects on the horizon: the prototype for Polarity is pretty much complete, and getting rave comments from playtesters; my on-again-off-again collaboration with Drunken Monkey Games is still bouncing around; and I’m talking with barista-turned-XNA-ninja DriveByBaptism about putting together a clever little XBLIG platformer. So much to do! So little time!
Oh, and there’s that PhD I’m supposed to be working on…
And Another Thing: If you’re a game developer in the Edinburgh/Midlothian area, swing by the Cumberland Bar on Tuesday nights and join us for GameDevEd. We need more indies!
In a shameless effort to avoid actual work, I’ve dusted off an old prototype for an iPhone game. It’s a quick little physics/rhythm/platform-y thing — can we use ‘Canabalt-like’ as a genre? — designed around a one-button interaction mechanic.
In other words, you tap. The idea grew out of my frustration with Levelheaded, an experiment into how short you could make a game and still have it be worth playing. It was basically a polished, iOS-ported version of my Global Game Jam game Jarhead from a few years ago. I might have gone a wee bit overboard with the rapid-play idea — games of Levelheaded take anywhere from two to fifteen seconds — but it was a fun little experiment. Unfortunately, it tried to cram in several non-obvious mechanics and a reasonably complex little simulation into those few seconds; obviously, it did a terrible job of communicating how it should be played, almost no one spent enough time with the game to really understand the mechanics. My bad.
Reverse Polarity is my attempt to return to the rapid play idea, but with greatly simplified mechanics and interaction. In fact, there’s exactly one mechanic (you’re attracted/repelled by things in the world) and one interaction (tapping swaps between attraction and repulsion). You can see where the name comes from (also, I was re-watching old SG-1 episodes at the time). Runs of Reverse Polarity tend to take under two minutes; the longer and faster you run, the more difficult it gets to continue. For the most part, gameplay is going to be mind-bogglingly shallow, with the focus on leaderboard-style competition. I’m tracking all kinds of stats for each run (e.g. speed, distance, air time, tap efficiency, &c), each of which will have its own distinct leaderboard. Mastered the art of building up crazy-fast speed? Ok — how about maximizing air time, or minimizing the number of times you reverse polarity?
Mmm, Game Center porn.
This whole not-owning-a-retina-display-device thing is getting ridiculous — this needs to be an iPhone game, instead of iPad-only. Poor little iPhone 3G — I love you, but you’re hopelessly out of date. Anyone got a newish iPod touch I could borrow for a few days?
So it’s been a few weeks, and the woefully necessary 1.1 update for Distant Star has long since live. 1.1 added a fleet management screen, an autosave feature, and the option to disable/enable the audio, plus fixed a number of distressing crash bugs. It’s been well-received (and the game’s average review rating on iTunes has certainly improved!), but definitely wasn’t the kind of content expansion to which I’d been looking forward.
1.2, which should go live in the next few days, is. It adds several gameplay features, including:
I’ve been on the hunt for memory leaks lately, and while I did track down several in time for this release I couldn’t pin down the largest two (on the build queue screen and, ironically, in the autosave system) before my self-imposed deadline. With my first meaningful update (1.1 shouldn’t really count) out of the way, my next focus is going to be solving the game’s crashtastic problem once and for all.
Well, that was exciting. Apparently I tagged the wrong version for my first release, and managed to send Apple a copy of the game as it existed right before I fixed all of the bugs. Ok, right before I fixed some of the bugs. But still.
Deeply embarrassing.
At any rate, I’ve got it all sorted out now and a smoother, much less crash-tastic version of the game is currently writhing its (slow) way through Apple’s review process. In addition to not ceasing to scroll after loading from save (!) and not crashing approximately every 7.8 minutes (!!), this update adds a couple new features:
All that, plus a ton of bugfixes, patched memory leaks, and general slickification. It’s looking better now, folks. We’re good to go.
Distant Star is live on the App Store! Go give it a play and tell me what you think.
Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m off to go celebrate — where ‘celebrate’ means ‘add Gamecenter integration.’
Lots of progress on Distant Star — the biggest change is that I’ve added a tutorial, which was by far the most-requested feature the beta testers asked for. The map screen is a lot more informative now, too: fleets display their ETA and size (and, if you tap them, their composition), and the artwork for systems has been updated (as a system grows more habitable it looks increasingly Earthlike). That, plus a bunch of little bugfixes and minor improvements (AI is more aggressive, lots of re-balancing, a little more hand-holding in the interface design) — in fact, everything else that was left on my pre-release checklist. So, on that note:
Distant Star is off to Apple for review. Hurrah!
Tonight, we celebrate — I’ve finished enough of Distant Star that I’m releasing a copy to my beta testers tonight. I spent most of the weekend putting the finishing touches on a ton of polish — the game now has attractive victory/defeat screens and a framework for tracking and reporting gameplay stats, plus a really useful report that you can access after each combat showing you how well your ships fared in battle.
I’ve also put together a really solid Creative Commons-licensed soundtrack; the title track is “Two Swords” by _ghost. There’s some truly amazing stuff over on ccMixter just begging to be dropped into games. Free culture FTW.
Things are really cranking along now, which is good, because October’s almost over and my first-release deadline is almost here. I spent a good chunk of yesterday and today finishing up one of my last pre-release milestones, and as a result Distant Star now sports a functional, if somewhat limited, save slot system. You can access it via the in-game menu, which is another of those functional-but-terrifically-ugly systems (“Save!” “Load!” “Quit!”).
As part of the save/load system I also added a new game setup screen, where you can customize the game before starting. Right now it’s rather limited — there aren’t a lot of interesting customizations yet, ‘mfraid — but the interface is all there; it works and it looks pretty good.
Tomorrow and Friday I’m going to nail down the AI, and if I’m happy with the state of things I’m going to start passing the game out to beta testers over the weekend. Huzzah!
I couldn’t help myself. There are tons of important systems in Distant Star that still need a lot of work (like the non-existant save/load screens!) — but I spent most of the weekend putting the finishing touches on the research and technology aspect of the game. I’ve got four ‘trees’ — Combat, Industry, Defense, and Ecology — completely implemented. Every technology in those trees works; researching ‘Post-Keynesian Economics’, for example, actually improves the rate at which you gain wealth.
Tech trees for Combat, Defense, Industry, and Ecology
I also finished up the last of the combat mechanics (shields now actually work, and automatically recharge) and refactored some nasty code leftover from the prototype. Expect great things. Soon.
At last!
After a late night hacking I Distant Star finally has a tech tree. The research system isn't in place yet (so you can't actually do any research...), but all the interface for browsing the tree and selecting technologies is in place. The whole thing is totally data-driven, and insanely extensible. It actually supports multiple 'trees' -- each individual tree focuses on some aspect of your empire. There's a combat tree (better weapons and tracking speed), a defense tree (better armor and shields), and an industry tree (increased production and planetary efficiency). I've got ideas for a couple more trees (science, ecology, etc.) -- but the great thing about building the system in this way is that I can just throw the XML in later.
I'm incredibly pleased with the disparate tools I'm using to assemble trees. I start by sketching them out in a mind-mapping tool (the ever-awesome-and-surprisingly-free MindNode; that sketch feeds into a little Ruby script that spits out plist XML with some reasonable defaults for each tech. At this point I could drop the tree into the game -- but none of the technologies would actually do anything, so before I do that I go in and add an effect or two to each tech. It's surprisingly fun ("Hmm. What should 'Post-Keynesian Economics' do?"), and something I've wanted to do ever since I first played Civilization way back in the day. My very own tech tree!
I've been playing a lot of Civ V lately, which should come as no surprise to anyone. Anyone with even a passing interest in strategy games should give it a try; it's an interesting, albeit very safe, take on a well-established formula. What I like most about it, though, is the changes to the interface -- in previous iterations of the series large empires grew completely unmanageable in the endgame. Just hunting down all the cities and units that needed new orders in a given turn starts to feel a bit like work.
In V, they've introduced a nice interface element that greatly simplifies all of this management: at the beginning of each turn, a queue of icons appears, each representing some action or decision you should probably take during this turn. You can ignore them, of course -- but it's incredibly helpful to have the game tell you when, say, you need to pick a new tech to research or a unit is waiting for orders. It's not an original mechanic, by any means -- but it's incredibly helpful here.
Naturally, I've stolen it for Distant Star.
At the beginning of each turn in Distant Star you get a neat little stack of notifications along the left side of the screen. If something interesting has happened -- a ship was completed, a fleet arrived at its destination, a colony was founded or lost -- an icon appears to let you know about it and, if you tap it, give you more information. I'm finding that it completely changes the way I play, making the game feel like less of a chore. On each turn I scan through the notifications with my right hand, tapping any that I think need my immediate attention. With my left hand I take care of whatever needs doing, whether it be giving new orders to a fleet or queuing up another batch of frigates on an idle system. It's deliriously intuitive, at least to me -- and it completely does away with the tedious scrolling that characterized the game up until now.
A week ago I announced my entry for PoV's October Challenge, an old-school 4X space game (ala Master of Orion) for the iPad called Distant Star. I've made a fair amount of progress since that announcement; Distant Star has gone from a pile of half-finished tech and ideas to a rough playable prototype. Almost all the core features are in place: ship construction, exploration, colonization, combat. Of course, to be properly playable I needed a few basic AIs -- at the moment, you can play against two simple, deterministic AI players, each with their own play style (one colonizes recklessly, while the other builds up small fleets and attempts to capture one system at a time).
Introducing some simple AI players helped point out all kinds of multiplayer bugs I'd introduced so far -- turns out none of my fog of war code worked at all, and resource accumulation was completely borked. The first game I played the AI wiped me out almost instantly.
Based on some early, vicious usability feedback I've made some subtle changes to the map interaction, restricting scrolling outside of the galaxy and highlighting fleets or systems when they were selected. I also played around with a real-time version of the game, but quickly realized that, while it made the early game much more pleasant, things got way too hectic once the AI acquired more than a handful of high-quality planets. They started building ships far faster than the player, especially if the player's empire was quite spread out. Back to turn-based I went.
Up next: research management. Bring on the tech tree!
For the last few weeks, I’ve been hacking away on a medium-sized iPad game; I hadn’t planned on finishing it by October 31st, but (with your collective permission) I’m upping my deadline and making it my October Challenge entry. So, without further ado, I present, for the iPad-owning, grand-strategy-loving among you: Distant Star
Distant Star is an old-school 4x game (a la Master of Orion or Sword of the Stars) for the iPad. It’s a turn-based strategy game in which you explore the galaxy, assembling massive fleets to conquer your opponents and terraform their planets. Starting from a single system, you build starships, research new technologies, and colonize distant star systems — but you’re not alone in the galaxy. There are other races out there, with radically different needs, abilities, and psychologies.
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Thanks to the couple of weekends and odd evening I’ve put in so far, the core of the game is more-or-less complete. You can build ships, assemble them into fleets, and move those fleets between systems. Obviously, there’s a lot of critical stuff left to write: the AI system is just a shell, the research/tech tree aspect is non-existent, and the entire thing is completely devoid of graphical shininess. I’ve also made my life significantly more difficult by attempting to support multiple orientations, but with some slight glTranslate/glRotate cleverness, this shouldn’t be too hard.
I have to confess: I’m not really making Distant Star for the October Challenge. I’m making Distant Star because I happen to have an iPad and I want to play an old-school 4x game on it. Unfortunately, such a thing doesn’t seem to exist, so I suppose I’ll just have to write it myself. Worse things have happened.
Anyway: Distant Star, coming for the iPad in early November!
