Twitter · Email · GitHub · Tumblr · MetaFilter · LinkedIn · Stack Overflow
∞
Airships · Space Exploration · Grim Meathook Future · Dawn · Parasite Escape · etc.
∞
Which Fish? · Freelancing · Game Musings · Pen & Paper
Over the last weekend, I again got to participate in the Global Game Jam. It's a pretty big event here in Zurich, with about 80 participants each year, held in one big ex-factory hall.
Like last year, I worked together with Kaspar Manz, though Kristina Balanc, who did the art for Art Critic, couldn't make it. What made this year different was that we were joined by Jan Graber, a local journalist who wanted to experience the jam from the inside. He would both work on the game and report on it, and if you read German, I recommend his rather more expert coverage. This post, as a postmortem, is going to focus on the good old "what went right, what went wrong" side of things.
A few months ago, I got introduced to Caverna at a board game evening. Caverna is pretty much "Dwarf Fortress: The Board Game" in that you run a group of dwarves digging out caverns, creating a living space, mining and farming. Unsurprisingly, this got me to start playing Dwarf Fortress itself again.
Today brings both the release of Airships 5.3 and the start of the Steam closed beta for the game.
When programming game AI, a common pattern is to look at each possible action and assign them a numerical score to figure out which to take. This may be done explicitly, with each possible action actually considered, or implicitly. A lot of thought may go into calculating the best action scores, taking all available information into account and also projecting play forwards in time. Or it may be as simple as "there's an enemy in front of you, shooting it would be a great idea".
A problem can arise when the AI always picks the action with the best score. This sounds odd - after all, the best-scoring action is the best action, right? But unless you did a very good job at calculating scores, a particular type of action can end up constantly scoring best. The AI gets locked into repetitive actions that become easy to predict and outmanoeuvre, and may fail to take care of secondary or long-term goals.
(This post is partly inspired by Vi Hart and Nicky Case's Parable of the Polygons in that it has a bunch of interactive toys to hopefully illustrate its points. It's not nearly as pretty as the polygons stuff, mind you.)
Late last night, I checked Airships' Greenlight page one last time and found to my great delight that it had been greenlit. So of course, I tweeted about it, had a celebratory toast with my flatmates, then promptly went to bed to deal with all the details upon the morrow.
The next major version of Airships, EA6, will have support for multiple languages. Right now, English and German are supported, and I hope to also include French and Spanish. I have fairly limited resources, so I may not be able to afford professional translation to many languages. So if you want, you can help out by providing or verifying translations through this spreadsheet.
One of the nifty features of Airships is that you can create your own coat of arms. You can do this for your single-player empires, selecting a symbol (a charge) to give you a particular bonus. And you can design and register a coat of arms for your unique use in multiplayer. The system hasn't really changed since the initial release with the exception of a few added charges, but with dev 6 - the update of prettiness - I want to improve on what's there.
I recently received some queries about my OCR project, Longan, so I thought I'd write up the current state of it. I tried doing this before, and it quickly mutated into a book-length project, so I'll try to keep this one brief.
I started writing Longan because I needed a good OCR engine for another (now defunct) project I was working on. The only freely available OCR system that anything near worked was Tesseract / Ocropus. My experiences with Ocropus were pretty dire: it was hard to set up, hard to use, and very brittle in its output quality. So I decided I could totally write my own, better OCR system. Because of hubris.
Another game from the 90s that I am once again able to play thanks to GOG.com. In Chaos Overlords, you play as the head of a criminal organization plotting to take over the city, sector by sector. You are assisted in this by an array of deeply weird gangs that you can hire and use to expand your territory, increase your income, and fight the other crime lords. It is, in other words, a war game, but a weird and wonderful one about zany crime and casual violence.
At the start of 2014, I'd been working on Airships for a few months, and the major components were beginning to take shape: ship design, combat, heraldry, even a simple strategic map and multiplayer. I'd been blogging about the game on my site and IndieDB right from the start, and the very positive response was a major source of motivation. Still, the game lacked much of a user interface, and the computer's ships just hung in the sky and fired, with no tactical AI to drive them.
Thanks to the continuing work of GOG.com, I am once more able to play Imperialism II. I originally got the game back in 1999, when it was released for Mac OS 8, and absolutely loved it. Sadly, the Mac version did not support later Mac OS versions, and I didn't have a Windows machine until a few months ago, so I found myself unable to play it for the last 15 years.
Anyway, let me tell you why I think it's still a fantastic game that holds many interesting game design lessons.
Escape Velocity, released way back in 1996, was the first game I lost large chunks of time to, and what set me on the path to game development. It could be best described as 2D Elite: You command and steer a spaceship in a top-down 2D view, flying between planets and star systems, fighting, trading, and doing missions.
I spend a fair amount of time on Steam Greenlight. Not just because I have a game of my own on there, but also because the steady flow of games is interesting, and there's the occasional gem. After a while, I noticed some definite national preferences towards specific genres. So I did what every educated white male would do in this situation: use dubious science to explain my prejudices! Er. I mean. I ran some stats on nationality vs genre on Greenlight.
When you start upgrading the visuals of your game, some parts start sticking out like a sore thumb. In this case, I'm really unhappy with the way damaged armour looks, so I'm going to outline a way to make it look better. This is a bit involved, but there is a really cool picture at the end...
In the first post on lighting, I got as far as adding unidirectional light sources to the game. The next step was to make the light directional, so things facing a light source would be lit up more strongly. To do this, the game needed to keep track of the direction of light, and not just its intensity.
In this magic-based dungeon crawler, instead of using individual spells, you use the mouse cursor to manipulate various things: stone, fire, metal, souls. Your cursor is your magical focus, and click to grab and drag to move. You can also change the radius of your focus, from small and concentrated to large and diffuse. If you do this while holding on, you compress or expand.
This has various effects, as follows:
For a bunch of reasons including research for Airships and another unannounced project, I've been looking at the history of matches. You know, the little wooden sticks you can use to make fire1.
It's long been fashionable to reinterpret Sherlock Holmes, such as in the recent TV shows Sherlock and Elementary. Apart from changes in time, place, and mood, the exact nature of Holmes and Watson has seen various permutations - here amusingly referenced by Kate Beaton. So here's my cynical take on things: Holmes as a fig leaf for corruption.
In this second instalment of the Airships modding guide, I'll give you an explanation of how mods can override existing game functionality, and walk you through creating a simple mod that adds a new weapon: a really big cannon.
Over the past few days, I've spent a lot of time going over Airships and improving it in terms of AI, speed, and bugs. The major highlight is that the strategic game should be more balanced now: AI empires make much better decisions in terms of what to build and who to invade. Also, I've eliminated inefficient code for crew shouts and firing angle calculations that were taking up a solid two thirds of CPU time - remember to profile, kids!
On top of that, there's lots of other improvements:
You may be familiar with the term "great filter". The universe is billions of years old, and it took hundreds of millions of years for humans to turn up after the first vertebrates. If interstellar spaceflight is at all possible, a few million years ought to suffice to spread through a galaxy. There are also a lot of stars in the galaxy, and as we are increasingly able to tell, a lot of planets. It seems implausible and arrogant to assume that we are the first and only lifeform capable of complex thought and tool use. So where are the aliens? There must be clever tool-using lifeforms elsewhere in the galaxy, and some of them must have arrived in this state hundreds of millions if not billions of years earlier.