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carlosww
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« on: June 04, 2014, 07:39:02 AM »

Hello! My name is Carlos and my brother (art) and me (code) have been developing what is now called The Spatials for six months.

Both of us have been at some point or are professionally involved in game dev, and we wanted to do try to do our own thing, with our rules, our ideas, no managers, no deadlines, aaaaaand oh god a year went by and we have nothing... Well you get the picture Smiley

We first developed two big protos, first a full 3D game with a custom engine, which we soon realized was way beyond the effort and skill we could munster between the two of us to finish in a reasonable amount of time. Still it was a very interesting experiment (and faking  instancing with vertex shader constants and mesh duplication was boss, here's 5 million tris from thousands of objects in ~200 draw calls at 30FPS, on the slowest retina iPad at full res. Procedurally animated too)





UPDATE: quite a few people asked me about how this, so I wrote a blog post with all the details and some pseudocode: Faking mesh instancing in OpenGL ES 2.0

After this we pivoted in both our concept and technical planning, hard. We went for a much simpler idea, which would become the embryo of The Spatials, and on a technical level I repressed my 3D compulsions and decided to fully embrace what our framework of choice (cocos2d-x) offered, and nothing else. A bit of a case of The Pragmaticals, capital P (I am totally calling dibs on this name for a future game, mkay?)

From this was born Game Number Two. GNT was about a cast away spaceship or roaming space station or roaming asteroid inhabited by a bunch of colonist or astronauts or aliens or all of them, who occasionally went out on missions in randomly generated galaxy that took part as a sequence of automatic encounters and battles and diplomatic intermissions, all displayed in a VERY (in concept) oldschool text listing with a few icons and lots of numbers. It was completely non-interactive and induced sleep in most test subjects.



This lacked Fun, which is indeed a most important problem in a game, so GNT, as a concept, was scrapped too. BUT! This time we knew we were on to something. If we could find the Fun, and put it into this concept, something else would emerge. And that something was The Spatials.

The jury was still out about the Fun, but The Spatials was here. We refined the concept so the castaway segment was about building a space colony on an asteroid, a place to call home, in glorious 2D isometric fullres (mixed draw-order and Z buffer, and yeah it's a beast to get it right, specially since I constrained myself to not touch cocos2d-x internals unless 100% necessary). The passive missions were changed into a 2D isometric exploration/combat segment, with random generated planets. Half of your time would be spent managing and building up the asteroid colony for your officers to live in, and the other half would be about visiting exotic locales and doing very interesting science. The kind of science done with large caliber guns and high explosives. Hey, the nature of humanity never changes.

Fortunately for our sanity and bank accounts we finally arrived at a prototype+concept early this year. The gameplay and art bullet lists were, after a year, finally looking half closed, and we set to work. GNT provided a good framework for the UI and we advanced very fast. In march I remembered I used to be a Development Manager in a previous life and put a deadline on ourselves, fearing we would fall again in the infinite cycle of New Ideas and never finish it. It was so close now, it had to be done. So, the first of May, The Spatials 1.0.0 for iPad was done. It was rushed in some areas, it lacked content in some others, the monetization strategy was worse than bad, but here it was, in review. It went live a few days later and...



If you have followed other indie dev tales you may have noticed something amiss in my narration. PR, marketing, promotion, visibility, announcements, reviews, articles, forums, social media, crowdfunding, you get the idea. We were so engrossed in developing the game we either didn't think about it, or as the release came closer, we just brushed it off as "it's okay, we will do that after release". Nope, it doesn't work like that. And, apart from the very nice people of the Touch Arcade forums and a few other places, the game was mostly ignored.

But this was just one more step on the road for us. We have gathered all the feedback and dusted off the good ol' bullet point list and set to design a 2.0. This time it's going to be available first on PC and Mac, as a full paid game with no microtransaction nonsense, and we are releasing as Early Access, to engage fans and critics alike while we develop the game. The final version will also come back to the iPad and we hope other platforms too! And this time, we are doing things the right way, and we will give promotion and communication the critical attention it requires. We love talking to people about our game!

The Spatials homepage - Now available for download on PC/Mac!
Vote for us in Steam Greenlight!
Touch Arcade thread, lots of in-dev iPad 1.0.x discussion
« Last Edit: October 02, 2014, 02:35:22 PM by carlosww » Logged
Christian
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« Reply #1 on: June 04, 2014, 04:57:03 PM »

Wasn't this recently released on IOS? I think I remember you posting about it on Toucharcade. Glad that this is coming to PC, since I don't have an iPad.

And I'm guessing that means no micro-transactions for the PC version?
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carlosww
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« Reply #2 on: June 05, 2014, 01:52:28 AM »

Yes, we launched version 1.0 on the iPad a month ago.

No microtransactions for the PC version. In retrospective it was a mistake to take that route for the iPad version too, but what's done is done. Version 2.0 is a regular paid download in PC/Mac (by the way, our Humble Widget is up! Check our home page!), and is of course balanced with that in mind.

Our short experience with the F2P world has not been a very nice one and we want to avoid going down that route in the future.
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dhontecillas
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« Reply #3 on: June 05, 2014, 02:29:00 PM »

Hi!

I've been playing like an hour or so. It looks like it has simulation at very different levels, and also lots of hours of gameplay. From my point of view, it's a game that fits great on PC. I will continue playing for a while before providing some feedback.

Do you have some kind of list of improvements for the next version? any priority ?
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carlosww
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« Reply #4 on: June 06, 2014, 02:14:14 PM »

Yes, we are preparing an initial list of the features and changes we want to develop in the 2.0 cycle, but I can provide an outline now.

We first want to make the station segment much deeper and involved. Right now it's about housing and feeding a small amount of officers and that's it. We will expand the needs and requirements of those officers, so they will need a wider variety of rooms will consume more kinds of resources. The resource and crafting systems will be made more complex and interesting too. We also want to do something about the station feeling empty, but are not yet ready to announce it!

The officer skill system will be simplified. Right now the passive skills feel too complex, way too many numbers going up and down. This will be changed so it's more predictable and easier to understand. It will also go nicely with the increase in complexity in other areas of officer management.

After the station gets in a better shape we will start revisiting the galaxy exploration gameplay. This will actually start earlier, because as part of the resource changes, we will also add some new resource gathering mechanics, making it a more interesting aspect of planet exploration. Then we will work on the campaign. We haven't decided yet on anything, but by making the station segment more stand alone we will free some of the current progression constraints of the campaign/galaxy. I'm a fan of Starflight and I would love to sprinkle some SF-like magic on the galaxy segment, but it's a very lofty goal Smiley

Sorry not to give more specifics right now, but I'm of the mindset of under-promise and over-deliver Smiley
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carlosww
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« Reply #5 on: June 10, 2014, 01:22:37 PM »

So here it is, the promised blog post for the planned new features for the station sim: Station roadmap for 2.0. We hope to make this area of the game a lot more interesting and deep. We haven't forgotten about the combat segment, but for now the station needs a lot more attention to bring it up on gameplay and content.
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carlosww
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« Reply #6 on: August 12, 2014, 01:14:59 PM »

After a short hiatus we are again at full speed. We just released version 2.1 with a ton of new station content. It's basically all the production and resource related content for station visitors and part of the officer related content. Plus the new tech tree progression system to rein a bit in the chaos! There's also a new video in our homepage showing the (accelerated) construction of a big station, check it out.





Our next build will be focused on planet generation, exploration and progression systems. We already removed the old campaign from 2.1 and we have plans to make dynamic objective gen much more interesting.
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rsdworker
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« Reply #7 on: August 13, 2014, 01:16:21 AM »

nice - i have few feeback

i noticed tech tree is wrong in production boxes - example you unlock the service station you get soap in factory but later when i unlock other eg staff 2 then its shows correct icons in factory production box

money income is very hard at noment
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karlozalb
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« Reply #8 on: August 13, 2014, 01:36:45 AM »

This looks cool! I'll test it Smiley
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carlosww
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« Reply #9 on: August 13, 2014, 01:58:19 AM »

i noticed tech tree is wrong in production boxes - example you unlock the service station you get soap in factory but later when i unlock other eg staff 2 then its shows correct icons in factory production box

True, you found a bug here. It appears some unlocks don't work correctly when the factory building only gets one unlocked recipe. For now just keep unlocking tech nodes, it has zero cost to aid in testing for this build.

money income is very hard at noment

Try to explore planets and blast some aliens/ pirates/ robots. While you explore around the station keeps running and receiving visitors, plus you get credits from the loot you get when you kill enemies. Use the "old" button in the planet popup to access the old exploration screen. We will fix this UI in the next build.
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carlosww
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« Reply #10 on: September 01, 2014, 05:35:19 AM »

Work advances steadily towards version 2.2. The new mission engine is now in place and it uses a DSL based on TinyScheme for its file format. I've wrote an article about the process and the evaluation of various interpreters here:

http://carloscarrasco.com/embedding-scheme-for-a-game-mission-scripting-dsl.html
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dhontecillas
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« Reply #11 on: September 13, 2014, 07:13:20 AM »

When do you expect to release the next version? I have not played it for some time, but I am waiting for the next version to try it again.

By the way, how is the greenlight going ?
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carlosww
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« Reply #12 on: September 14, 2014, 01:55:48 AM »

We hope to have version 2.2 ready in a few weeks. We ended up doing a bit more work on game systems than we wanted to, and a bit less on content. It just didn't make much sense to be working on some mission content when we still had to update the skill/combat system from version 1. That work is now mostly done and it has completely changed the feeling of combat and we hope it's for the better. Version 2.2 will still feature new missions using the new scripting system, they will just be fewer than planned. We will keep adding new ones in future versions.

The Greenlight is flatlined basically. After the initial push for being featured in the first page most of the voting is gone and it becomes more of a marathon. We are at 82%, receiving less than 10 votes a day. At that rate it would probably take us from six months to a year to get into Steam. We will need to make A LOT more promotion to make it go faster. But I am not sure what is going to happen with Greenlight, the last big batch was approved in August 1st, and since then Valve has been approving games on a one-to-one basis, instead of doing "top N" batches. The result is that the pace of approvals has decreased a lot, so it could be even worse than that.

For now we will keep working on promo and trying to get into alternative stores. We are now in Desura and I hope Humble will approve us for its store pages (we already have the widget).
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carlosww
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« Reply #13 on: October 02, 2014, 02:34:17 PM »

After six solid weeks of development version 2.2 is ready. We focused on the galaxy exploration campaign and the combat system, making huge improvements over the old, left over system from version 1.0.

New planet surface generators: caves and space stations. A dozen new tilesets just for exploring planets!

New combat system with autoattacking. Fighting your enemies is now much easier and fun. Just point and click over an enemy and every officer in range and with enough energy will start firing his or her sidearm. Which means...

New sidearm items. Now all officers can attack enemies. The first active item slot has been changed into a sidearm slot. Sidearm items are fast and low power weapons that are usable by every class. The older skills are still available and have been boosted in power.

Simplified item system. Passive stat items now only increase a single stat. It's now much easier to choose items for your officers. Also we introduced some class differences, so only damage classes can equip power increase passives for example.

New scripted missions. The campaign is now based on scripted missions. You will talk to NPCs, deliver mission items, and find new adventures while you explore a planet. Missions now have multiple steps and the game gives a much clearer guidance of your objectives.

The next version, 2.3, will be all about the station sim again. We will implement new game systems to make officer management more interesting. We hope to get much closer to the final release with 2.3 so a serious balance phase will also happen at this point.
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