I've only played this on my own and I think you've made my left brain hate my right brain, and vice versa. Especially when I get the munchkins swapped left-for-right.

Neat idea with the coop shooting and (I assume?) competitive scoring. The graphics evoke the speccy quite well too.

Great IK on the arms

I agree about the backup movement, I hadn't realised from a quick play how deep the sensor model was though - maybe a more developed version with maps/enemies that require a bit more care would help this.

The graphics are great too, especially the kitty paws stabbing at buttons. I think this is my favourite "normal game controlled by visible hands" entry.

I think this is great, I like a good text-mode game and this really goes a long way. I'm particularly impressed at all the effects in there, and how readable they are. For example, the enemy spawn crackles, and the breaking glass as a health meter are completely understandable despite being a bunch of ASCII chars

You had me at "pew" and "bamf", but I don't think I type fast enough for this as I fell down a hole pretty quickly. Maybe a training mode which prompts words to type would be a good thing?

Madness, yet vaguely reminiscent of some of those multi-genre Sierra/Dynamix games. I didn't manage to get into the chopper at the (?) end.

This is terrific! I hadn't realised the radar was updated by raycast, that's probably a better use of the idea than I made. I think the sweep speed (and thus the degree of lag on the central display) is really well judged.

I got killed by the yellow things but I intend going back - I messed up by turning north for the first one without realising it was only alcove, then botched my escape.

[What went right]

Might as well post some trials and tribulations here:

What went right

1) I finished a game in my spare time. OK, it's only teeny tiny, but still...

2) I was able to implement (if not exactly explore) a game mechanic I've been musing about for a while, and picking this limited scope allowed point 1 to happen

3) I got to play lots of other cool entries and see some other relatively hardcore sci-fi fans come out of the woodwork. I like that.

4) My toolkit/library is growing and I got to use some of the entity component stuff I've been mucking about with for a while. It did make things easier!

What went wrong

-1) Not enough time. I didn't start anything really until the flight to GDC, where I took some raycast code I'd layered on top of Box2D and tested the scanning/sensor return mechanics (about 3-4 hours?). Then GDC happened and not much work got done (2 hours). After that I was in Berkeley for a week working for a client, but got work done in the evenings (6-8 hours?). I did a bit more on the flight back (2 hours) and tarted everything up when I was back at home (4-6 hours). For a total of around 24 hours.

-2) Too dry. Indulging my inner sci-fi geek meant not giving instant feedback on correct/incorrect contact identification, and not dressing things up as more of a game. So I'd argue the result is interesting but not exactly fun.

-3) No screenshots for ages, still no video or readme. My thread didn't exactly draw attention, because it was pretty boring, whereas my Space Effort thread was a good source of encouragement for me perhaps because I started with arts not codes.

-4) No sound. Again. Sorry

-6) No UI library. I wrote some IMGUI stuff for Space Effort but decided not to use it again, and my UI this time was minimal so it wasn't a huge problem. But it did mean that things like the difficulty select and play again screen got left until the last possible minute.

-7) It's only tangentially cockpitty. I've been meaning to add a bitmap screen border to make it look more like a display, but didn't get to it in time for the compo version.

Grey area

No Photoshop on my work laptop. Doh! I was sure I'd installed it too... This would have helped the early boringness issue, but at least this it me concentrate on the game mechanic, so I don't know if this is a net win or loss.

What's next?

More interesting (i.e. not just one convex polygon) ship shapes.

I really want to turn Sublight into a proper 2D tactical space combat game. I'd quite like to do a 3D game, but frankly I've been there before and it does make things more complex. I think that most of the same ideas and mechanics can be interesting in 2D though.

I do like the idea of doing the raytracing radar mechanic in 3D - instead of a 1.5D scan section of a 2D ship, you'd get a 2.5D scan of a 3D ship, which you'd draw like a heightfield mesh - e.g. like Toastie's nifty holomap in Landfall.

Hope the above was of interest, I like reading other peoples' post mortems, so hopefully someone else will get something from this!

Cheers and thanks all,

Will

["Sublight: It's more a game mechanic than a game."]

Good point, and thanks for trying it out. I'll start by posting some instructions here and maybe try uploading a vid later. It is a bit of a hardcore avionics geek idea - sorry the whole thing is so dry 

"Sublight: It's more a game mechanic than a game."

Pick a difficulty level to start.

• You are training to be the sensor operator on a warship, looking at your sensor displays. The large space on the left is your mass detector - blips will appear there and move around. Your job is find out what they are as quickly as possible.

• To do this, click on a blip to target it. Your tracking radar will start scanning back and forth in the direction of the blip, and you'll see the radar return as a moving line in the top right display. This will give you an idea of the shape and orientation of the target.

• Click on the ship outlines below the tracking radar to page through the different ship types. Once you've decided which one you're looking at, click 'DESIGNATE' to mark the current blip with its ship type.

• Rinse and repeat for the remaining blips. At the end of the session you'll see how many you got right, and how quick you were on average.

HINTS/SPOILERS:

The small triangular fighters are easy to spot, and you can usually tell one before scanning it just because it's moving fast.

The long carriers are also really easy to spot, particularly as they pass your ship and reveal their profile.

Distinguishing between battleships and corvettes is hardest since they (purposefully) have similar shapes at different sizes.

Huge thanks to Fuzz for arranging all the downloads and keeping up with naughty updaters like me I'm downloading the packages now...

Legos used to be fun too, but they have way too many pieces that only work in certain situations now.

I think this is more of a problem if you look at one set at a time - as soon as you combine a couple, you find that more pieces just give you more options, and options are good. For example, I was really happy when last year's City and Mars Mission sets introduced square bins for putting stuff in. Two reasons:

1) My daughter *loves* putting treasure in the bins, taking it out again etc.
2) They were perfect for the engines on this:



and that's just one example. I will admit that I look at Bionicle parts and think "what could I make with that", but then you see stuff like this:



and realise that it's all just down to imagination - how good you are at seeing the potential in weird shapes. Just like Darth Vader

W

However it was the Sony party that made the fear real.

Shame - the Sony "GTC welcome" party on the Sunday night before GDC was really good - just a bunch of developers talking about developing. With drinks!

I think you've got a pretty fun game there, manuevering strikes a nice balance between being responsive and being too easy, although a bit more feedback about safe docking speeds (speed towards the screen) would be nice.

At one point I started in front of a gas giant and couldn't see a station. Not sure if it was visible at the start and I looked away or something, but an indicator pointing in the direction of the target when offscreen would have helped.

The boppy tune is addictive, and despite being totally out of place (Blue Danube is pretty much mandatory) I found it went with the game quite well. Perhaps because you're playing the game slowly and carefully while listening to energetic music, so you have to separate thet two things in your head?

Will

I love it! Great art style, great audio, and it's really fun blasting away. I like the sense of gradually getting overwhelmed as you care less and less about the cities and more about just staying alive.

Interestingly, it feels like you're straddling a tech and design middle ground between Defender and Body Harvest - definitely a good place to be.

Will

[edited for speeling]

The latest version works well here - the stuttering is gone and it looks really nice. I like the MG impact squibs a lot - they capture the motion of dirt kicking up without adding too much particle clutter so they sit well within the low-poly style.

I think the cockpit animation/camera shake is still my favourite - maybe you could also drive a little fritz animation on the holomap (or just scale it randomly a few percent) to really sell this?

I may have found a minor bug: I played two games in a row (menu -> start game during the first game) and one team seemed to start with rather fewer than 50 tickets - it might have been the state of play at the end of the previous game.

Look forward to seeing what comes next. Are you going to add different chassis and weapon choices so you get some more tactical variety? (e.g. slow/fast, weak/strong, mg/missiles/beams) At the moment it's a bit of a race to the flag.

Cheers,

Will

Sorting for alpha is annoying The simplest solution is to go in two steps:

1) Draw large opaque objects front to back (for good Z rejection performance)

1.5) (optionally) Draw skybox (saves shading a lot of pixels)

2) Draw alpha objects back to front.

I remember also getting decent results just drawing back to front, with alpha surfaces in a model (like windshields) statically sorted to the end of that particular model. Not quite so good for performance but nice and simple.

Cheers,

Will

I read about this on the MS site a while back - I'm pretty sure that you have to use the appropriate redist installer to get the DLLs onto the machine - just sticking stuff in a folder might be against your license agreement.

The WinSxS stuff makes installing multiple versions pretty straightforward. My plan for approaching this next time was to have the installer provide web links to the correct downloads (or possibly do a silent install-off-web in basic mode) to avoid bloating it unnecessarily.

[edit] The MS installers for redists, DirectX etc. don't do anything if you have the stuff installed already, so you can in theory just run them without needing to detect first - that should be a lot safer and easier than trying to detect and maybe getting it wrong.

For the people who don't like having stuff installed without their permission, what do you suggest as an alternative? Dependencies are dependencies, you can't run the game without them after all. Is offering the option enough, with the caveat that "the game will crash if you don't do this"?

Cheers,

Will

I don't have any resources but I have used this technique for a couple of things, so if you have any specific questions I might be able to help

Last time I replaced my work laptop was about 2 years ago - I got a Vaio SZ-something for about 20% off, although I was seriously considering a Macbook Pro as well.

The higher-end Vaios are good gamedev machines - they're light and relatively well-specified with excellent screens. They also have the useful feature of being able to switch between Intel and NVidia graphics for the battery/performance tradeoff. I've used this a few times for debugging Intel compatibility problems and it was a godsend.

They aren't cheap though, but if you try and spec a similar machine from another major manufacturer you generally end up in the same ballpark. In my experience (this is my third) they're very well made.

One warning: Once you've travelled with a light laptop, you'll be very unwilling to travel with a heavy one

Stupidly I didn't have Photoshop with me while I was at GDC - I only got back on Monday