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[AndyKorth]

Scott has been doing some excellent work, and he’s put together fleets of ships! A fleet is a set of ships that will fly together in formation, and generally look out for eachother. Firing on one ship in a fleet will get the whole group angry at you.

Here we’ve got a 3 fleets on screen, and the player (the green triangle) has a few escorts. Already some of the independent traders have been engaged by another group- probably pirates. The IFF system colors them yellow, since neither party is hostile to the player yet.

We’ll have more information about the faction system in our next post!

[AndyKorth]

We've added a faction system to Solaro. I hinted at it in a previous post, but now I'm ready to explain it in more detail.

Factions provide a lot of flavor to the world. It's part of the setting, but more than that, it provides a new way for the player to interact with the world. Different factions will be set to be at war with each other- other factions will come to the aid of their friends.

Meanwhile, the player is in the middle, and their actions will influence how the other factions view them. Running missions can affect your reputation with different factions- and who you blow up also has a significant effect. All in all, this is a pretty typical system- but there's one concept we've found that very cleanly offers some advantages.

The player has separate temporary and permanent reputations with each faction. This offers a great balance between making  yourself a permanent enemy of a trading corporation or just angering a single member. If you're in good standing with a faction, a few accidental stray shots won't anger them too much. However, a full blown attack will always have some response from the attacked fleet. Really good relations will cause them to overlook a few destroyed vessels- they give you the benefit of the doubt. But with repeated attacks, they will eventually decide to destroy you on sight.

[AndyKorth]

One thing we've been focusing on while creating Solaro is to tell a story without large paragraphs of text. While there's no denying that a rich world can be created with just text- but it's not the experience people are looking for in this sort of game.

Our goal instead is to use small amounts of text and to shape the world around the quests instead.  Psychochild summarizes the problem nicely in his blog post:

• Many players say they want an engaging story.
• Most players skip the boring text anyway.
• Reality dictates that quest text will be limited.

The point Psychochild makes in his post is that players don't know what they actually want. This is 90% correct- but I'd rather say that players know what they want, but they have the wrong idea of how to get it. More (or even better) quest text is an obvious solution, since it stares you straight in the face. This is especially in games like WoW, where the quest text is 99% of what makes collecting boar snouts different from collecting murloc eyes. So let us step back from the traditional quest "text description, action, text and reward" model.

Often, showing is better than telling.  The downside, of course, is that doing anything other than blocks of text becomes a lot more work- especially where art comes in to play; that's been our traditional weakness.

So far, we've had good luck with custom scripting on our quests. Since you're doing something reasonably different on each quest, they feel very unique. There's more variety than changing a block of text can provide. (We'll also won't have 8393 quests, which is the
current quest count in WoW) This is also playing towards our personal strengths. It's easier for Scott and me to script something interesting than to make art or elaborate text stories.

[AndyKorth]

I've forgotten to post here in a while, so here's a new post!



ile ago we purchased a really nice set of turrets from 3dRT, and we’ve got them in game now as our weapons! They’ve all been fitted to work on our rotating turrets and fit nicely on our ships!

One other advantage of these models is that they all share the same single texture. This saves us texture memory and context switches within Unity. It also allows us to combine several meshes into a single mesh that uses the same material. This can significantly save on draw calls and allow us to draw an impressive number of highly detailed custom ships.

View them all in a Unity scene: http://kortham.net/temp/upshot_bcBqiEvY.png

Another nice feature is that we can swap out the texture to reskin ships by their faction. The above graphics show off the “red” look, and we can adjust this highlight color. For example, here’s the same weapon with a grunge look:

[jotapeh]

Wow, this game also slipped off my radar somehow. Pretty cool. I really dig those models. And the reskinning thing is awesome too.

[RCIX]

This looks really cool! Do you plan to offer it for free or pay?

[slembcke]

It's going to be a shareware game.

[AndyKorth]

Since we've been pretty busy these last few months, we wanted to share what we're currently focusing on with Solaro. Solaro: Skirmishes is a space flight simulator action game that focuses on arena based combat. As you win each arena, you are awarded new components, such as weapons, shields, missile launchers, and hull pieces to add to your ship.

This gives us a great testing ground to see what kind of combat is fun. We can test the balance between different weapons and shield setups. Our previously mentioned mission system allows us to easily create a variety of different sorts of arenas.

Right now, we're just showing off the basic framework of the arena combat system. We've retooled controls and redone a lot of artwork. There are still a few rough spots that we're redoing, but this is a good example of what's to come.

Click the image to try out our playable demo in your browser.

Controls are on the demo page.

Please share this blog post with your friends!

[AndyKorth]

Getting the controls just right for Solaro has been something we’ve put a lot of work into. So we’ve continued to refine how you control your ship in order to maximize the fun for everyone.

We’ve found that choosing just the right control scheme depends on a lot of factors in a game. Different acceleration rates and flight speeds work better with different sorts of control schemes. In Solaro, our zooming system and universe setup differs from other games, so we’ve had to do a lot of experimentation to get things just right.

With the new default control scheme, the flight computer will make the necessary adjustments to keep your ship flying in the direction you’re facing.

This change went hand-in-hand with a change to how the turreted weapons work. We’ve removed the fixed and partially rotating turrets. This greatly simplifies the user interface when the player is making a ship- we’ve removed some buttons and made it easier to use. But more importantly, since all weapons rotate towards a target, we’ve been able to make the changes to the flight controls because strafing is no longer an important part of flying. This lets the player focus more easily on flying and combat and makes it more enjoyable.

[AndyKorth]

Sometimes, a good set of shields is the only thing between your face and the cold vacuum of space.

This ship has been outfitted with two small shield generators. Each shield generator creates a sphere around it, protecting the components it encompasses. However, each shield can only absorb so much damage. Once it becomes red, the shield is expended, and it will only recharge after several seconds of inactivity.

With a system like this, placing your shields becomes a small but fun tactical choice. Overlapping shields provide additional protection, and creating foward/aft or starboard/port combinations of shields allows you to rotate your ship towards the strong shield while in combat. If you're really skilled, presenting a strong shield can give your damaged shield time to recharge.

Although you can't tell from the screenshots, there is a really cool plasma effect on the shields. If you don't want to take my word for it, try out our demo from a few days ago!

http://howlingmoonsoftware.com/wordpress/?p=510

[AndyKorth]

We only touched on the arenas briefly in previous posts. An arena system allows the player to get right into the game, and it enables an effective risk-reward cycle.

Players are encouraged to choose their own pace and challenge level. Right now, six different arenas make up a zone. Each arena in a zone has a different sort of mission. Some of these are just straight up killing enemies, fighting a few waves of enemies, racing through waypoints, destroying asteroids under a timer, or taking out a big boss ship. Different rewards, in the form of new pieces for your ships, are earned at each arena.

At your option, you may fly to the next zone at any time. Each zone has more difficult challenges, but you unlock new sorts of items for your ship. For example, in the second zone, you unlock two new types of weapons, the thorium engine, the fighter cockpit, and a few new hull pieces.

If you find the game too hard, simply get a few more weapons in an easier zone. If it’s too easy, players will move on to advance more quickly. This isn’t too unique of a concept for games, but I do think it’s underused- it’s a very natural and effective means of difficulty control, and it’s certainly more elegant than a difficulty selector.

[AndyKorth]

Is it a buggy shader? Or is it a cloaking field? (Heh, it's a bug)

Actually, I’m surprised this looks as good as it does. It’s going to be a rimlight shader, but I somehow broke it… Unity got confused and decided to use it with wacky textures. It’s actually partially transparent here, but some draw order issues make it seem reflective.



See it in full size!

[mokesmoe]

If you can get the whole thing transparent like that, it would look awesome. A texture thats not just stretched lines would be nice too, but it would still be cool without it.

[AndyKorth]

The last few days I've spent on Solaro have been cleaning up the ship editor. I've made the editor much simpler, but kept all the features. Reorganizing the UI has eliminated big rows of text buttons that were difficult to mentally parse. I've also removed the second "inspection mode" that you would occasionally need to switch to.

Many of you probably remember how it used to work: there was a list of components on the left- a big row of buttons. Then a smaller view showed the piece you were going to place. Once you placed a piece, a button with an arrow on it would switch to a different editor mode.

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The old ship editor. Click for a larger version.
[/align]

The second mode really only existed because putting all the information on the screen in a single mode over cluttered the screen. This included ship summary information, such as how much power was remaining in the reactors...  It was clearly a bad decision when you had to switch ship editor modes every time you placed a weapon to see if you exceeded your power consumption. The save and load buttons were also in the other mode, since we ran out of real estate.

Instead of an always-present text list of ship components, one of the new features of the editor is a graphical selector. I would be remiss not to show it off, although it's not 100% polished yet.

[align=center]

New component selector. Please click for a much larger image!
[/align]

Overall, this makes for a lot less text buttons on the editor, and a much more visual interface.

[RCIX]

I may have said this already, but this looks awesome

[AndyKorth]

The first five minutes of gameplay is responsible for hooking your user. And within those first five minutes you need to teach your player about what's going on.

Becoming hooked on a game relies on engaging the person. You have to show off the start of the game and show that there's more, sparking curiosity. Tutorials don't just need to teach the user how to play, but they also need to quickly hook the user- especially if you're relying on them  to make a purchase after playing the tutorial.

One good place we've looked has been this and similar articles on Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4327/first_five_minutes_how_tutorials_.php

Our goal for the tutorial in Solaro is to introduce the key controls in a rapid fire fashion. The basic controls in Solaro are pretty simple, so we can fly through these pretty quickly. After about a minute of very little reading and a lot of doing, you've got the controls down.

One of the tutorial screens, bigger image here: http://kortham.net/temp/upshot_OrrXFWiO.png

The tutorial also covers targeting and combat, and it gives you a shot at the arena system. The next step with the tutorial is to finish up the final hooks. The tutorial will award you with some new pieces and introduce you to the ship editor.

The tutorial needs to accelerate the player into the game- so it need to provide a taste of the progression in the game. When you complete the tutorial, you should feel like you've accomplished something, and you should leave wanting more. In the case of Solaro, you want to win more arenas, you want more rewards, and you want more cool pieces to add to your ship.

And all this needs to happen in the first five minutes, or you lose players!

[AndyKorth]

Thanks for the feedback guys! We're glad to hear people are excited. We got some good comments on our blog so I wanted to share one:

Yeah, the first few minutes are critical. Sucker Punch has a formula for beginning games which it calls the “JB Intro.” James Bond movies start by dropping the viewer directly into an action sequence (which may not even be related to the main plot), leaving exposition for later after the viewer is more invested in the proceedings.

The tricky thing with starting a game this way is that it needs to seem dangerous and exciting but actually be very easy, and teach people how to play in a way that is as unobtrusive as possible. It’s something that just takes a lot of repeated focus testing on virgin players to get tuned right.

One way that works all right is to try to have a fairly linear path that is blocked by challenges that require the player to execute each of the basic actions to proceed. When they arrive at a challenge, start a timer and after a few seconds display a prompt telling them how to do it. The first Sly Cooper game, for instance, started the player in a shallow pit. They had to jump to get out. Sly 3 required the player to jump onto a truck to get out of the starting area. This wasn’t quite as good of a challenge, though. I remember seeing players wander all over the starting area for a while without realizing that the truck was the exit. In Infamous we guided the player along a path (using explosions and lava) to a point where they had to jump to get out of a blast crater. If they failed the jump the environment would loop them back around onto the ramp to try again.

Great comment James! I’ve been thinking about how to add some action to the tutorial. The whole in media res / action prologue is a really good idea, but I’m not sure how to integrate it into the basically plotless Solaro Skirmishes. It’ll play a bit like an arcade game. Your comment that it doesn’t really even need to be related to the plot is a helpful good insight.

I like the thought of being thrown into a crisis. Halo did it when you started on the exploding Pillar of Autumn ship, Infamous did that after your package blew up half a city, and the advantage of the crisis is that not only is there no time for exposition, but there’s a sense of urgency that can make the simple instructions of the tutorial a little more interesting and pressing.

For Solaro this could be… “Oh, the captain died, now you have to learn how to fly while pirates are closing in.” (I’m the kind of person who will wait for a minute or two just to see if they actually show up before I finish the tutorial. They don’t  ) On the other hand, there’s not really any personal relationships there; not anymore than you’d see in Asteroids.

Maybe it just makes more sense to toss them into that action-sequence and not explain why you need to be told things. Like you said, you don’t really need to worry about how it relates to anything.

And any other ideas would be welcome regarding the game's opening and tutorials!

[AndyKorth]

I don't know how it happened, but Solaro has 37 custom shaders in the project!

We've got a lot of variety in our shaders; some are full screen effects, many of them are for special UI effects or weapon effects, and we've also got special shaders for weapon and shield effects. So it's time for a short pictorial tour of the shaders in Solaro! Most of our shaders are customized to make cool animated effects, so I'll do my best to capture them in a way to show off in screenshots.

The engine pulse shader allows you to choose two colors and a mask to create the shape of the engine flare. You also provide a normal map to act as a distortion shader. We animate that distortion so the engine flare moves around like a candle flame. The other cool effects that we do with this, outside the shader, include making them grow and shrink as a function of the thrust generated by the engine. We combine this effect with a glow overlay to simulate a bit of a camera flare from the light source.

Selecting components in the ship editors needs some sort of visual effect. Here we've applied a modified rimlight shader. We've set it up to animate and pulse as you've clicked on something. Here the entire wing is selected and you can rotate it around the body of the ship. Again, this one's really cool when you see it animated.

On the other hand, when you are placing a new piece, we wanted a visual effect that portrayed the idea that the piece hasn't been placed yet, but to also show where it will be placed. The transparent stripes on this texture are in screenspace, which is a really cool effect that Scott put together; this means that the stripes don't move as you scroll around the screen. It creates a cool computer-digitized effect, which draws a nice distinction between the real pieces and the pending ones. As you rotate or move the piece you've placed, it will turn red if something is blocking the placement.

A similar shader is also used for our arena backgrounds. Again, this is a subtle screenspace texture overlay. It colors the boundaries of the arena. No matter how much you zoom in, the grid stays the same size. This sort of thing is pretty important, since no texture will scale the 10,000x that we see in Solaro. It also keeps the very 'digital' feel that many of the UI components have.

Sorry this blog post was a bit late! My fianceé was in a car accident... someone went through a stop sign and hit her on the way home from work. Her hand is in a splint, so she's needed a lot of help around the house.

Stay tuned for another group of effect shaders coming up soon!

[AndyKorth]

This is part two of an overview of cool shaders we wrote for Solaro.

We've also got a vertical distortion shader that we can apply to things like in game text, title images, and other billboard effects. Used here on the "Solaro" title, this shader creates a bit of a video interference effect... and again, it looks a lot better in action. We vertically scroll a very tall and wrapping 1x512 pixel normal map, and we use it as a distortion map. This creates a moving pattern over the image that shakes it to the left or the right. This effect can add a lot to an otherwise plain title or static image. The animation brings it to life with a digital sort of effect.

The target view shader is applied to the entire target camera. This inset camera is used to get a view of a targeted ship if it's off screen. We create an animated noise grain over the image, as a sort of static effect. We also apply an edge burn texture around it, which helps visually differentiate the target view from normal space. Another nice effect of the target view shader is that it allows us to fade the view in and out smoothly. This allows for a seamless transition from a ship on the screen, to one that has moved offscreen and is now represented within a target camera box.

Our shield shaders are used in a few different places. This is our PlanarShield effect. It takes one base texture, but samples it twice at different points, each changing as a function of time. The resulting effect is a smooth wrapping animation of movement in the shield. When it's applied to a sphere, you get a very cool plasma-like effect. This shader also modulates the intensity as a function the y position of the UV coordinates. With the way our sphere is unwrapped, this makes our shield more transparent at the top and bottom, so you mostly just see the shield around the edges of the circle. This allows you to still see your ship through the center of the shield.

We do a similar animation effect on our warp gates. However, we adjust the falloff differently so the visual effect is strongest at the center. This hides the y=0 line of UV coordinates at the center of the sphere, since it's fully opaque there. You then see a swirling vortex animation centered around the middle of the warp gate.

All ships in Solaro are equipped with these deflector shields. They activate and pulse once each time you bump into a solid object with your ship. They have a similar animation, but they only show up at the point of impact. These last three images show how you can get a lot of milage from a custom shader with only a few changes.