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[linley]

Update (14 May 2011): a revised version of the demo is up - see here.

Update (5 May 2011): demo up - see this post.

...

Well, it's time I wrote another game. My last one, Transdimensional Hellspider, failed to be a great success due to a range of questionable design decisions but I think I can do better. I've decided to keep this devlog as a way of motivating me to code a bit more quickly, and if things go to plan I'll be updating it often.

The game

Angry Moth is a tribute to the still-reigning emperor of space battle simulations, Freespace 2, but in 2D. I know that putting Freespace in 2D is kind of missing the point, but I love Spacewar-type inertia games and anyway I don't know how to program in three dimensions. The story, visual design, interface etc will all be new, but I want to capture Freespace's sense of the player being a small but pivotal participant in a series of grand engagements. The explosions will be big and sparkly, the action will be fast-moving and tactical, the difficulty will be savage.

Screenshot


Here you can see a couple of friendly warships (top) and some enemy ships, one of which is using some kind of beam on a friendly cruiser - fortunately your friend has a shield, but how long will it last??!? (the game will be filled with moments of tension like this.) The player is the little thing in the lower middle.

Projected features

  huge battles with dozens of spacecraft on each side
  dynamic gameplay with minimal scripting
  a branching storyline that leads to victory or despair
  a large variety of enemy and allied ships
  various weapons and other systems to outfit your ship with
  upgrades for the player and the allied fleet
  2-player cooperative splitscreen
  the best 256 colour anti-aliased sprite rotation you will see in 2011

Done so far

  the basic game engine is complete: you can fly around and shoot at things, which shoot back. Other ships on your side also shoot and are shot at. Most things explode if shot at enough.
  fixed-forwards perspective, so everything rotates around you when you turn (note the motion-blurred starscape in the screenshot).
  thrust-style inertia controls, with retro and side thrusters.
  warships with different parts that can be disabled separately.
  currently the big warships just fly straight at each other and exchange barrages until they pass by and out of range. This will need to be more interesting.
  there are only eight different types of ship as yet.

It's in C using Allegro, and will eventually be released with source under the GPL. Should run on any system that Allegro supports (Windows, Linux, Mac etc). System requirements will be minimal.

Video

Video coming when I spend some time remembering how to make it.

Etc

For context, here's an interview I did for Steve Cook's quote-unquote blog, where I discuss this game and other things.

More soon!

[Pineapple]

I like the way this is looking.

[floatstarpx]

awesome!
i love this style of game... it used to be the only kind of game i'd write:

this is a shot from something ("Alpha Wing"...before someone else called a game that...) i wrote about 10 years ago - i've still got the .exe (modified date is apparently year 2000)!... i never finished it, tho (i tended not to finish projects much back then)..

i only had 2 types of ship... a lot of particles, and some circles.. and coincidentally enough - even back then, this was actually C and allegro too. (I haven't looked at allegro since, I must admit)
it's like i'm looking at myself in some kind of "time thingy".

there's still the freeware "homebrew" GBA version of 'Alpha Wing' floating about online (which I did finish), although I wouldn't know exactly where to download it nowadays...

good luck with the game, i'll keep an eye on this thread!!

[BlueSweatshirt]

You know....

Just the other day I went back to your Allegro depot to see if you had made any new games.

Nice to see you're still going at it, looking forward to this game. 

[EDIT]
also, building off of the hellspider engine for this, are you?

[nihilocrat]

Holy craaaaap, I love all your games, can't wait to see this one!

[Julien_v42]

Hey, nice job so far! Sounds really promising. I will happily playtest it if you want feedback.

I came across your post because I happen to have done [or started doing] the exact same genre of game: http://nextstopnowhere.wordpress.com but using XNA, it was meant to be a XBox360 LIG game.

I've also used thruster based control, but I didn't make the camera rotate, I wanted to focus on exploration, so it seemed more natural (ie easier to remember) to keep a constant orientation.

I wish you best of luck with your game, I know for a fact it's a lot more work than it seem

[linley]

also, building off of the hellspider engine for this, are you?

Yep, although for this one I wanted to work with rotating sprites instead of just drawing primitives so I wrote an insanely complex and cumbersome system for pre-rendering anti-aliased rotated versions of all of the ships (the particle effects are still circles). It even supports alpha-blending for the independently rotating turrets.

I've also used thruster based control, but I didn't make the camera rotate, I wanted to focus on exploration, so it seemed more natural (ie easier to remember) to keep a constant orientation.

Yeah, the spinning can be a bit disorienting, but there is a long-range map with a fixed orientation down the bottom right of the screen, which makes it easier to work out where you are. I decided to use the rotating camera because it makes sense for a space game, it's an interesting challenge, and I can't think of many other 2D games which have it. I originally thought that all of the arctangent operations would make it too slow but that hasn't been a problem at all.

I wish you best of luck with your game, I know for a fact it's a lot more work than it seem

Thanks! And you're right, it's always more work than it seems. Right now I'm working on AI routines for fighters escorting bombers, to make them stay in formation until under attack then return to formation when they've driven off the threat, and the code just keeps getting longer and longer with no end in sight.

[Julien_v42]

Well, the AI of fighting ships is the major points that prevent me from releasing NSN. All the rest (limited content, some bugs, etc) is nothing compared to uninteresting fights.

I'm a bit curious: you're doing it with big state machines? Or did you use something more fancy?

[increpare]

Oh two player - super.  Cool!  Good to see you doing something slightly different from your recent scrolling shooter fare (not that I don't like 'em).

[Helmeted]

I love games of the Spacewar school and I loved Freespace 2. This sounds like my kind of thing.

[linley]

Minor progress report!

  basic fighter AI is done - fighters know how to stay in a formation with bombers and protect them from other fighters, and how to guard warships from attack as well.
  one of the most boring parts, the functionality for the intro menu and the menus for setting options and configuring controls, is done. It's a bit ugly but it'll do for now.

My next step will be setting everything up so it's possible to have an actual battle. Since ships are placed with a simple script system and basically all of the ship behaviour is done, this will mostly require balancing things like weapon and armour strength. When I think I've got things right in that area I'll try to post a video.

For now, here's a couple of new screenshots:


Here we see two enemy bombers and a few escort fighters attacking a small friendly warship. The circles are HUD elements for the player's targetting system, which will be changed to something other than circles at some point.

Well, the AI of fighting ships is the major points that prevent me from releasing NSN. All the rest (limited content, some bugs, etc) is nothing compared to uninteresting fights.

I'm a bit curious: you're doing it with big state machines? Or did you use something more fancy?

Big, complicated, poorly-coded state machines. Each fighter has variables for its "mission", e.g. escorting bombers, guarding warships or intercepting enemy fighters, and its current "action", which describes a fairly simple act like returning to formation, turning to attack, firing, evading etc. There are complicated rules for determining when a fighter changes between different actions, e.g. a fighter on an escort mission will engage with any enemy fighter that gets within a certain distance of its group leader, but will return to formation if it gets too far away.

I'm still working out how much control the player will have over friendly fighters. One option is to give the player a small squadron of fighters (two or three) and a few simple commands, like "form up", "attack my current target", "break off and guard friendly ships" etc.

Finally, I forgot to mention in my thread-starting post that one of the main inspirations for Angry Moth is an obscure Japanese freeware game called Squadron that I found on Postman's sadly defunct Shoot the Core PC shmup database site a few years ago. I'm having trouble tracking it down, as "squadron" is not an easy term to search for. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

[linley]

Well, the basic game is now pretty much playable, although there are still plenty of things to do, so I'm increasing the completion level to 40% and posting a video. Here are two medium-sized fleets colliding in battle, recorded in jerky low quality on my laptop:





As you can see there's plenty to be done and the balancing is nowhere near right, but this shows how the gameplay is going to work.

[Halcyon]

Oh wow, AWESOME! I am a massive fan of the style of games you mentioned as your inspiration and I have had a very similar idea for a game like this in my head for a little while now, but I am inexperienced when it comes to actually making a game and it would take me a lot longer to create my own version of this idea. So I am really excited to watch this project develop and to play it once done, keep up the good work mate!

Awesome video of the progress so far, really builds my excitement for this game. The only thing I can mention though is that it seems it can get a little cluttered at times and hard to differentiate enemy ship from weapon fire etc; although it could just be because I am watching a youtube video of it rather then actually playing it.

[BlueSweatshirt]

Wow Linley, just wow.

You're definitely finally making a use for that robust system you made in Hellspider. The space seems to be used so much better, and just looking at the game it feels really atmospherical and personal. Once battles hit a larger scale, I think this really will feel like an epic, colossal space battle-- And you're just a tiny fighter.

You should have a more constant momentum. Particularly in the AI ships, is what I'm getting at. Just having them stay there feels very lifeless. Even a small drift with the occasional movement would really liven things up.

Aside from that, I implore you to take advantage of the large outer space, and don't try to focus on small compact battle spaces. Really make them big and spread out!

[nihilocrat]

This is beginning to look a lot like a game I was developing earlier but never really got to finishing called Kreuzzug : http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=11206.0

I was actually planning to limit the player's control only to the squadron of fighters they are in; both enemy and friendly fighters would operate in squadrons of about 5 and you could give them various orders such as: fire at will, retreat, stay in formation, attack a particular squad / capital ship. You could replenish missing fighters in your squadron by returning to a friendly carrier, which would launch enough fighters to get you back to 5, probably with some kind of recharging required so players don't just stay glued to carriers. Losing your whole squad would just mean you'd respawn from a friendly carrier under similar recharge / cooldown constraints. The inspiration came less from space sims, where you generally want to stay alive and action stops if you die, and more from shmups, where death is easy but not so heavily punished.

[andy wolff]

Hellspider is one of my favorite games, despite its flaws, and I am very excited to see that you're making this.

Good luck

[linley]

The only thing I can mention though is that it seems it can get a little cluttered at times and hard to differentiate enemy ship from weapon fire etc; although it could just be because I am watching a youtube video of it rather then actually playing it.

Yes, this is a lot clearer in full 800x600 resolution, although the really intense battles are supposed to be chaotic and confusing if you just fly straight into the middle of them like I do in the video. I have room in the 256 colour palette for another set of transparent colours alongside the yellowish red for friendly things and the blue for enemies, and I'm thinking of using it for a purplish red for enemy drive exhaust and explosions. This should help differentiate some of the chaos.

You should have a more constant momentum. Particularly in the AI ships, is what I'm getting at. Just having them stay there feels very lifeless. Even a small drift with the occasional movement would really liven things up.

Do you mean the big warships? I'm still deciding how they will move, hopefully in a more interesting way than in the video. My main difficulty is that I don't want it to be possible for them to overlap. My original plan was to just have them flying towards and past each other but I think you're right, that's not going to be good enough.

Aside from that, I implore you to take advantage of the large outer space, and don't try to focus on small compact battle spaces. Really make them big and spread out!

Don't worry, they're going to be huge. I'll do a longer post on how the missions and the overall structure of the game will work sometime later.

This is beginning to look a lot like a game I was developing earlier but never really got to finishing called Kreuzzug : http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=11206.0

Nice. I like the glowing exhaust trails - inspired by Project Sylpheed? (for anyone who hasn't played it, it's a decent but not great Xbox 360 space sim with plenty of obvious Freespace references)

I was actually planning to limit the player's control only to the squadron of fighters they are in; both enemy and friendly fighters would operate in squadrons of about 5 and you could give them various orders such as: fire at will, retreat, stay in formation, attack a particular squad / capital ship. You could replenish missing fighters in your squadron by returning to a friendly carrier, which would launch enough fighters to get you back to 5, probably with some kind of recharging required so players don't just stay glued to carriers. Losing your whole squad would just mean you'd respawn from a friendly carrier under similar recharge / cooldown constraints. The inspiration came less from space sims, where you generally want to stay alive and action stops if you die, and more from shmups, where death is easy but not so heavily punished.

Yeah, a design decision that keeps coming up is how simmy versus how arcadey I want the game to be. At this stage it could go either way but I'm leaning towards a more simmy style, partly because that seems rare these days. The player will get three lives, though.

Hellspider is one of my favorite games, despite its flaws, and I am very excited to see that you're making this.

Thanks!

And thanks to everyone for the feedback, I appreciate it! Now I need to go and do some more coding... must fight the urge to play my new favourite game Deadly Premonition instead.

[linley]

Progress update:

I mentioned above that my original plan for warship movement was to just have big groups of them pop on to the battlefield then move towards and past each other. Only fighters, and maybe some larger fighter-like craft, would have any freedom of movement.

Well, that obviously wasn't good enough so I've written a level scripting system to make missions more interesting. I've never coded anything like this before (the most complex AI routines in my games, even in Crawl, haven't been much more than "move towards player") and I was expecting it to be pretty hard, but it wasn't too bad.

The system allows ships to be created individually or in groups. They can be given instructions like move to x/y, change formation, follow another group, wait around etc. based on a range of conditions like location, time passed, the survival or destruction of particular ships etc. Certain events can also cause friendly warships to send messages to the player. Nothing special really, but I'm a little bit proud of it.

One thing I'll have to keep in mind is making sure that missions don't get too linear. The system is flexible and potentially allows missions to play out quite differently each time you try them, but designing each mission to create an interestingly branching tree of possibilities will be a lot of work. Partly this is because there will be very few ways to fail a mission completely - probably just the player losing all lives or all friendly warships being destroyed - so each script will have to accommodate everything from total success to near-total defeat. This will feed in to the overall mission structure, which I haven't started working on yet and will explain in a later post.

I've also designed an enemy carrier, but I'm not quite happy with how it looks yet. I might post some pictures when I have a finished bitmap.

[BlueSweatshirt]

You're awesome. 

So am I getting the hint that this game is going to have a story?

[evktalo]

Sounds.. and looks great! I'm very happy that you're doing a new game. I enjoyed Transdimensional Hellspider a lot, it was somewhat hard to get into, but I did play it until I won. Albeit the dive-bombing weapon turned out to be more effective than I thought it was supposed to. Anyway, I love the idea and scope of this, and am looking forward to play it!

--Eino