Busy Times

Whew, July has seemed like an unproductive month for Watcher. In reality, I think lots was done, but it's mostly about learning. I have spent lots of time reading a book on character and story design. I haven't done much of that, and I'm the one to do it for this game, so I decided to learn a little about it.

As for actual development, this week I managed to squeak in a targeting reticle that can tag multiple targets, and a missile launcher module complete with enemy-seeking missiles. It all actually works quite well. The targeting reticle may also be used for ship-ship communication.

A major design decision I am facing right now is how to make the cities structured. I plan to have communication happen between ships, and I would really like to make it so the only written story comes from those communications. I am realizing that I will probably need to have some story communication happen in the cities as well. So when you go to the market to buy commodities the merchant tells you something important, for example. It would be cool from an immersion standpoint to make the player actually walk around the city and talk to people and go to shops and stuff. For one thing, that adds a ton more artwork that I'm not going to have time to make, and for another thing I think it would take away from the game. The fun part of the game is going to be flying the ship and dogfighting with enormous capital ships while bombing bases and protecting allies.

A recent flash game I've been playing (another reason for my lack of major progress) called Caravaneer has an interesting idea for cities. They just drew an arbitrary map of each city in real real simple form, and landmarks are indicated with an icon. So there's a well at each city, and a shop, and a market, and a doctor, etc. Each city has a different layout, but they all have the important landmarks. Another thing Caravaneer did is a good dynamic economy. I once thought of doing this before, but threw it out because I didn't feel it would contribute to gameplay. Now that I've seen what can be done with it, I just might have to put it in. It's not just randomly dynamic... it's market driven. So if a shoe-making town runs out of leather, shoes run out of stock, and the demand for leather grows dramatically. If you keep making shipments of leather to the town, eventually the demand goes back to normal and you won't make much money off of it.

Anyway, I might try that method, and if there's some important person you need to talk to, they will have a landmark on the city map.

Another reason this month may have not been quite so productive for Watcher is ...


Lauren was born! She's a cute kid, and we're glad to have her. Sleep at night is a little more precious now, though. Luckily Jared doesn't wake up to her wailing very much. Like, I think he's woken up only once in the week that she's been home.

Infrastructure

This week was just more infrastructure. There is now a message window in the HUD to tell you stuff about your mission (like when you complete it, and when you pick up cargo, etc.) and a new dialog that shows you all of your current missions. So if you just sign up for all available missions and forget what they were, you can look them up. The bounty hunting missions isn't quite so hacked together, and both cargo and bounty missions are randomized a little now (instead of entirely scripted).

One of my friends also gave me a good idea for the "first chapter" of the storyline. Instead of telling you what it is, I might do a little demo release of the first chapter when it's done. The first chapter is basically my first milestone. The game won't be feature-complete at that point, but a good chunk will be done.

So many little things

Wow, there are a lot of little things that go into making a game. You would think that I would remember that, since I have shipped one game (a long time ago). And I do remember it, but it always amazes me how many little things go into making a fully polished game. Today I spent some time on a few of the little things, like showing the name of a city on the navigation screen when you mouse over it. They're little, but very important. I'm not even talking about the microscopic stuff yet...

Anyway, the player's ship now loads properly between levels... before it would leave some stuff behind, like what weapons they had, and their entire cargo... it was like some sort of greedy border customs. But now it's all good. I still don't have game saving/loading, as I re-ordered priorities since I had trouble motivating myself to do the load/save framework.

Instead I worked a little more on missions. Now missions can lead you to other levels, and there's a hacked-together bounty hunting mission. It's not too exciting yet, since the AI just stupidly hunts you all the time, and it's easy to outsmart it. But the enemy ship is spawned correctly, in the correct region. I did a little work on the "little things" for mission creation too, like showing the mission description.

Anyway, here's a concept sketch for the ones who just like to look at pictures.

Howl's Moving Castle

This week I managed quite a few small additions/changes. The first thing was the radar/compass widget. Take a look (the arrows around the border):



The green arrows are landing pads, and the red are enemy ships. It works quite well.

The next thing was changing the movement method from direct velocity to inertial control. This change made the game a LOT more interesting. Now there's actually a point to combat. This change also opens the door to a lot of physics weapons.

The last changes were more under the hood, but they are paving the road to allow game saving/loading, which I feel is important even this early in the game. (heh)

Now that we've got the game dev report out of the way, I saw a great movie last night. All of you have probably already seen it... Howl's Moving Castle. I had not even heard of it until yesterday, and I absolutely loved the movie. In a lot of ways, it's the art style that I would like to have for Watcher. Howl's was a little too old-fashioned for what I have in mind, but the point is that there are airships and airplanes and such that are steam powered. The art style I hope for is some kind of mix between the old fashioned and futuristic. So, not everything will be coal steam powered, but also nuclear/fusion steam powered. There will be laser weapons and computers alongside the mechanical steam stuff. Anyway, if you haven't seen Howl's moving castle, you should. The art is amazing, and the story is amazing, if not a little strange. The plot isn't necessarily amazing, it's the storytelling that is fantastic.

Navigation screen

Not much happened this week, although I did make a functional navigation screen. Check it out.



That screen shows where your ship is and where all jump gates and cities are. I tried several dumb things first to get it working, and then I remembered TGB's ability to draw the same thing in a different window. I still kept some of the dumb stuff, like creating a new object for each thing to be displayed, since actual size on that map is really really small. So I scaled each object up about 10x.