Weekly Dev Update – October 17th, 2014
Adam This week, most of my work hasn't been in implementing cool new features. Since I switched to full-time on the project a month ago, I've been doing nothing but coding coding coding. But, since I'm also responsible for pretty much all of Jellyfish's admin work, I've been neglecting the legal, accounting and management aspects of the company. So, I spent my week on the phone on hold with various government offices, going back-and-forth with our lawyer with contracts and learning everything there is to know about small-business accounting. Thrilling, I know! Dave This week I finished integrating combat (remember,...
Combat Explained (Part 2) — Items
This is a continuation from part 1. In this post I talk about items. Several of you on the forums asked specifically about itemization, so here it is! The goal of the Astrobase Command item system is to equally support procedural item generation and crafting (user item generation). And also in a broader sense to further refine the uniqueness of a player-created species, and the uniqueness of procedurally generated species a player might encounter. Keep in mind Astrobase Command has no tech tree. The technology "power" can conceptually be thought of as the items (and ships and modules) you know...
Weekly Dev Update – October 9th, 2014
Dave This week I worked on more mission logic, and mission AI. This involves the Mission Leader sending out either solo characters or smaller groups of characters to perform tasks and complete objectives in different areas of a zone. Does he split up his team and have characters complete objectives simultaneously, or does he find safety in numbers and is willing to have a longer (but presumably safer) mission? Does he avoid the crashed alien ship he discovered that wasn't detected by long-range scanners, or does send in the marines? His AI and personality has to determine all these things,...
Combat Explained (Part 1)
Disclaimer: this description of the combat system is from a design standpoint. So it gets pretty technical and delves into the nuts-and-bolts. You have been warned! What is a Combat System? From a design perspective, RPG systems can be thought of as organized sets of statistical contests which combine to form game mechanics. Typically these contests are wrapped in a narrative context. An RPG with a lockpick mechanic might generate a random number, and compare it to a threshold determined by the value of a character's lockpicking skill modified by the difficulty of the lock. We call these simple contests....
Weekly Dev Update – October 2nd, 2014
Adam It's been another week of jobs and section integration. The first ones I knocked out were dining areas (cantina, cafeteria, mess hall). Now, when a character gets hungry, they go to their nearest dining area and eat (Food is also a resource in storage now). I also wrote it in such a way as to lay the groundwork for people to go eat at the same time. That way, friends can hang out together, which will make it even more obvious to the player what relationships they have with each other. It will also work nicely for social areas...
In Dev Feature
“oh my God! — it’s full of stars!” A Brief Tutorial on Creating Procedural Star Fields Using Substances.
Several years ago at a previous job I was fortunate enough to have people from Allegorithmic come over and demo their Substance Designer. While a couple of the other projects had definite uses for a tool like that unfortunately the one I was working on at the time we were using pre-rendered assets. Making it pretty much the worst fit for procedural texture generation. Since then however I've always wanted to have a good use for them since any tool that saves artists so much time is a good tool indeed. In Astrobase we early on, in order to keep flexibility...
Weekly Dev Update – September 25th, 2014
This week, we've been super excited by how a bunch of the features we've been designing and talking about for a while are finally making their way into the game! Adam Since I got general assignments and their AI component working last week (specifically for assignments to quarters), this week was about getting assignable jobs in. I started by knocking out all the reactor jobs. Now, when you assign a crew member to a reactor job, they will activate the reactor, the power output gets spread across the station and the character's skills then determine how quickly the reactor's durability...
In Dev Feature
Food For Thought
One of our earliest design goals for Astrobase Command was to make believable AI characters with personalities, moods, likes and dislikes. Not only does it increase a player's attachment to their crew, but it also creates new situations to manage. Do you want to give your most gifted science officer a team to run, even if he's the most irritating person in the known universe? The team might benefit from his knowledge, but will also most likely be united by their hate for him. The Goal Anytime a character is making a decision, whether going about their daily routine or...
Weekly Dev Update – September 18th, 2014
Hey everyone! Now that we've shipped the website, we're excited to start talking about the game on a regular basis again. We're trying to commit to at least 2 posts a week. We'll be doing screenshots/video/general interest posts on Tuesdays and a Weekly Dev Update on Thursdays, where the whole team will talk about what we worked on that week. If there's anything specific you'd like to see or would like us to talk about, make sure to pipe up in the forums! Adam Last week, I was able to sort through Daniel's section assets and fixed up the system...
Website Re-Launch
As you may have noticed, we've sunk all our space-bucks into this new website. Just kidding, we'd just been holding off on any serious site update until we passed a few milestones that allowed us to show off the great stuff that's now in the game. Earlier news updates may be badly formatted, but sometimes the past has to suffer for the present. We're not planning any substantial PR push until we get a little closer to early access (from my AAA days, let's call it "soon"TM). We just wanted the website not to be an eyesore if it were...
