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StarLife Game - Early development - Feedback is welcome

Do you like the concept of StarLife?

  • Yes.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • It looks okay.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • No.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • It looks like gorilla crap!

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • I don't know, who cares?

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    1

tiagocc0

Arcane
Joined
Jun 29, 2007
Messages
2,056
Location
Brazil
Excidium said:
Looks very ambitious, but full of great ideas.

Always good to see a programmer interested in game development that doesn't involve bejeweled clones and other simple cellphone games.

Thanks! What's sad is that most game developers companies from my country just develop cellphone games.
 
Self-Ejected

Excidium

P. banal
Joined
Aug 14, 2009
Messages
13,696
Location
Third World
tiagocc0 said:
Excidium said:
Looks very ambitious, but full of great ideas.

Always good to see a programmer interested in game development that doesn't involve bejeweled clones and other simple cellphone games.

Thanks! What's sad is that most game developers companies from my country just develop cellphone games.
I know right, it's depressing. Last real game developed here that I played was Outlive (an RTS).
 

tiagocc0

Arcane
Joined
Jun 29, 2007
Messages
2,056
Location
Brazil
Excidium said:
I know right, it's depressing. Last real game developed here that I played was Outlive (an RTS).

Exactly, I met them just before they launched Outlive, I wanted to ask them about a job even if it was an internship, but in the end I was too shy to talk about it.
 
Self-Ejected

Excidium

P. banal
Joined
Aug 14, 2009
Messages
13,696
Location
Third World
They went to the shitter after Outlive, so it seems you didn't miss anything. :lol: The company doesn't even exist anymore, I think.
 

tiagocc0

Arcane
Joined
Jun 29, 2007
Messages
2,056
Location
Brazil
Excidium said:
They went to the shitter after Outlive, so it seems you didn't miss anything. :lol: The company doesn't even exist anymore, I think.

Yep, after Outlive they sold themselves to highest bidder, they even made a game about Xuxa.
 

Shemar

Educated
Joined
Oct 16, 2010
Messages
260
tiagocc0 said:
Shemar said:
The game is way too old for me to remember details but what I would want to see:
- Power management between speed-maneuvering/shields and weapons (also applies to ship building considerations)

Could you please elaborate more?
I can see it like you would change your power from weapons to shield or engines or any possible combination of the three.

The basic concept is that each ship has one or more power units (think generators) and one or more energy storage units (think batteries). Then each action of manouvering, firing, or absorbing hits with the shields costs power. At the start of a fight ships have fully charged storage units so they are very effective, but if the battle draws long, and they use power faster than they produce it, they run out of stored energy and have to use whatever their power unit is able to produce each turn. That also opens up the game to tactics of cooperating ships covering each other, one saving energy the other going all out, kind of like a tank/striker combo. Also ship designs could be either for quick engagements (small energy production and storage, high weapons) or more adept at longer fights (better energy units, less weapons).

If done right it also fixes the long battles problem as ships will not have power to keep their shields up! They would have to start taking serious damage or disengage.


Yes, I plan on avoiding this approach as this kills micromanagement, maybe at the later part of the game, after researching an expensive technology you would be able to form fleets were they would stack together to represent a very organized group of ships, but I'm still thinking about it.
This would help in the case where you have hundreds of ships and you have to control everyone of them.
I would say avoid the situation where there is a battle with 200 (or 20 for that matter) battleships/carriers. Scale the resource costs to where naval engagements are on the scale of WWI/WWII fleet sizes, where hight value units like battleships and carriers are really high value and not something that you produce 10 of each turn.

Smaller units like fighters can be grouped into flights of 4-12, since the damage model for them would be one hit-one kill (uneccesary complication to model more detailed damage on that level). That shoudl keep things quite manageable.

Shemar said:
No problem, I like this concept, but I don't like games where you have to build a ship to improve the fleet overall shield performance, then one ship to improve the speed, then one ship to do something else. This becomes boring very fast.
If there are several types of ships that vary in size and type they will all be used for combat purposes.
That is also what I had in mind. See above my note on fleet sizes and HVUs. You don't want your carriers to be exposed, you want them screened by smaller ships that are not only better at intercepting incoming small craft attacks but also a lot less painfuil to lose. The same way a modern navy would be near uselss if all it had was carriers and battleships, I would like to see that kind if balance in the game also.


I was thinking, maybe I could skip some steps in the development process and try to create what would be the tactical combat for ships. I could make a ship editor, a weapon editor and a component editor, all very simple, so we could use them in a simple application were we would test the tactical combat.
I would just need to define the basic aspects like engine, shield and weapons, then movement and attack. After that we would just tweak the values.
As we test it we could go on and try to implement more things like marines and ways to capture a ship, ways to fire at a chosen component of a ship and so on.
What do you think, would you like to test it?
That would shift the game a lot closer to where it would be a dream come true. A space naval battles tactical game that will be eventually expanded to a space empire building game. I would definitely be willing to beta test and consult on the combat system and I think an approcah of get to a playable fight the simplest possible way and then start adding features from there is the best.
 

tiagocc0

Arcane
Joined
Jun 29, 2007
Messages
2,056
Location
Brazil
Shemar said:
The basic concept is that each ship has one or more power units (think generators) and one or more energy storage units (think batteries). Then each action of manouvering, firing, or absorbing hits with the shields costs power. At the start of a fight ships have fully charged storage units so they are very effective, but if the battle draws long, and they use power faster than they produce it, they run out of stored energy and have to use whatever their power unit is able to produce each turn. That also opens up the game to tactics of cooperating ships covering each other, one saving energy the other going all out, kind of like a tank/striker combo. Also ship designs could be either for quick engagements (small energy production and storage, high weapons) or more adept at longer fights (better energy units, less weapons).

If done right it also fixes the long battles problem as ships will not have power to keep their shields up! They would have to start taking serious damage or disengage.

That's a great idea, I've seen this on space simulators so it would be great to have it implemented on a 4X game.



Shemar said:
I would say avoid the situation where there is a battle with 200 (or 20 for that matter) battleships/carriers. Scale the resource costs to where naval engagements are on the scale of WWI/WWII fleet sizes, where hight value units like battleships and carriers are really high value and not something that you produce 10 of each turn.

Smaller units like fighters can be grouped into flights of 4-12, since the damage model for them would be one hit-one kill (uneccesary complication to model more detailed damage on that level). That shoudl keep things quite manageable.

Shemar said:
That is also what I had in mind. See above my note on fleet sizes and HVUs. You don't want your carriers to be exposed, you want them screened by smaller ships that are not only better at intercepting incoming small craft attacks but also a lot less painfuil to lose. The same way a modern navy would be near uselss if all it had was carriers and battleships, I would like to see that kind if balance in the game also.

I see, that's something to consider, I don't like games that have limits but if we could manage to make it reasonable within the game then there's no problem. Like for economics reason or something you really shouldn't be able to have 20 carriers, you could, but you would break your economy.


Shemar said:
That would shift the game a lot closer to where it would be a dream come true. A space naval battles tactical game that will be eventually expanded to a space empire building game. I would definitely be willing to beta test and consult on the combat system and I think an approcah of get to a playable fight the simplest possible way and then start adding features from there is the best.

Great, I will start it then. :salute:


Orgasm said:
I expect a release at Friday.

With french fries and soda! :D



I've made a new Menu screen, it's up in the screenshot page: http://tiagocc0.webs.com/screenshots.htm

If you guys could please take a look and see it's better now, thanks!
No more buttplugs it seems.
 

Shemar

Educated
Joined
Oct 16, 2010
Messages
260
tiagocc0 said:
I see, that's something to consider, I don't like games that have limits but if we could manage to make it reasonable within the game then there's no problem. Like for economics reason or something you really shouldn't be able to have 20 carriers, you could, but you would break your economy.

I was not suggesting hard limits, I don't like that either. But like you said, balance the economy so that the area you need to defent/patrol/fight over is not capable of producing the resources for huge amounts of ships. The easy and at the same time realistic way to do this is to intoduce maintenace costs (for example every ship costs 1% of its initial construction cost per economic round to keep operational). After all, real ships cost a lot more to maintain and crew and keep operational (over service lifetime) than the initial purchase/build cost. By intorducing maintenace cost you essentially soft cap the fleet size based on what the economy can support, you make it easier to catch up when you have smaller fleets and you give good incentives not to keep obsolete units operational.
 

tiagocc0

Arcane
Joined
Jun 29, 2007
Messages
2,056
Location
Brazil
Shemar said:
I was not suggesting hard limits, I don't like that either. But like you said, balance the economy so that the area you need to defend/patrol/fight over is not capable of producing the resources for huge amounts of ships. The easy and at the same time realistic way to do this is to introduce maintenance costs (for example every ship costs 1% of its initial construction cost per economic round to keep operational). After all, real ships cost a lot more to maintain and crew and keep operational (over service lifetime) than the initial purchase/build cost. By introducing maintenance cost you essentially soft cap the fleet size based on what the economy can support, you make it easier to catch up when you have smaller fleets and you give good incentives not to keep obsolete units operational.

Great, noted.
I can see how the building costs are a lot cheaper than the maintenance costs, maybe we could use this information somehow to apply it in the game. Instead of having a 1% maintenance cost.


I just uploaded a video of the game running, very basic stuff. I will start making the combat application now. Wish me luck :salute:

http://vimeo.com/26806942
 

Zed

Codex Staff
Patron
Staff Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2002
Messages
17,068
Codex USB, 2014
tiagocc0 said:
I just uploaded a video of the game running, very basic stuff. I will start making the combat application now. Wish me luck :salute:

http://vimeo.com/26806942
Nice.

"StarLife" sounds like a doll-dressing game though. Or a celebrity sim.
 

Shemar

Educated
Joined
Oct 16, 2010
Messages
260
Call it a 'working title' and when you are close to providing something playable you can finalize the name.

I had a hell of a time accessing your web site. It took minutes to get from page to page. Hopefully it was something temporary. I'll re-visit it tomorrow.
 

tiagocc0

Arcane
Joined
Jun 29, 2007
Messages
2,056
Location
Brazil
Shemar said:
I had a hell of a time accessing your web site. It took minutes to get from page to page. Hopefully it was something temporary. I'll re-visit it tomorrow.

Sorry about that, it's a free hosting site. I'm planning to move to a better host but I'm trying to find a good one with a forum.
 

Zed

Codex Staff
Patron
Staff Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2002
Messages
17,068
Codex USB, 2014
ask DU for a subforum on the Codex B)
 

tiagocc0

Arcane
Joined
Jun 29, 2007
Messages
2,056
Location
Brazil
Zed said:
ask DU for a subforum on the Codex B)

That would be a dream come true for me, I've sent the pm, thank you for the suggestion!

Edit: DU created the subforum, :love:
 

anus_pounder

Arcane
Joined
Mar 20, 2010
Messages
5,972
Location
Yiffing in Hell
Looks very interesting. Hope it doesn't end up as vapourw-

Location : Brazil.

:what:
Goddamn it, I swear you guys will one day face the potatolanders in a titanic clash for codex supremacy.
 

Konjad

Patron
Joined
Nov 3, 2007
Messages
3,930
Location
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Never played MoO, but this game sounds interesting. I'll check out from time to time how you're doing. Good luck!
 

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
Patron
Joined
Jan 27, 2010
Messages
15,048
Location
In quarantine
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
just like Master of Orion 2 which is the main inspiration for us, following Space Pirates and Zombies, Galactic Civilizations 2, X-Com (UFO: Enemy Unknown), Victoria II, Spore, Civilizations V, Syndicate, Star Trek Birth of the Federation, Fallout Tactics and Gratuitous Space Battles.

:shock:

Good luck, you'll need it.
 

Destroid

Arcane
Joined
May 9, 2007
Messages
16,628
Location
Australia
Konjad said:
Never played MoO, but this game sounds interesting. I'll check out from time to time how you're doing. Good luck!

Blasphemy! You really should, it only takes a couple of hours to smash out a game, it's much more streamlined than MoO2 and quite easy to play.
 

tiagocc0

Arcane
Joined
Jun 29, 2007
Messages
2,056
Location
Brazil
anus_pounder said:
Looks very interesting. Hope it doesn't end up as vapourw-

Location : Brazil.

:what:
Goddamn it, I swear you guys will one day face the potatolanders in a titanic clash for codex supremacy.

:retarded:
Anyway, thank you!


Konjad said:
Never played MoO, but this game sounds interesting. I'll check out from time to time how you're doing. Good luck!

Destroid said:
Blasphemy! You really should, it only takes a couple of hours to smash out a game, it's much more streamlined than MoO2 and quite easy to play.

Thanks Konjad! Like Destroid said.
I myself must find some time later to replay MoO and MoO2.


Crooked Bee said:
Good luck, you'll need it.

Thanks! :salute:
 

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