Eidolon Games

I’ve got it set up so that after you get your ship equipped with weapons you can click a button and it will display the ship with green cones indicating the range of each of your weapons. Not terribly exciting, but it did prove a bit more tricky than anticipated.

New button in the lower left

Visualization of weapon ranges

With this done I think I’ve got all of the features that I really need for the hot seat multiplayer. I’m going to work on trying to balance some components, fixing a few bugs, then getting this pushed out to the humble store.

I worked this week on making it clear what components are valid for what slots. There are three slots, Engine, Weapon and Miscellaneous. Engines and weapons can only go into engine or weapon slots, but a miscellaneous component (like shields or generators) can go into either a weapon or miscellaneous slot. The trick was figuring out how to communicate that in a way that felt natural. I think I managed to do that. The Engine and Weapon components clearly don’t fit into any other slots, and the miscellaneous components can fit miscellaneous and weapon slots. I suppose play testing will demonstrate whether or not that works out. There’s an indie game night in two weeks, so that will be a good chance to try it out.

I’ve got a few more enhancements planned for this screen. When you’re choosing a ship and equipping it I want to have a ruler or something similar that gives some sort of sense of scale for the ship. I’m also going to add indicators to show which direction a weapon will fire if mounted on a particular slot. Related to that is some sort of way to view the overall weapon ranges of the ship. Finally I also want to add a display that shows how maneuverable the ship is. Components have weight, heavier components can drag down the maneuverability of the ship, but to manage that you’re really going to need to have an idea of how the maneuverability is being affected.

Lots of good stuff in the plans, but I’m thinking that some of it may be unnecessary to get the game into people’s hands so that they can start playing with the modification and hotseat multiplayer. We’ll see.

I need to apologize, it has been entirely too long since I last updated. So here’s what I’ve been up to.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Salt Lake City Mini Maker’s Faire. Along with some other people from the Utah Indie Game Guild I showed off my game. It was a little bit different crowd than most of the other shows I went to, but overall reception was good. Multiplayer continues to be something that people are very interested in.

Speaking of multiplayer, when I changed the name and the focus I was intending to create a rich single player campaign. Then due to popular request I decided that I needed to add a multiplayer component. So it became a single player game with a multi player component. Based on the feedback I’ve received I feel like it has now become a multiplayer game with a single player campaign. Don’t get me wrong, I still plan on making a great single player campaign, that’s one of the big things that gets me excited about the game. But it’s very clear that multiplayer is going to be a big draw for a lot of people, so it’s something I focused on.

To that end I have been working on the multiplayer components. I’ve got the multiplayer menus set up and working pretty well for local hotseat multiplayer. When playing multiplayer you build a fleet based on a number of points, the same way it works for a lot of table top wargames. The ships you have available to you are ones that you built out of components. So I’m currently working on polishing up the ship editing screen. I need to make it clear what the components do. Which components can go into which slots, etc. I’m really hoping to have that done this week and get the whole thing update available on the Humble Store by next Saturday. This will also require some balancing though, which could be tricky.

So that’s where things are at. I recognize that with the game in the general public’s hands, especially with people giving me money, even a small amount, I really have a responsibility to provide frequent updates. So I’m going to be better about keeping this up to date. See you next week then.

I spent this week reworking the ship modification stuff. For multiplayer games you’re going to want to be able to outfit your ships and bring them into combat. Previously the ships were only editable from inside the campaign part of the game, and the edited ships were part of the save game, so you couldn’t use them anywhere else. Also you could only edit the ships that you had access to in the campaign. Now you can equip any component on any ship and access it from any multiplayer game. Well, I haven’t completed the bit where you bring them into a multiplayer game, but they are accessible now. It’s looking pretty good, but still needs some work, a lot of polishing.

Also this week, the Humble Store got back to me. I now have a Humble Store merchant account, and I need to submit some more stuff to get the game on the store. The most intimidating thing is the long description. I’m trying to figure out how to accurately portray the mood of the game, story-wise that is. Presenting the mechanics well shouldn’t be hard, but I’ve been struggling with how to give enough information to make it intriguing, present it in a way that properly conveys the mood, and keep it short enough that no one loses their interest reading through it. Once I figure all of that out it shouldn’t be too much longer before the game is up on the store. Then I’ll work on polishing the multiplayer stuff up enough to update the version available on the store.

It’s going to be a good, but busy week.

This week I upgraded the game to Unity 5 so that I could take advantage of their new multiplayer networking stuff. I haven’t started integrating it yet, but I did go through a networking tutorial, and it looks like it’s not going to be too bad.

The second thing I got done is related. The game now supports hotseat multiplayer. It doesn’t allow you to customize your ships yet, but it does allow any number of hotseat players. Additionally I structured it so that you can mix hotseat and networked multiplayer, so you could have two computers connected over a network, each with two or three players apiece. I don’t know if that feature will ever be used, but if you want to do it you should be able to.

I’m thinking the next step is going to be allowing players to customize their ships. I’ve already got the customization window built, I’ll just need to add in some new bits. It needs to limit components based on power availability, and it needs to tally up an estimate of how many points the ship is worth. I expect the point values to be wildly off mark at first, but that should be remedied by some playtesting. I also need to include some soft of lobby where you can set up the game and pick your ships.

I’m also going to have to do some balancing on the different ship hulls. At the moment they all pretty much work the same way. There are some slight maneuverability differences, but not a lot. I’ve got five different factions of ships, different manufacturers basically. I want there to be some good differences between the different groups, so each group has some sort of theme. I’ve got several variables I can change to give the ships a different feel. There’s armor, weight (which affects maneuverability), turn speed, hit points, and weapon slot placement. I figure that I can vary those to give the different groups a different feeling and support different play styles.

Networked multiplayer may be a ways down the road. I want to get started on the story campaign. But I’ll have to see how things progress. I haven’t heard back from the Humble Store yet, so it’s not quite available to the public yet. I’m thinking I may submit it to Desura as well this week. I know that there have been some issues with developers being paid, but it sounds like those are being worked out. Also at this point I’m more concerned with getting the game into as many player’s hands as possible.

Edit: I did a little more looking at Desura, it sounds like they are on their way out. Probably not worth bothering trying to get on there. So I’ll have to find some other places to upload it.

I’ll lead with the most exciting news of the week, I submitted Aurora Redemptus to the humble store to be sold as an early access title. I got it submitted Saturday evening, so it will most likely be a couple of days before I hear back, but I’m very glad to have that done.

Of course I had some things that I needed to get done before I could submit it. The biggest thing was a tutorial. I added in a basic tutorial that covers all of the basics that I would cover with people at the Salt Lake Gaming Con. The whole thing takes less than a minute, I haven’t timed it, so it could be closer to thirty seconds. Anyway, it gives a brief introduction, then turns you lose to kill some turrets. Other small improvements include several bug fixes, and an improvement to how the machine gun bullets look. They use to be just yellow lines, but now they are bolts of light. They look a lot better.

At the moment I’m charging $1.00 for the game, of course I’m going to be providing access keys for everyone who liked the game on Facebook. I’m honestly still thinking over whether to charge or not to start charging for it right now. On the one hand, I promised free access to everyone who liked the game on Facebook, I will definitely provide that, but it feels a little funny to offer them ‘free’ access, then go ahead and give it to everyone for free. On the other hand my big concern at the moment is just getting people to hear about and play the game. I’ll have to see how it shakes out.

As for what’s next, I’m thinking that if I’m asking people to pay money, even $1.00, then I should provide plenty of content. I’m really wanting to add multiplayer, and that would provide numerous benefits. First, it would hopefully get a lot of people playing the game, someone plays it, then wants to play with their friends so they tell the friends about it, and so on and so forth. Another big benefit would be help in balancing the game. Anyone who played the game at the con will be able to attest to the fact that at the moment the missile ships are just way too powerful. If handled right one missile ship could take down a lot of other ships. If there were a lot of people playing the game it would help me get a feel for how the weapons balance up against each other. I think this would be something that would be really nice to have mostly done before I get too far into the story campaign. If I get halfway through, then find that I have to nerf some weapons system, then every level that made use of that is going to have to be reviewed for balance. One potential solution to that could be to have a different class of equipment only available in the story, and that are tuned to the needs of the story. So you would have missiles in the story and in the multiplayer, but they might be more powerful in one than the other. As I said before, I don’t think that multiplayer would be terribly difficult to implement, the difficult part would be handling all of the balancing. That could take a lot of time out of development. But then I think being swamped with work because so many people are playing your game would be a pretty good problem to have.

There are some other changes I’ve thought of making that I’m not sure where on the timeline they fall. Before the conference I was toying with a more distinct planning mode. The background would fade slightly, making the lasers and explosions less distinct, then all of the ships would light up with green, red or blue indicating player ships, enemy ships and ally ships. That would make it easier to pick out the ships, see where you are going, etc. I thought it was looking pretty cool too, but it was too buggy to include in the con demo. I’ve also got some new weapon systems I would like to implement, special abilities for ships, and of course the story campaign, which is one of the things I’m most excited about.

So a big task for me now is prioritizing, figuring out what will bring in more players, what will keep those players happy, and what will contribute towards the overall success of the project. Lots of very fun stuff to do. Any suggestions or thoughts would be very welcome in the comments.