A couple of months ago, I made a blog post about some content I was working on; The Crucible.
Since then I’ve been working on various things, but not much else has been heard, except for my normal forum posting but that greatly fluctuates on what topics there currently are.
So here’s a relatively sporadic update, of what I’ve been up to since, and including The Crucible.
The Crucible
From the feedback I got it was clear there were two main issues; the stage bosses were just normal AI and rather boring to kill and that a lot of players wasted time waiting for the next wave.
The first of these issues is pretty easy to fix, our super item system is diverse and we can do very interesting things using it.
The latter however is a bit in-depth. We all know waiting around for things to happen is a bit boring. The easy option would of been for me to just make the next wave instantly spawn when the previous wave had passed, but I didn’t want to do that as I figured it’d make the later stages much, much harder. At the time, The Crucible consisted of two boss AI. A hidden controller featuring an extensive and long boss script featuring a few things I had written specifically for this, which controlled all the AI that spawned and stage selection, and a dummy AI which just roamed around (the Crucible Commentator).
The controller AI’s script is was about 1500 lines which is pretty long already given that Pretender Hermes is about 500, Easter Bunny/Zombie Easter Bunny are about 200 each and Copper Blob is a measly 140 lines.
As such it was decided it’d be too complex to modify the current script to allow for some mechanic where you can manually trigger the next wave either ahead of time. So it was decided that Calypso would write us a new type of spawner, a Wave Spawner. Similar to an Ambush Spawner but allowing us to spawn waves in succession with mission requirements and a force spawn trigger area. Removing the need for messy boss script and giving us much nicer way of doing wave-based combat in the future. While Calypso worked on that, I took a detour and started playing with other things.
After Calypso finished up the Wave Spawner code, or the large part of it. I got dirty with it, there was some quirky behaviour or things which I wanted and were lacking, mostly hindsight when actually trying to use it. So I then polished it off, including mission goals for clearing waves of a wave spawner. Compared to how it was going to be, doing the Crucible will feel very smooth and sleek. Now the spawners are done for Engineer, Shield Monkey, Fleet Commander and Gunner and will be on test later today. Now, onto the other things!
The Other Things
Some of these things are in game already, some are yet to come and some are real life things, of which I’ll save the coolest for last.
Starting with things that have already hit live, the most noticeable is probably the new level names. Previously the level names that accompany your level stopped increasing at 5350. Years ago when these level ranges were made, 5350 was such an unbelievable level to hold and it shows when you see that ‘Average’ and ‘Above Average’ covered the tiny range from 182 to 316. Our list of level names now extend to our absolute level cap, which is currently 10,000. Removing some of the old less inspirational names such as ‘Super-Duper Elite’ and adding some new much more epic ones such as ‘Marauder’, ‘Supreme’, ‘Demigod’ and replacing ‘Average’ and ‘Above Average’ with ‘Reasonable’.
Halloween is around the corner, literally, I’m typing this like 30 minutes before I’m activating the event. Unfortunately this Halloween doesn’t have a great deal of new, last year I added Vampires and Holoprojectors, this year features a new item class which you may of already heard of, the Sound projectors. There aren’t a great deal of these, but there are some! You will need your sound on to hear them, though. This years Halloween event also featured a contest in a similar vein to the Astro-Santa letter competition. The competition has ended now though and winners have been picked; their prizes will be various collection of Halloween items + something extra special.
Finally I have started on some (other) new content. This is a zone I’ve been interested in doing for about a year now and I love the idea so much, I’ve been collecting ideas for things to do and include on it and I feel like I’m at the stage to just do it, save for the other things I’ve been doing.
The new zone like the minor faction, Vervaardiger, is somewhat inspired by the iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS game Galaxy on Fire 2. The content will be featuring three new galaxies within the normal universe, occupying Celestial Gardens, Earthforce Space and Perilous Space. It’ll revolve around industrialism, specifically the mining industry. The span of universal layers covered does mean that there will be content for both low level and high level players. There will definitely be some worthwhile items from there for all players.
The Coolest
And now, to finish off, the coolest one I have to say. Friday 11th and Saturday 12th of October was the Norwich Game Expo. Having been tipped off just the Monday before by one of my Explorer Scouts, I managed to get myself an exhibition spot quite last minute. NGE was no PAX Prime or E3, but it was good. I popped down on the Saturday where I demoed Star Sonata on one of my computers on a local server for new people to try. It was quite honestly fun, I just wish I had more time to talk to the other developers who were there. Needless to say I’ll be doing it again, and this time I might seen a current player! I also got some good feedback from people trying the game and noticing things myself which just weren’t quite right. After which I spent about 6 hours playing through the entirety of The Nexus content to find things which aren’t quite right. And that was just the Volcom faction! I plan to do the Cadet side soon as well.
To finish up, like Calypso I will be doing relatively often blog posts, although they won’t be every week, nor the same day each time.
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