Starship Builder - New Art?

Wow, it's been almost 3 months since I posted anything about Starship Builder! Mostly I've just been taking a break from the project.

I would like to share with you a new art style that I'm experimenting with. I'm not sure if I like it yet, but figured I'd share it to get feedback. (Click the thumbnail to view full size.)

Future Walt says: It sucks.

This build also has a few other changes:

• Removed the concept of ship control "modes".
• Double-left-click to move the ship to a location.
• Left-click and drag to select weapons.
• Hold C while left-clicking and dragging to select people.
• Removed Repair Bays and Small Cannons.

Download this build for PC and Mac.

48 Hour Film Project: SGmOVIEmAGIC's Quack

Last week we (us Schell Games folk) wrapped filming on our submission to the 48 Hour Film Project. The result is called Quäck. I play Zombie Hitler, brought back to life by a magical umbrella. So be warned, this film should not be viewed by anyone easily insulted by Nazi jokes. Here it is:




Oh, and we made this awesome poster too!

Starship Builder - UI Revamp & More

I've spent the past couple weeks making a lot of little improvements to Starship Builder. Most importantly, the game's user interface has been totally revamped to be a lot cleaner and more self-explanatory. Here's a full list of improvements:

• Added repair bays. Crew stationed at repair bays will automatically seek out systems needing repair.
• Lots of user interface improvements, including tooltips for just about everything.
• Movement is now back to using the left mouse button. Future Walt wonders why he kept changing this.
• Can right-click to target all weapons while in movement mode.
• New thruster particle effects.
• You can pick what team you want to play on in multiplayer.
• Can now play with up to 8 players. (But only 4 teams are supported.)
• Added an observer mode to multiplayer.
• New blue-ish background image.
• Lots of bug fixes, performance improvements, and tweaks.

A screenshot showing off the new Builder user interface:

And another showing the new background:

Download this build for PC and Mac.

Starship Builder - Ion Beams and Substructure

Another week, another round of improvements to Starship Builder! There are two significant new features in this week's build...

The most fun of the new features is a new type of weapon, the Ion Cannon! Ion Cannons are large, powerful energy weapons that deal great damage over time. Their disadvantage is that they consume very large amounts of ammunition and also can only fire directly forward. This means that it is much more difficult to target specific systems on an enemy ship, and they also may be less useful when built on larger, less maneuverable ships.

The other big new feature is less fun, but arguably more important: Substructure. I've done a number of playtests since adding multiplayer, and the biggest imbalance issue was that ships would break apart into multiple pieces too quickly. My solution to this was to add a layer of "substructure" underneath the existing systems. When a system is destroyed, it reveals the substructure underneath. The substructure itself can also be destroyed, but doing so takes longer, and the ship will not break apart until the substructure is destroyed. In this way, the substructure acts as a kind of glue, holding the ship together even under considerable damage. I'm still working out the exact balance between substructure and regular systems, but it seems to basically solve the problem.

Here's a screenshot showing both the new Ion Cannons and the exposed substructure. Click on the image to get a better view of the substructure.

Download this latest build for PC and Mac.

Starship Builder - Multiplayer!

I've spent the past few weeks doing a massive overhaul of Starship Builder's code to support networked multiplayer. It's been a very long process, requiring a lot of code to be rewritten. But thankfully, and finally, everything seems to be working pretty much okay. Here's a glorious screenshot of two ships in the heat of combat, each belonging to a different player:

Download this latest build for PC and Mac.

Here's a more complete changelist:

• Added basic network multiplayer.
• Can specifically target a part of the enemy by right-clicking on that part.
• Added armor pieces that do nothing but provide lots of protection.
• Press F to make the camera follow your ship.
• A black hole is now spawned after 3 minutes. It's not very powerful, but will suck in stray debris. Whatever you do, don't touch the black hole!
• A massive asteroid swarm now spawns after 5 minutes. Good look surviving it!
• Ships now maintain some amount of thruster stability even as many thrusters are destroyed.
• Added a basic minimap.
• Added small and big cannons.
• A single enemy ship can now be spawned in the simulator.
• Added a new mode that allows you to directly control your ship using the WASDQE keys.

If you want to play multiplayer yourself, here's some basic instructions for setting up a match:

1. On one computer, start the game and click the "Multiplayer" button once the game is loaded.
2. Select the ship you want to play.
3. Type a game name where it says "Host a game".
4. Click "Create".
5. On another computer, follow steps 1-2.
6. Click the button matching the game's name under "Connect to".
7. Repeat steps 5-6 for up to 2 additional computers. (Total of 4 max players.)
8. On the first computer, click "Start!".
9. Have fun!

Starship Builder - UI Modes

This is a somewhat experimental release of Starship Builder, focused primarily on trying out different levels of control that players have over ships, systems on ships, and people in ships.

Here's a rundown of what's changed:

• Added two separate "modes":
• Combat: Allows you to select and give targets to specific weapons. Left-click and drag to draw a box around and select the weapons. Right-click on a target to focus-fire on that target.
• People: Allows you to select and give orders to specific people. Left-click and draw a box around the people to select them. Right click on a system order some of the selected crew to operate that system. Hold U to select only those crew without any orders.
• Ship movement (when in "Movement" mode) is back to right-click.
• Crew can now be ordered to operate specific systems such as weapons, thrusters, ammo supplies, and cockpits.
• Crew's Quarters have been removed. All parts requiring crew now automatically start with their required crew. Crew can also be added and removed manually in the Builder. Hold P when placing a part to not create the default number of crew for that part.
• Crew must be assigned to specific Ammo Supplies. Those crew will then supply ammo to nearby weapons.

Here's a screenshot of the player selecting a handful of cannons:

And here's a screenshot of the player selecting a handful of people: (If you look closely, you can also see lines indicating the paths that the people are travelling.)

Here are download links for PC and Mac versions of this build.

I'm unsure yet whether the player should have this level of detailed control over ships, and I'm especially not sure about whether the individual crew members should be directly controllable or whether they should be completely automated. The direct control of crew in this build seems unnecessarily tedious, so I think I'm leaning towards totally automatic for the future.

Starship Builder - Crew Congestion & More

It's been a couple weeks since I last posted about Starship Builder, mostly because my progress since then has been lots of little improvements and not many big new features. But all those new improvements have added up, and I also have working on a significant new mechanic that I'd like to talk about, especially with regard to how it's programmed.

Here's a rough list of what's changed since the last post:

• Added crew congestion mechanic. (See below.)
• Replaced that ugly purple grid with a much nicer space background. A simple grid is overlayed on top of the background.
• Bullets fired from cannons now inherit the ship's velocity. (This is more physically realistic.)
• Tons of bug fixes and performance improvements.

Feel free to download the latest PC and Mac builds.

The significant new mechanic I mentioned above is "crew congestion". Essentially how it works is that, whenever two people are passing through each other in opposite directions, they will slow each other down. This is to emulate tight corridors where two people have to squeeze past each other to get by. But the people are smart, and they will try to avoid other people going in the opposite direction by taking a different route if they can. The result is that creating double-wide corridors or alternative paths can significantly increase the efficiency of your crew.

In the previous version of Starship Builder, a single person wanting to travel from point A to point B used a basic A* pathfinding algorithm to determine the shortest path from A to B, taking into account only the distance between points and travel speed (the rate at which the person can move through different parts of the ship, such as corridors vs thrusters).

In this new version, the A* algorithm is still used for pathfinding, but it also takes into account an estimated "congestion level" for each grid location. A grid location's congestion level is used to reduce the assumed speed at which the person can travel through that location. If the assumed speed is low enough, then the A* algorithm will naturally attempt to route around that location.

The way that congestion is estimated for grid locations is inspired by the way that ant colonies lay down scents to mark paths leading to food. After an ant finds a source of food, the ant will return to the colony, laying down a weak pheromone trail on its way back to the colony. This trail is a small suggestion for other ants to follow. Most ants won't follow, since the trail is very weak, but a few will, and when they find the food, they'll return, laying down more pheromone over top of the trail. As more and more pheromone is laid down, more and more ants will follow it to the food.

Congestion estimation in Starship Builder is inspired by these ant colonies, but it works in almost the exact opposite way. Whenever a person plans a path from point A to point B, a "virtual pheromone" is instantly applied to the entire path, but instead of persuading fellow crew to follow the path, it actually dissuades fellow crew from following the same path. The more virtual pheromone there is on any given grid location, the slower the "assumed speed" will be when the A* pathfinding algorithm runs. So the more people that travel along any given path, the more likely it will be for others to try to take a different path.