Blow Away the Opposition in Starfleet Commander

In Starfleet Commander, you enter the universe on a small outpost in a large galaxy.  You have a small amount of Ore, Crystal and Hydrogen to build up a massive space empire and armada.  Unlike games like Mafia Wars or Castle Age, everything in Starfleet Commander happens in real-time.  Building your first levels of Ore Mines and Power Stations takes only minutes.  In later levels, it takes hours, and sometimes days to build things.  So for a lot of the time, you will be seeing a bunch of progress bars across your screen.

Is it done yet?

Yet, this is what makes the game incredibly compelling.  After a few levels of being immune in “newbie” status, you are thrown into a pretty cutthroat world.  Once you are out of newbie status, anyone can attack you and steal your resources, and harvest the remains of your fleet from orbit.

I started the game with a friend of mine who was unlucky enough to live close to an incredibly aggressive player named “Caesar.”  That player plundered most of his resources from neighbors who happened to be weaker than him.  This sparked a massive arms race which also led to an alliance formed by many players disgruntled with becoming a feeding ground.

So, these progress bars become everything – how fast your fleets can move, do raids against other players, or how fast it takes to research technologies or construct buildings that are necessary for you to climb the tech tree.  And for some strange reason, organizing fleets, transporting goods among colonies, and arranging the flow of traffic becomes incredibly compelling.

Maybe I should work for Air Traffic Control

Now, the monetization of this game is fairly light compared to the Zynga games of Mafia Wars and Farmville because you can really only buy technologies or buildings with in-game credits. So there is a limited number of places a person could “buy” their way to the top. And I have to admit, I have been tempted more than once to swipe my credit card or to take these surveys or offer deals on in their store to get ahead in the game.

However, recent news has been showing that these games are full of scam-ridden surveys and offers.

To be fair to Blue Frog Gaming who created Starfleet Commander, they aren’t part of this massive class action lawsuit against Zynga. But if anyone is considering putting money into these games, be really careful. I personally would give money directly to the companies for credits because their games are just that much fun.

And to be honest, Starfleet Commander did contribute to my insomnia.

If anyone tries Starfleet Commander out and wants an alliance to join, look up my alliance – “Fading Suns“.

I am unabashedly a “Copycat.” I honestly don’t believe in seeking innovation or originality.

This may come as a shock because I am also through-and-through indie but I believe that the the constant search for something “new and innovative” in game design is a fruitless quest. In fact, we already have another medium that shows us what the constant drive for that ambiguous “something new” leads us – the Modern Art Industry.

And these are the pieces they come up with:

"Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp

The endless seeking of something new and innovative tends to be a fruitless search that ends up “in the toilet.”  Originality and innovation comes when you least expect it.  It cannot be forced.  It comes from mastering and understanding the craft first.   Then with proper understanding of the craft, are you truly free to express something the world has never seen before.

"Le Ravissement de Psyche" by William Bouguereau

I believe in classical training.  Imitation and mastery – buidling upon the knowledge and experience garnered by the giants that have come before you.  Only then are you truly free to express something new.

Once the contest is over, I will unlock all my private posts about the game as a “post-partum” view of the challenges I have faced in creating the game.  (By the way, I like the term “post-partum” better than “post-mortem.”  It’s more apropos and less morbid.)

Already I feel I’ve had to make a number of compromises to make the game possible within the timeframe I have.  From a technological standpoint, I am very happy with the performance of FreeSpin3D, however, I believe I have pushed it and Flash to its technological limit in terms of processing power and speed for software-only graphical rendering.  I’ve also used a number of mathematical tricks and artistic flair to give the game some polish.  So I am very happy with how the game looks from the artistic standpoint.  So from both an artistic standpoint and a technological standpoint, I am very happy with the results.  Although, from a coding standpoint, I’d love to get a code review with someone to figure out how to reduce the bloat in the Main Document class and to see common strategies and paradigms for creating elegant, modularized scenes and functionality.

My only doubt is gameplay.  “Is this fun?”  And much like most AAA-games, you can have the best technology and some fancy eye-candy graphics, but if the game isn’t fun, then what’s the point?

For now, the point is finishing the game and getting it published.  This is only the beginning and I’ll only get better.

Gwendolyn from Odin Sphere by Vanillaware

It amazes me how a single company can turn an entire genre on its head. Ever since the advent of the PlayStation, 3D gaming has been the goal for most development companies as the staple of AAA titles. In 2007, a small company called Vanillaware turned people’s heads by churning out two stunningly beautiful games in console 2D: Odin Sphere and Grim Grimoire.

What is most distinctive is that the games look and play like moving paintings.  Personally, I think that 2D gaming still retains largely unexplored.  With the rendering capabilities of modern graphics engines, there is still so much room for exploration (and re-exploration) of once long thought dead genres.

While so many developers are seeking “new and innovative” experiences in terms of gameplay, I think that there is still plenty of room to revisit older genres with new insights and new technology.

Odin Sphere revisits the classic 2D sidescrolling “beat-em-up” games.  Grim Grimoire tackles 2D real-time strategy.  Both of these genres have been long considered beaten to death and have given way to huge AAA 3D titles.  But with stunning artwork and solid gameplay, Vanillaware’s small team stakes its claim that there is nothing wrong with the “tried and true” games of the past when given new life.

Another thing to note for Indie Developers is that Odin Sphere was initially started as a 5-man project and maxed out at 14.  By major-company game development standards, this is a tiny team.  Yet, the results are nothing short of breathtaking.

I cannot wait for Vanillaware’s next release later this year: “Muramasa: The Demon Blade.”

Space ROX V 0.5

Of course, the point of any game is having some adversary to fight – be it enemy ships or floating space debris. Here I’ve taken the particle effect I created for the thrusters and blasters and applied them many-fold on a bunch of asteroids.

The animation for shooting the laser blasters has been modified to have multiple frames for the flash point, and the guns were syncronized.

The next objective is refining the control scheme and creating collisions.

Something of note – it seems that the up-arrow-key, the left-arrow-key in conjunction with the spacebar does not seem to work. Oddly enough, if you use the numeric keypad arrow keys (at least on my keyboard) the limitation goes away. To offset this, I also enabled the A, W, and D keys to do the same function as the arrow keys.

Redoing the control scheme is something that is on the list as well – perhaps using the mouse to shoot which will eliminate this arrow key issue.

Also, an inherent flaw in Actionscript 3.0 is a notable lack of a “Collection” class. Unfortunately the built-in “Array” and “Object” classes does not allow me to recast a stored object back to the original object type. I borrowed Michael James William’s Collection class to handle the multiple asteroids floating around.

Check it out!