Galactic Lego - Where to now?

Hugoagogo on 2013/05/06 08:08 of Alison In Wonderland

Although my game ended up in a rather incomplete state, I am still pretty happy with the final result, and thought my final score was fair.

First up to all the people who rated my game thanks for the comments, its always pretty nice to get a ton of positive feedback, that people liked the idea behind my game.

I would really like to redo the game from scratch, and have some neat ideas on features to add as well as a much better and more thought out way to do the code for the game, so if I have time in between uni, a cadet-ship, playing around with electronics and a newly made CNC machine, I really would like to have a nouther crack at it.

I would like to get some more advice from the people here though that played my game on what they think I can do to improve how you move around in the game. This is two space games I have done in a row, and I repeat from last time SPACE IS HARD, the whole frictionless without speed limits thing really doesn't lend itself to easy control and this really isnt made better by the lack of a star field for feedback.

In this game I tried to get around this by capping speed, angular velocity and the distance between opponents but for most people who I showed in person, it was still difficult to grasp, (That said my friends doing engineering were the quickest to master it).

So does anybody have some advice on how I can make ships easier to control without getting rid of designing your ships component by component. If anyone has any other cool ideas they would like to see in a game like this I would like to hear those too.

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Comments

Cosmologicon on 2013/05/06 08:44:

SPACE IS HARD, the whole frictionless without speed limits thing really doesn't lend itself to easy control and this really isnt made better by the lack of a star field for feedback.

Why do you feel the need to make it even slightly realistic? If I were to make a game like yours I would have the ships handle they way they do in Ur-Quan Masters: zero persistent angular momentum, and relatively low time to reach top speed.

As for a star field, is there some reason you don't include one? It's about 4 lines of python to have one that gives enough feedback, at least with pygame.

Hugoagogo on 2013/05/06 09:11:

First off I am a pretty big fan of space stuff, and secondly because doing that would make it no different to a billion other games, what I thought helped to make my game stand out was how you had to put thought into the design of your ship for it to actually work.

I don't have a problem so much with the game being "hard" I am more concerned with making the controls less frustrating after you have designed a ship.

I did consider adding a "stabiliser module" that would try to reduce your angular velocity or regular velocity. This would be pretty cool as if you had it destroyed or destroyed the module on an opposing ship you would lose its benefits.

As for the Star-field I simply didnt have time for it, at the end of the competition it came down to add star-field and a few other niceties or make lasers do damage

gcewing on 2013/05/06 12:21:

A real-life spaceship would have a computer on board to take care of all the hard stuff about control and navigation in space. So I don't think you need to worry that having an easy-to-use control system would be unrealistic. On the contrary, it would be unrealisistic not to have one!

There's still room for design. You would need to incorporate a control module, make sure it was protected, maybe include some redundant ones. You would also need control thrusters suitably positioned, etc. The control system could be simulated in a very detailed way if you wanted.

flyingfox on 2013/05/06 19:12:

Yeah, controlling the ships was difficult without the visual feedback of a star field.  In place of a background, you could draw an arrow from the centre of your ship indicating your velocity.  When you had no other visual references it was hard to see where you were headed.