I’m holding a sale!

The perceived value of indie games has dropped, so I’m trialling a lower price point. For a limited time only, Captain Forever supporter access is discounted from $20 to a mere $9. That’s a saving of 55%, and a perceived difference of an entire order of magnitude! This is an as-long-as-it’s-profitable sale, so as soon as income (sales x price) drops below regular levels the sale will end. If the games sell well enough then the sale could go on indefinitely, but it could also end tomorrow. Buy now or you might miss out!

If you’re already a Captain Forever supporter then you’re a paragon of humanity, a model of perfection to which we all aspire. You’re probably not interested in the $9 as-long-as-it’s-profitable sale, unless you’re one of the incredible few who asked for a Gifting mechanism. I’ve added gifting to the payment system, so now you can purchase supporter accounts for family and friends, each at the probably-temporarily low price of $9.

The third barrel in today’s announcement holds a bullet marked 0.5. I’ve just released the latest build of Captain Jameson – the massive RPGish successor to Captain Forever I envisaged when I first started the CF project. This build smoothes out a hundred rough edges, eases the first step in the difficulty curve, adds another two ship modules, and opens up three new sectors of varying size for you to explore. If you’re already a supporter then you can play it right now, otherwise, you know what to do.

Buy! Buy! Buy!

<3
Farbs

Remember this? I do!

Three years ago I released ROM CHECK FAIL, and it’s haunted me for three years since. Not only is it a fantastic game and debatably the high point of my career, it’s also an idea crying out for further exploration, and a litigation timebomb. I want to do more with it, but I also want to retain ownership of the shirt on my back, the pants I sometimes wear, and the house they all live in. After much ponderance I’ve decided to set the idea free. I don’t mean free as in beer, since it’s freeware already. I mean free as in Free Software Foundation.

Here, download the source code for ROM CHECK FAIL.

To use it simply grab the game from my Games page, install it, extract the source file into game’s install directory, and edit away. You don’t need to compile it or anything, any changes you make to the game source file should be detected and picked up automatically the next time you run the game.

I should warn you – this code be dragons. I wrote ROM CHECK FAIL over two and a bit weeks outside my fulltime job, so it really was just slapped together. Lowlights of particular note are my own atan2 function (because somehow I’d never discovered atan2), several virtual subclasses – and I use the word “virtual” to mean I never bothered to write the superclass, collision detection that works more often than I’d expect but less often than I’d like, repeatedly loading images from disk because it involved less typing, and the fact that the entire source code for the game resides in a single file. I’m so proud. If you’re looking for sample code, either to help you learn to make games or to evaluate my abilities as a programmer, then please, please look elsewhere.

I think I’m all out of disclaimers, and all out of excuses for lingering. Please take this file somewhere crazy. Be awesome, then tell me all about it.

Goodbye ROM CHECK FAIL. Have a good life.

<3 Farbs

Clickage invokes zoomage

In the two months since my last post I have released Captain Jameson 0.4, taken a holiday, ported most of Captain Foraxian to XBLIG, abandoned Foraxian XBLIG because ports of games in unpopular genres and unpopular styles are, unsurprisingly, unpopular, and devised a wonderful plan for Captain Jameson 0.6. Oh, and I’ve been working on 0.5, which is the subject of this post.

Captain Jameson Alpha build 0.5, to use its proper title, is not a major milestone. There are no sweeping design changes and there are no amazing additional features. Instead, 0.5 contains all the little adjustments, tweaks, and bugfixes that I’ve been putting off for the past year. It won’t make the game substantially different, but it should make it substantially better. Of course I couldn’t help making a few visual adjustments, as illustrated by this screenshot. Items of note are:

Snipe laser targetting
These show where a snipe laser will fire, and make the module feel a lot more snipey. It’s surprisingly fun to use.

New blurst shield visuals
The original blurst shield (in Captain Forever) was an ultra-rare component. Very few people ever saw one, so I didn’t think much about its appearance. Now blurst shields are relatively common, so the bizzare vibrating sausage graphic has disturbed many a player’s vision. In response to forumite prompting I’ve redesigned it.

New mouse cursor
I may still fiddle with this, but so far I like it. The crosshair is oriented in the same way as the player’s ship, which makes some sense when you then use this cursor to attach modules.

CJ0.5 is still some way off, but for now you can still play 0.4, 0.3, 0.2, and even 0.1 if you’re particularly sentimental or masochistic.

Enjoy!
<3 Farbs

Also: New shields! (Capt Jameson 0.4)

Vaconcovat, who you may know as the administrator of a rather successful Captain Forever forum, is running a fan video contest. If you create a 1 minute Captain Forever/Successor/Impostor/Jameson related/themed/inspired video that garners the most views, you’ll win three supporter memberships as gifts for friends/family/pets, and possibly have your name appear in Captain Jameson*.

Sounds great, huh? Check here for more details.

Thank you for promoting my games sharing your creative and artistic vision with the world.

<3 Farbs

* Maybe some stations will be named after you? Or perhaps some pilots? I really haven’t figured out the details yet. Most likely I’ll just talk with the winner and we’ll try to figure something out.

Since last I wrote I’ve released two new builds of Captain Jameson, each more incredible than the last. If you want to read the fascinating details and play the new builds then click here, otherwise you’ll have to trust me when I say that the game is coming along great. The game is coming along great.

The forums are also doing well, with Vaconcovat’s board swelling to 40 members and 270 posts. The efforts to map the Jameson universe are utterly spectacular, and well worth a peek if you’re having trouble finding your way around.

With 0.3 out I’m now considering what to do for version 0.4. Suggestions?

A deal’s a deal! This afternoon three forums and a reddit subforum all came online. Please check them out, register for any you like, and join in the conversation. If you’re wondering what to talk about, why not start with the Captain Jameson Alpha? I’d love to hear about bugs, suggestions, and stories from the final frontier. All players should find themselves exploring the same map, so it might be helpful to start sharing route tips and mapping data. If you get stuck in the game it might also be a good place to ask for help.

Since Jameson is still in alpha I wasn’t comfortable posting it in the main site menu, but you can find it tucked away in the community page as CJALPHA.BAT.

Enjoy!

<3 Farbs

Hi folks,

I have a proposition for you. I hope you like it, because otherwise I’ll feel like a bit of goose. Here’s the deal:

If you¹ create a Captain Forever forum², I’ll release³ the Captain Jameson alpha⁴.

• ¹By “you” I mean the community. Anyone. Possibly several people. Ideally multiple forums will emerge. If you want to build a forum then don’t let the efforts of others disuade you!
• ²The forum must be dedicated to or at least heavily feature the Captain Forever games. This would be a place for players to find release notes and announcements, trade mapping and exploration notes, post feedback about the games, and generally hang out.
• ³The alpha build will be released for play by all Captain Forever supporters, ideally within 24 hours of me being notified about the first forum, but possibly up to a week later if I encounter unforseen technical disasters.
• ⁴The alpha is an incomplete version of the game Captain Jameson. This means that it may be missing some features of and contain more bugs than the final version. You will have the opportunity to play the game before it is complete, and help fine-tune it. I still plan to finish and release the game, regardless of the presence of an alpha build.

I’m very excited about sharing this game with you, but I really need there to be somewhere for everyone to discuss it first. I hope someone out there can summon up the pony to pony up and get this pony (forum) on the road.

<3
Farbs

As promised last post, I’ve been building a replacement menu system for Captain Jameson. I’m not finished yet, but I think it already communicates its use and evokes both the NASA MEDS systems and the mainframe and BBS interfaces of times gone by. I wasn’t actually online during the BBS era but I’ve had a blast learning about figlets and sysops and FBI raids. Hopefully I’ll sneak some of this into the gameworld.

I’m nearly ready to resume testing on squishy humans, which is lucky since the PAX10 deadline is only a few weeks away. Hopefully these tests will see more players break through the shell (pun intended) and into the game.

In other news I’ve created a @CaptainForever twitter account for 280-byte-sized Captain Forever updates. This blog will remain as active as ever, but the twitter account might see a few updates too.

What do you think of the new menu?

<3 Farbs

Image source

Okay, I went overboard with the title. Let’s move on.

When you’re making a game (or, I imagine, embarking on any creative endeavor), you find yourself navigating possibility space. Your game could feature dolphins or sharks. It could be played from a top down perspective, or via a text parser. Each of these decisions affects the game and helps locate it in possibility space, so each time you make or change a decision the game moves. If you’re doing this with any intention (such as to make something awesome) then I think it’s fair to say that you’re navigating. Ahoy, land ho, etcetera.

With many constraints and clear goals this becomes an excercise in problem solving, and can be quite fun. If you’re simply cloning an existing game then you just need to accurately map your destination and set sail. Without any constraints or goals you could conceivably create anything, but you’re far more likely create nothing, having no idea where to start on a giant blank canvas. Here be dragons.

I follow a different approach, which I call selfish design. I create games tailored to my tastes, specifically so that I can play them. This keeps me clear of the paralyzing dragons of possibility, and helps me stay motivated. Also I get to play cool games that I like. Obviously I’m also keen on distributing and sometimes selling these games, but I find if I keep to the selfish design principle the other motivations can also be satisfied. Sometimes.

Right now I have a problem. If you follow this blog you’ll know that much of Captain Jameson is played via Command Line Interface, and that I’ve recently been testing the game with real, live, squishy humans. The strongest indicator I’ve found for whether a player is able to engage with the CLI and enjoy the game is this:

Is that player me?

This is where selfish design falls apart. I built the game systems, I understand how the ship computer terminal operates, and I know what few commands it can process at any time. Everyone else see a blinking cursor. Even when prompted to type a specific command, players know there are almost limitless things they could type, and any of these things might work. They face infinite, paralyzing possibility.

Though I love the CLI, I think I’d be happier making a game other people could play and enjoy. With this in mind I’m experimenting with a new system, based on the Multifunction Electronic Display Subsystem (MEDS) currently installed in NASA shuttles. You can see a little old man fiddling with one in the picture here. I’ll keep the ASCII stylings of the CLI, but instead of typing arcane half-remembered context sensitive commands I’ll have the player pick from a series of options at the bottom of the display by hitting number keys on their keyboards. Hopefully these six buttons will present finite, liberating possibility.

<3 Farbs

No, don’t worry, I haven’t scrapped Captain Jameson. I have rewritten the beginning of the game.

Since Jameson adds some new and seemingly tricky features I’m worried that players will be lost, not knowing what’s happening or what they’re supposed to do. Over the past few months I’ve thought about this, wondering whether to address it with in-game email, pilot chat popups like in the revised version of Forever, or some other means. At GDC I watched Brandon Boyer’s talk, where he thanked developers for creating new worlds and inviting him to explore. I realized I hadn’t designed Jameson from this perspective, and when I did this issue solved itself! There’s already a character motivated to instruct the player. All I needed to do was figure out how he would communicate.

I decided to use preloaded text files, which the player can access at any time via the console. I’m happy with the theory, but I’m still not sure that it’s effective. With this in mind I adapted a neat little idea from Jason Rohrer’s Inside a Star-Filled Sky. I created a special build which records every input interaction and the length of every timestep, then saves these to disk. Now when someone tests the game remotely they can send me this file, and I can replay their entire game on my machine. I’m hoping these replays will show any areas where players get stuck, frustrated, bored or confused. The player can even type messages for me into the console, to let me know exactly how they feel. I expect to see a few angry comments, and I expect they’ll be enormously helpful!

<3 Farbs