I’ve rewritten the spawning system, so now you find other ships at particular locations. Previously (as some of you figured out) I just flung them in from off screen to maintain a population and present an appropriate level of challenge. Now you have to go find it. This change is interesting, it’s had a pretty big impact on the game, and I think it’s nearly finished… but it makes for a terrible screenshot.

Something else I did, which I’m hoping will excuse this image, was build a little air timer app for my phone. Accelerometers are affected by gravity, so using them to read anything other than the orientation of a static or constantly moving object is quite difficult. Luckily this means they’ll only ever read 0 when in freefall, and as a snowboarder this is something I’m quite interested in. Now, thanks to the Android Scripting Environment, I can throw my phone up in the air, catch it, then hear a robotic voice report how long my phone was airborne. In a couple of weeks I’ll stuff my phone into my jacket pocket, and it will tell me how long I am airborne. I’m tempted to have it also reports impacts, but if I land on my head I’m not sure I’ll want to hear about it from a robotic voice in my pocket.

<3 Farbs

My w finger got tired

This is a good example of how I work. Once upon a time people made games by writing a giant document describing every aspect of a game, then handing that document over to a team to implement. I don’t do that. Instead I start with a vague idea of how a game should work, then get the core features running as soon as possible. Once I’m able to play something I’m much better able to judge what works, what doesn’t work, and what might work. Case in point: Cruise control. Exploring is interesting, but it means moving forwards a lot more than in previous episodes. My forwards finger started to hurt, so I added what in most MMOs would be called autorun. I probably wouldn’t have covered that within the deep dark depths of a design document.

<3 Farbs

TONK TONK

Captain Barada taps the top left corner of her VDU.

Hmm. I should restock oxygen while I’m here. No good exploring without a full tank. I’ll jot down this station’s coordinates too, so I can cut back when I need another breath.

<3 Farbs

I didn’t put this station here. This station put itself here. I shut the game down and started again, and it was still here.

For the technically inclined: I added a seeded pseudo random number generator to the project, since the standard flash random function isn’t seeded. This allows me to randomly generate a world, then later generate the same world just by feeding the random functions the same seed value. I can also generate a completely different world by starting from a different seed value. This has some pretty cool potential.
<3 Farbs

On the left is the first ever sketch of a command module (which was later revised). The middle sheet shows a few iterations of Captain Successor modules, and on the right are some thoughts on how stations might anchor themseleves in space. These usually change once I get them in game, especially in regards to animation. Still, nothing beats a pad of graph paper and a felt tip pen for testing ideas.

<3 Farbs

See that little yellow girder piece? It’s exciting. It doesn’t seem exciting, but believe me it is. Unlike anything else in the Captain Forever games so far I can fly far, far away from it, then come back and find it still sitting there. What’s even cooler is that it isn’t even really there when I get far away, so it doesn’t need to be considered for gameplay or physics updates. I could fill a whole universe with these… or perhaps something else. Perhaps I could fill it with space stations.

I spent Friday working on a not-ready-for-announcement side project, so I figured I’d finally compile and post this. It’s a series of short dictaphone interviews I did with IGF Design finalists at GDC earlier this year, with a special guest appearance at the end. I had planned to turn it into a piece for PC PowerPlay, but it works much better in audio than in text. Enjoy!

Captain Etcetera development news resumes tomorrow.

<3 Farbs

Today I started building the next episode of Captain Forever. With various side projects largely squared away, and what seems like a very solid design in my head, I fired up SciTE and started tapping.

The first thing I like to do on a new project is talk about it. Usually I do this in quiet, secretive parts of the internet from whence word of my work will not wander. I prefer not to talk about my games publicly until they’re finished so that if the design fails I haven’t created false expectations. With CB I’m less worried about that, so I figured I’d start talking about it from the word go.

GO!

The second thing I like to do on a new project is get something running. In this case it’s a clone of Captain Impostor with a new name. Currently I’m calling this episode Captain Believer, though that’s quite likely to change. For a while Captain Successor was called Captain Fughatta, so yeah, things can definitely change. I’ve set aside six months for this ep, whereas Successor and Impostor were both finished in three, so as you can imagine I’m aiming to build something much more substantial this time around. Six months might not seem like a long time compared to other games, but by starting with Successor I already have a finished game. This is six months of addition and refinement.

Another thing I’m trying is regular devblogging. To kick things off I’ll attempt one post per workday, so you should see plenty more up here over the coming weeks.

Or an apology.

<3 Farbs

Dear CafePress and its many competitors,

Please provide a URL interface. This would allow me to sell products bearing images that I make available from my website, without having to go through the tedious process of using your shopfront. I would create a link like

http://www.cafepress.com/offsite.php?image=www.farbs.org/screenshot309485203497.png

which directs people to your shopfront. There they would browse merchandise featuring the image www.farbs.org/screenshot309485203497.png. You could even create a little icon for this, much like the Tweet This, Facebook Share and Digg icons that have invaded the blogosphere. With this simple system I could offer prints of people’s favourite Captain Forever moments, PlayPen pages, or weird digital art created using their webcam. Webcomics could sell copies of every strip, and photoblogs could sell every image. What’s more, since you already have the infrastructure in place it would be incredibly easy to implement. The internet wants this. You want this. Please, someone, make this happen.

<3 Farbs

PS: Does this exist already? I haven’t been able to find it.