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Apologies for the mic – it was supposed to sound space-radio-transmissiony, but got a little garbled in the process. What do people think – do you want more of these, or would you rather I went back to regular ol’ blogging?

<3 Farbs

There’s a lot in development at the moment, including:

• Asteroid field surrounding start location (pictured) – I like sneaking out through its protective barrier at the start of each play, but the hundredth time it got a little repetitive. I had to speed the command module up a little to compensate. I’d love to see more formations like this across the map, and expect to spend lots of time figuring out how to generate them.
• Ingame email – currently functional but ugly
• Paying for oxygen – right now it’s free, which means you can go a long way without touching the economy. I want to try this out and see how it goes.
• Proper death sequence – I’m still using the Nemesis/Narcissus/Eris sequence, however the ships you fly in Jameson are normal civilian craft so they shouldn’t explode quite so spectacularly.
• Placeholder Quest Zones – spaces in the map that you need to visit to finish the game
• Emergency Beacons… are how you find the quest zones
• Bugs – are few but annoying.
• In-game Instructions – are necessary because…

…I’m about to submit the CF series for the Freeplay Awards. It’s funny how much gets done a day or two before a deadline

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My attempt to finish Captain Jameson’s bounty system wandered further off track when I realized that ol’ Captain Clippy would also need to store and retrieve messages. What’s more, lengthy text fields really don’t belong on the main game screen anymore. I need to put this in the terminal window. I ditched Clippy and started building a simple mail system for the game. It’s functional at the moment, but it needs things like message notifications and new-message counts before it’ll be of any use. This led me to work on arguably the most critical part of the system – the notification beep.

I can’t just use a single beep or it’ll get lost among the general interface noise. No, I need to play a 3-4 note sting. It’s surprising how expressive these can be. Depending on which scale you use you can create something despondent, triumphant, alarming, or discordant. The difference between your first and last notes can suggest that something has finished, or that something is still in motion. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it than that, but I’ll have to leave music theory study ’till I’ve finished the game.

I ended up picking out a 0-5-7-12-7 pattern, since the first four notes neatly congratulate the player (“You completed a goal!”), and the last implies unfinished action (“Go read your email!”). I was about to blutack a microphone to my PC speaker (Yes, this is how I make Captain Forever’s beeps) when I realized why the tune held such appeal. I was pretty sure it was from Gradius. In fact, it reminded me of the tune played whenever you drop a credit into the machine. “Congratulations on your purchase! Your game is about to start!”. You can hear it in the youtube clip here. Luckily they turned out to be slightly different, so my version should be okay. Heck, after the thousandth time I hear it I might drop the second and third notes anyway.

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Yesterday I continued my quest to compound complexity, this time creating Captain Jameson’s bounty mechanic. Currently it just gives you credits for defeating designated ships, but over the next few days I plan to add LAW stations, bounty maps, and possibly even police vehicles. First however I need to add some player feedback, and for that I must resurrect Captain Clippy. What I need is a way to notify the player when they receive a bounty. I considered using the COM line at the bottom left of the screen, but chances are they’ll miss it. No, I need to put this message front and center.

Captain Clippy is a player feedback system I added to Captain Forever some time after launch. I realized that many new players weren’t reading the flight manual, HLP hud lines, or pause screen command reference, and that the only way to teach them to play was to spam instructions across the middle of the screen. I needed them to last for a minimum time (regardless of player clicking), and for fun I added a variable delay to simulate human response/typing time and the ability to refer to the player by name. Now it seems this system, named after the world’s least loved paperclip, would be perfect for passing messages from non-player characters. I’ll port it over today.

Meanwhile, Indie Kombat maintains pace. With two and a half weeks remaining I’ve built a surprisingly difficult mashup of Fishie Fishie and SYNSO: Squid Harder, and Rob has built… a slot machine? Or something? I’m really not sure.

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Captain Jameson received asteroid fields today, and I wasn’t immediately sure what they should look like. I started with the bright chalky colours shown in the middle of the picture here, but they just look right. Next I tried asteroids that look like, well, Asteroids, but surprisingly they didn’t fit either. I eventually settled with the style shown in the bottom right. It seemed weird drawing part of a CF game without a bright glowy border, but I think it fits quite well and suggests (correctly) that the asteroids are a background element.

Tomorrow I’ll make the asteroids spawn in interesting patterns. Right now they’re just sprayed randomly across the map.

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Thanks everyone for your comments on the last post. You folks posted a lot of useful stuff up there. Ben’s suggestions were particularly inspiring, but what really lodged itself in my brain was Vaconcovat’s comment about scrap hauling. The scrapper stations are relatively simple game systems, but because they interact with several other game systems they invoke complex and interesting player behaviour. In a few minutes of Captain Jameson I might do the following:

1. Decide to explore further along bearing 90 from 0,0 (go right)
2. Log in to the nearest nav station, and notice that I would need to cross a large gap between oxy stations
3. Visit a recently reactivated factory that manufactures Charlie class Mk II Boosters (which should provide enough thrust to get me across the oxy gap)
4. Realize I have insufficient credit
5. Reconnect with the nav station, and this time bring up a list of ships in the area
6. Identify, track down, and destroy a couple of hostile ships
7. Rebuild my ship using the newly earned modules, configuring it for fast movement because my oxy is running low
8. Crawl back to the second nearest oxy station, because it’s closer to the scrapper station I’m ultimately aiming to visit. I begin to doubt my decision as oxy hits 2%, but I make it there in time.
9. Visit scrap station and get a quote for my wares. The quote is very low because some of the modules were damaged in the fight.
10. Sell the undamaged modules and rebuild my ship out of damaged parts
11. Take the damaged modules to a nearby repair station, and spend the credits earned in step 10 repairing them
12. Return to the scrap station and sell of newly repaired parts
13. Refill oxy
14. Return to the factory and purchase a shiny new Mk II thruster
15. Bolt the thruster to the back of my ship and zoom off into the unknown

It’s not a great story. There are no characters, there is hardly any plot, and it says bugger all about the human condition – but it’s a start. You’ll also notice a huge hole in point 1 – why go East? In fact, why go anywhere? This was the question that got me caught up in this stuff, but I think it was a mistake to try to answer it while also addressing generative narrative issues. I’m going to try treating them as separate problems for now and see where that leads me.

I’ll add asteroid fields on Monday.

<3 Farbs