You’ve seen these books, surely. They’re published every gift-swapping season, and they nicely catalogue 1001 somethings that you must something before you die. This year they’re listing videogames, and so far I’ve found it a rather fun read – Page 842 in particular. You can probably guess why.
With Captain Jameson release slipping rapidly towards 2011 I decided to finish some auxillary features, just so I can release something before the year passes. To that end I’ve updated the Captain Forever website, rearranging the menu and adding new community, statistics, and links pages. If know of more links I should add to the links page then let me know. If you’d like the forums to be more than a placeholder stub then you’ll need to be a little patient. Sorry.
It’s invigorating uploading a few changes and releasing something live on teh interwebs. I know the mantra reads “Release early, release often”, but Captain Jameson simply isn’t structured that way. Not yet anyway. More on that later.
<3 Farbs
Awesome work Farbs! Are we gonna see you at LD19 this week?
I wish I could do LD, but honestly I can’t remember the last time I had a whole weekend free. If the theme somehow magically inspires an idea that I can finish in a couple of hours then I might give it a try, but odds are that won’t happen.
Are you competing?
very nice, cant wait for a forum. also take as long as you want on Jameson. we can wait.
Wow, This will be great once you get the forums going…
Especially when you get Jameson done…
Interesting, very interesting. I hope we do see something before the end of the year- if it’s unfinished then I’ll have all the more reason to come back for more later on. Though whenever you decide to release something, I’m sure it will be worth the wait.
Also, I look forward to the launch of your forums and I am very interested to see what you end up doing with the statistics page.
agreed, best things come to those who wait… but please some sort of sneaky peeky would go down well as a christmas present!
Yeah, how about another devblogvid?
Ooh, now there’s an idea. Though I suppose you probably have most of your bases covered with the first video.
Still, that’d be a nice little nugget to hold people (like me) over until January.
i just wanna see that sweet airlock joining up with the command module.
Did anyone else misread the title as “1001 Games I must Finish Before Making You Die”?
Greatly anticipating Jameson’s release
I am looking forward to what you do with Jameson Farbs.
Any chance you might change the way the Captain Forever project goes forward… it seems like Jameson could become a little like minecraft. Expanding on it with new features rather than creating a whole new game in the series…
Just a thought.
Cheers!
Captain Jameson is going to be awesome! But yeah, I would want a devblogvid to see all the new updates in action (mainly the Oversized command module ship) and keep ourselves satisfied ’till the release of Captain Jameson.
Keep up the good work!
@Fidgetwidget,
Sometimes more isn’t always less, sometimes quantity is more important than quality (although people tend to think quantity is always the way, even when it is not).
Anyway, Cap Jameson will be awesome!
i think when Jameson is released its gonna have to be 1002 games to play before i die…
c’mon farbs get festive.
only 4 days till xmas and still no present
Farbs, 8/9 days left… gonna bail on the December release?
2/3 days until Christmas…
I’ll see if I can get something out before January. Not Jameson though, sadly.
Ah, so like a beta release?
Ha, no. You should lower your expectations.
D:
Farbs, whats up with the not-so-jameson release? something happen? or just life?
A little bit of life, and a little bit of it taking longer than I’d hoped. It’s still in development though, and I’m still excited to get it out.
if it plays il play it i mean il wait for bug free and ive loved all the work you have done on these games over the years and this is been one of the most increable series’s ever to be made what im saying is done or beta or alpha id play it lol
but im not rushing
iron the bugs out and make it work
make it better then all the others
and thats what makes it worth it when its played.
sorry i suck at grammer
Hey, I’ve been thinking about dropping the $20 bucks for Captain Successor, but I can’t find anywhere whether or not it addresses my biggest complaint with Captain Forever: in CF, ships of your level are never spawned, forcing you to survive on inferior parts while running from a sudden abundance of ships two levels above what you can get, while actually killing one of those advanced ships for parts just dumps even bigger and stronger ships onto the map, leading to a less-than-zero-sum game as the enemy weapons ranges increase to allowing them to nail you from off screen even when zoomed all the way out. The one time I won, I did so by running frantically and engaging no-one for the last three or so levels, not even seeing who was shooting who until the game suddenly declared that I had “won” by doing basically nothing. The basic engine is AMAZING, but that’s not what I consider a satisfying play experience.
I don’t really care about the new components but I’d happily pay for a game that was much slower-paced and gave me the chance to gradually build up a good ship and use it aggressively, rather than one that compulsively ramped up the difficulty and drove me towards the finish like a stampede of bulls on a narrow city street. I’ve read up on the game lots of places but all they do is go on about how many new components Captain Successor has; can you tell me if the actual structure of the game has changed for the better as well?
Hmm. I find that the difficulty curve is fine… There is always the chance of spawning an enemy below you. It’s like you are trying to tactically take out a delta station with TOO MANY GUNS, then a stupid little alpha idiot comes and rams into the station, activating it, and ruining your day.
The only problem i have, is in successor, say you start with sprint boosters and torpedo launchers, the first few (and many thereafter) have sprint boosters and torpedo launchers. Is the generator based on your current setup?
I definitely felt that Captain Successor gave you a better chance at survival. You still will find plenty of higher level ships, and there will be times when you’ll have trouble finding parts that are useful to you, however the greater variety means that you’re more likely to find a ship that is perfect for you to sneak in and destroy and because enemies don’t spawn as close to you (and it seems that there are not always going to be exactly three other ships in your immediate vicinity) you are less likely to find yourself constantly surrounded and outgunned.
Overall, I’d say Captain Successor is by far a superior experience to Captain Forever. And you can’t go wrong with Captain Impostor already out, which is at the very least a fun little distraction, and a new game right around the corner. You’ll probably find your fix here.
yea i never had trouble with the difficult, the scrap ships were a bitch sometimes cause they usually have some stuff you want but their flight paths are very erratic which makes it a nice risk vs reward situation.
Strain Of Thought: Jameson will probably give you what you want out of the game. it seems like its going to be a little bit slower paced with more exploring.
Thanks for the replies everyone – I’ve been AFK for a couple of days.
I just double checked the spawning code for Successor and compared it with Forever, and can confirm that yes, you can find ships at your own level in Successor. The chance of a new ship being at level is roughly 1/(2n+2), where n is your current level starting from 0. This means you’ll see fewer at-level ships as you progress through the game, but they’ll still be around.
Jameson currently uses a completely different spawning system, with enemy vessels placed around the map rather than constantly spawning to maintain a fixed population. Jameson in general should provide a slower paced, less impulsive game. I completely understand if you want to wait ’till it’s released before signing up though.
In my opinion:
Captain forever Is a neat game itself. The Spawn system is a little eratic sometimes (like when you are at golf level and find 2 hotel ships and an India ship aiming at you all in the same time, as if there is no escape if you are in close proximity to one of those ships), But the gameplay mechanics are nice.
Captain successor is better in my opinion because of more enemy types and more modules, but that was expected of a “successor.” Everything improved (also expected), and there is this rare occurrence when you destroy a station and your ship is chocked full of engines (the result is what i like to call the ultimate ship).
Captain imposter is a big twist in genre and gameplay. This game went from strategic shooter to action shooter just by a new release. Sure, there is STILL some strategy (finding out which ship you want to clone when your last ship became useless), but overall it’s new to me.
It seems like Captain Jameson would twist not only the genre again, but the story. The story went so far as 3 indestructible ships who are responsible for sector-wide explosions being controlled by you via terminals for help of protection and the sake of lives. Now a lost colony victim to one of those sector-wide explosions (or something similar)? I don’t know how this will go along with the story, but it’ll be interesting!
Not to sound nitpicky, but what exactly needs improving before release? It sounds just like its some polishing that needs to be done.
So my question is, in Captain Successor will the amount of Girders on your ship reflect the amount of oxygen on board? It’d be a neat little way of encouraging the player to throw those extra girders on. Other than that, can’t wait to see Captain Jameson.
I think you made a typo, Captain Jameson is the only game that has to do with oxygen, not Captain Successor.
So, any word on the something you may or may not be releasing before the end of the year? It would be nice to at least get some new info or something :/
Or are you going back into super-secret undercover mode?
@Wolly – In Jameson the oxy tanks are currently fixed, but girders and other modules can be sold for scrap so you often find yourself hauling them around.
@Chris – This year has about 15 hours remaining where I am, but I think I’ll get something small out by then.
im telling you, a ship docking to the air lock would make me squeal with excitement.
Oh, I realize the year is very nearly over. And where you are you have to be 11-13 hours ahead of me (I’m not exactly sure what timezone you are in). But you know, anything will do. Even if you just put up a big smiley face and the words “Don’t Panic,” I think I’d be happy.
D: Whatever you release today, i wont be able to play until tomorrow when my Internet resets.
Hey, Farbs and everyone else, thanks for the replies! I’m sorry I sounded so cranky in that post, I’d just let the game punish me for playing it wrong a few too many times. I ended up downloading Battleships Forever instead of buying Captain Successor, which turned out to be quite a disappointment, but while messing around with it I had a bit of an epiphany as to why I wasn’t enjoying Captain Forever.
Short version: I am a naval history buff who keeps trying to find games that capture certain aspects of historical naval conflicts, and always gets frustrated because the games don’t live up to my expectations but I don’t know why. I now realize there are a bunch of non-obvious aspects of said conflicts that are hardly ever simulated, that I didn’t realize it was important to simulate, and which the absence of influences combat in ways I’d never suspected. Congratulations on creating a game deep enough that it helped me gain a better understanding of one of my favorite topics.
I want to ask a bunch of new questions about Captain Successor now, and the intended direction of Captain Jameson, but I think before I do that I really do need to just go buy the damn game so I can speak from an informed position. So… see you again after I blow up a few hundred ships.
Oh cheers! Successor isn’t any slower than Forever, and Impostor is much, much faster, but Jameson will give you a lot more time to think.
Oooohkay… Farbs, giving you the benefit of the doubt, did you recently do an update to CS that might have introduced some bugs into the ship generating procedure? Because the vast majority of enemies I am encountering have retarded designs and worse AI.
For example, this space station is one of the worse offenders:
http://img816.imageshack.us/img816/527/architecturallychalleng.png
Some more images!
Here’s a better shot of the station:
http://img577.imageshack.us/i/architecturallychalleng.png/
Here’s the station in the process of destroying itself:
http://img513.imageshack.us/i/architecturallychalleng.png/
And here the station has wiped out twelve of the eighteen guns it started with while another ship with an equally pointless design arrives and declares its intent to destroy me. With what, I cannot say:
http://img705.imageshack.us/i/architecturallychalleng.png/
These two designs are extreme, but they’re not so extreme that they’re not representative of what I’m seeing. That’s the second time in just this game I’ve seen the “two foxtrot girders and command module” ship, in general hostile ships with no weapons have been common, and what feels like a quarter of the ships I’m running into have at least one weapon positioned so it fires on itself.
… and then there was the ship with a single ram as a weapon that was positioned deep inside the ship such that it could never actually ram anything.
What gives, Farbs?
Oh my. You appear to be flying a giant pinata.
The algorithms used to generate AI swap around each time you play, so some times Golf ships will all be “stations” like that one, with no boosters. They’re the game’s treasure chests, or pinatas I suppose. In other games Golf ships might be the original mirrored designs from Forever, some weird rotationally symmetrical vessels, and tiny little gnats with no girders and poor communication skills.
Umm, yeah. Some of the ships are a bit dumb. I guess realism was never a high priority for me.
Many, many, many of the ships I am seeing “rotationally symmetrical”. Most of them, even. They are the ones most likely to shoot themselves, too.
I understand that the station is a *station* and has no boosters because it’s supposed to be *stationary*. I brought it to your attention because *eight* of the eighteen guns on that station are pointed *at* the station, and in general about half the stations I’ve encountered have at least one pair of guns that they fire on the themselves. Please tell me that’s a bug.
Heh. No, that’s not a bug. I had to choose between these three options:
*** 1 ***
Severely limit the use of prismatic lasers in the game (as with Sprinklers, which have this problem but worse).
*** 2 ***
Spend several days building a frighteningly complex system to determine where prismatic lasers could be placed on ships.
*** 3 ***
Deal with a small subset of ship types damaging themselves in an hilarious fashion.
I chose #3.
It sounds like your current game has opted to use prismatic lasers for many ship archetypes. You’ll probably find that this won’t happen so much on average.
Why not just have the random ship generator fire the ship’s weapons once before placing them in the game, and check whether or not the ship receives a hit? If it hits itself, roll again.
I should add, I am really missing the ship designs from captain forever right now. Most of the ships just spin wildly in place while shooting in every direction, and while that’s neat to see as a diversion from time to time, an entire game of it is monotonous. It basically comes down to flying forward in straight line “re-rolling” for new enemies until the RNG craps out a cripple. There’s no point in even trying to tackle most of the spinners. There might be if I had some *shields*, but the RNG seems to have decided that absolutely no one at all ever has ever heard of them in this universe.
Oh, and about the “prismatic” thing: until I saw the station I posted a picture of, I wasn’t sure if all the ships firing on themselves were using prismatic lasers or not, as it can be hard to tell when they’re also spinning and there’s lasers everywhere and you’re trying not to get hit. But if you actually *look* at the picture, you’ll see four of that station’s guns are pointed *directly* at itself. Even if those were regular lasers, they’d still fire on the station.
@Strain Of Thought
I agree with Farbs that you should just make ship generating thing simple to prevent excessive limitation and possibly lag/delay. Don’t you enjoy staying still, do nothing and see those ships blowing themselves up?
I also think that spinners are quite hard to tackle but you can develop some tactics to beat that. For me I usually disarm every modules except the command modules, squeeze into the ship, and blow it up from the inside. It’s challenging.
Just read through all of the newer comments here, and I have to say that there are at least a few valid points made.
However, it is worth noting that ever game if Captain Successor is going to be different. Sometimes you get stuck with enemies that aren’t much fun to engage, and other times you’ll get a perfect blance of the right available parts and enemies to fight. It just depends.
As far as the occasional self-destructive enemy is concerned, well, I am not bothered by it. It’s rare enough for this to happen that when it does it is more amusing than game-breaking.