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?
first post! im really enjoying this new game man! a huge departure from your other titles, much more in-depth. worth.every.penny.
1)
At any given time, have a constant 0.1% chance of a “hot rock” spawning off-screen hurtling towards you. That’d make you have to be more on your toes to slam on the brakes. Plus, this means one would spawn roughly every 1000 seconds, which is a fairly good pass-time. Also, when you dodge it, it disappears a few seconds after it does off-screen.
2)
Shooting at “hot rocks” causes pieces to fragment off and float out. They would despawn after being off-screen for a second, a burn 500 damage per second when in contact with any part of your ship. This would allow you to tunnel through the “hot rocks”, but make it difficult. This would also satisfy the people who want to destroy asteroids.
3)
Large guardian ships should drop a random piece of equipment of their rank when they explode. Just so you get SOMETHING out of them dying, besides the station.
4)
Perhaps some sort of warp station. Any stations you have colonized can be teleported between. This would allow you to reach really far out areas with much more ease.
5)
How about a gun, that when you hold down space to fire charges, and when space is released, fires a charged shot which moves at a speed and does damage proportional to how long it was charged.
6)
Another weapon, a drill bit. Whenever it’s in contact with a ship, it deals constant damage. Kind of the like the ramming spike, except you have to be touching the ship.
7)
Another weapon concept, a Mine layer. Simply fires about a mine a short distance away from the player. Mine stays for 1 minutes before detonation, if no ship runs it over. This would allow for some enemies to be mine-layers.
8)
Some sort of hybrid booster/gun. Boosts and shoots, for when there’s that really overpowered merchant ship right behind you, trying to kill you.
9)
The ability to put a ship into a dock, and start as another pilot. So you could return to the dock, dock the new ship, then go back to your old ship. Possibly saving up to 3 ships this way, maybe.
I think that’s enough ideas for now.
^
Erm. Evidently 8 and a parentheses makes a smiley face. Ignore that.
Hey I would love to be able to set my heading like via the compass. It would make the map so much more useful!
I found a beacon! Is that thing a secret you’ve talked about?
@Exper – Ta!
@Invention – Yep! Can you find all three?
Haha now I found only one in the northern part of the game. And I really look forward to battle with peacekeepers
May I humbly request an option to deactivate the custom cursor? It looks just fine, but it stutters something awful for me. Arranging modules with oxygen depleting and enemies closing in is difficult enough, and I’d be happy to sacrifice that small aesthetic touch to smoothen things up.
I feel guilty I haven’t played more.
You see, I undocked once so I could give a friend a quick tour of what I’d explored but closed my browser when I was done, assuming it would just put me back on the dock I had last saved on when I came back…
…Whoops.
Needless to say, I lost all my stuff. And at that point I didn’t feel like fighting to get it back… So I let it sit… and sit. An here I am.
I’ll play again soon
@ZL – I think the main problem here is framerate, however a hardware cursor might mask this a little. I need to do a pass over the options screen some time soon, so I’ll add this while I’m at it. Ta for the suggestion.
@Chris – Heh, I know how you feel. Banks and warehouses exist in the game to try to alleviate this, so if you’ve been using them it shouldn’t take too long to get back on top. Even without them, I’m always surprised by how quickly I progress after losing a ship simply because areas have already been explored and unlocked. This saves a huge amount of time.
Well, my only problem so far with 0.3 is a slight drop in performance.
I would like to suggest COM stations that you (I think) mentioned earlier – they let you communicate with all stations within the com station’s range. But – that would mean re-desiging the oxy/rep/upg stations concept – I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as wireless oxygen, or wireless repairs. I have a suggestion of using “oxy buoys” for the oxy stations. Makes more sense then you hovering nearby and then your tanks are magically refueled.
@Farbs – Thanks for listening and responding to feedback so promptly : )
Not a big fan of the “hot rocks” concept. They look weird. Simply having ‘roids do damage proportional to speed would be good…
NOW, having the “hot rock” effect with a gravity field (think “Space War”) and calling it a “neutron star” would be cool…
Also, scrapyards and such seem to be far between in this build.
I also wish there were Juliet- or Kilo-class repair and scrapyard stations at 0,0…
I don’t think high level stations are needed at 0,0 at all. If you’ve got a juliet class ship you can go wherever you want very quickly, why would you want to come right back to the start? Not to mention that you probably can’t fit through the gaps to get there anyway, at least in 0.3.
I think that alpha level staions at 0,0 are best. gives you a reason to explore elsewhere.
“Gate”stations would be nice, though. Unlock two, and you can teleport between them.
up near the emergency light there should be a signal light for radio waves,
i really get frustrated when i get out of range of all nav stations and get no response from anything after hitting F2
I would rather just not hit F2 and be only check when i am getting a signal instead of stopping (dead halting basically) and checking every so often.
don’t know if that was an intentional anxiety builder but the idea of a signal light is a compromise between an minimap which would trivialize part of the game difficulty and the current state of annoying nothing.
Hey Farbs, I admit I havent really played much of the alpha builds, and could well be wrong, but do the enemy ships no longer send out raido pings? That was good for locating them – I’ve never actually found an enemy, just station guardians.
Anyways, loving the new depth of gameplay and minecraft style build releases! Booya!
@Angle – I’m thinking about something similar
@mackat – Maybe. I’m not sure. I quite like the panic you feel you try to find a NAV station, and all you hear is a long unanswered modem beep. Bongggggg….
@Berin – They do, but you’re better off trying to find them via a NAV station. Originally the vessel layer was turned off by default so you had to enable it in the NAV station via the key menu. In more recent builds it’s on by default.
Hey Farbs. Pretty good. I’m as always pretty rubbish at this game. always have trouble keeping hold of modules or killing things without destroying all the weapons first
But no. as for what other people have been saying, Warp Stations would be a great idea, and definately getting a higher level mod from the guardian I think. definately since it usually costs me at least half my ship to kill one
Great work. Very happy to have purchased.
This goes for all of the captain games, it would be super to have preferences saved ie. turn reflection off (i find it distracting) and no sound (usually running a retail store when playing).
Also is there a mailing list? I found Jameson almost by chance and I would have checked it out sooner if I knew about it.
Cheers.
…. doopty doopty doo just re configuring my Exo-hull of india girders to juilet girders in my massive battle ship now that i have found an india scrapper along my 4 sesions of play….
*sneeze* (bumps back button on mouse)
*wipes face*
…
…
where did ma ship go….
dear merciful farbs,
i love my mouse but i also love this game. please don’t make me choose.
Have the game launcher open in a new window/tab from now on as to avoid the accidental navigation death. previous games had similar issues but there was no “save” type feature so it was never a big deal as the investment was not as much. while this is not explicitly part of game design it is something that the game designer can fix.
p.s. nice touch on the idle infobouy
Dear Farbs,
I’ve enjoyed the previous games tremendously and Jameson also is very impressive from what i’ve seen so far. I do have a suggestion and that is that of assignable keys. I’d really love to be able to assign my own movement keys at the beginning of the game and save them, just like you can save the game progress now. I also think it might be good to be able to assign keys to different weapons you have, so you can fire a weapon, or group of weapons (torp launchers for instance) seperately. Right now I sometimes get quite frustrated when I blow a nice ship to pieces with my lasers when I would just like to fire my central gun only at the enemies command module. This could be integrated into the menu with a ship’s layout. Just like you can select a module now for repair or upgrade in the menu, you could assign a specific firing key to a weapon’s module. The spacebar would continue to fire all weapons at once, since this is important in big battles
thanks for developing such a great game
Cheers
An auto-suspend feature. If you close the page and open it up, you’re in the exact same place. Kind of what mackat was asking for, but more general purpose.
@william
I do not know for sure but i suspect that some kind of exit procedure in flash would be ignored by the browser.
@farbs
maybe we could steal a lesson from the handbook of shady web developers and throw a popup message are you sure you want to navigate away/ close this page (full of horrible flash ads causing a cacophony in their case)
i like the hot rocks in the new release, but this oxygen thing is killing me…
1. can guardian ships drop oxygen tanks? or anything at all for that matter?
2. can we configure our “module” in the beginning to favor speed, weapon power, or oxygen level?
3. can command modules drop oxygen so we don’t have to stop in the middle of a battle if we kill something?
the oxygen limit seems so restrictive to me…i think it hurts gameflow to just (!stop!) and fly all the way back to where you came from and back again…i feel like it is like including mandatory bathroom breaks in a fps game
“oops, gotta stop killing bad guys and having fun because the poop meter is full and i gotta find a toilet!”
i don’t want to see it go away, but…i just want more control over it, more options to meet that need instead of having it feel so restrictive, and having more options for strategy and exploration. Maybe just have more ships around or something? Please? I want to like the realism in it, but it just becomes frustrating after a certain point for me. It’s sort of the kind of thing that I thought sucked all the fun out of WOW (just running place to place 70% of the time), but that’s just me. I find it hard to get as lost in this game as in the previous releases.
Few suggestions
1. ^ as above killing an enemy command module releases a few globules of oxygen that you could fly over to collect. When im trying to grind to get some good parts/get credits its annoying if you can only fly out, kill one ship and then have to go refuel straight away.
2. warp gates are a great idea, maybe not implementing a whole new station, but making it an option at DOCK stations, as they are quite rare and prized.
3. being able to destroy asteroids, not that easily mind, but being able to carve a way through a big asteroid would be good.
4. If possible maybe some more types of guns/parts ? the guns are great at the moment, but just a few more types would add even more awesomeness ! there are good suggestions further up for this, and id like to suggest something like a chrono gear, but it increases the power or range of the guns attached instead of speed.
Otherwise loving the game, it was definitely worth the wait. It really shows how much time youve put into it ! keep up the AWESOME work <3
Doss
I think it needs a plot. You need a motivation to go around rescuing all these stations.
Let’s see.
In the beginning of Captain Forever, there was a sector-wide explosion. Why? If you introduce a gun (or a bomb) in the first act, it has to go off by the third. Someone set off that bomb for some reason.
Captain Jameson makes the reason clear: All the bases are offline. Worse, they’ve been taken over by a malevolent power.
So who did this? Who could have set off that explosion and taken over all our bases? The game needs an antagonist, Farbs.
And I can only think of one candidate who fits that operating profile.
FOR GREAT JUSTICE!!!!
Crap. That was supposed to link here:
http://img.chan4chan.com/img/2010-03-14/1268578544233.jpg
@OCmC – Actually, that’s not very far from the real plot. If you recall the story of Captain Forever, the Nemesis IS a giant bomb. It goes off rather often. Boot/jackers have moved in on the devestated sectors, and Capt Farbs is enlisting the help of pilots like yourself to drive them back out.
Mackat: Farbs could just have the game save the world/player state to a SharedObject every 15 seconds, which could then be reloaded and deleted upon restarting the game.
Technical stuff:
-Switching to a different computer means you have to start from scratch (but you can switch back and have your progress back).
-Clearing internet history means you have to start from scratch (don’t think there’s a way around this one currently).
-Site does not recognise that xxxxxx@gmail and xxxxxx@googlemail are interchangeable as email addresses (not a major complaint but it threw me for a loop for a couple minutes).
Game stuff:
-Spent a while thinking that having my ship devastated meant having to climb the ladder from the first rung again. Then realised that, OXY be damned, this was still Captain Forever and provoking enemies into killing each other (then taking their stuff) was still the best way back to the top.
-If there’s a perfectly-placed field of enemies next to a SCR station and you’ve turned them all to scrap, you can summon a new batch by docking and de-docking.
-It seems wrong that I can tell from the dial tone that there aren’t any nav stations in range before my terminal tells me.
-I never know what to do with an enemy who has been reduced to a command module. I want to be able to show mercy, tractor-beam them back home and conscript them into my army. That could be where we get new pilots/command modules!
Hey Farbs. Update since my last post, now I’ve get a got 20-30 hours worth of gameplay in. First up – Kudos man, this is a fantastic game, and really enjoying the strategic elements that the threat of ever present death and total loss brings.
That being said, It would be good if you can address the severity of death a litte. One nice way would be for you to be able to buy back previous incarnations of your ship, based on blueprints captured when you docked or from specialist factories. That would allow a rich player to take more risks when voyaging into the unknown.
The perils of going off-nav. When out of nav range you really feel alone and vunerable. It’s good but can be a little harmful to gameplay if you are forced to timidly make small forays out into the void. I suggest a radar module, which would allow for a very small range of portable navigation, centerd on the player. Would mean that you would be less likely to fly right past an oxy station that’s just off screen.
Upgradeable pilot module – the ability to customise your play style by upgrading your pilot module in one of several ways, each granting a small buff to a chosen ability. eg, speed, armor, fire rate, oxy usage, flamboyant colour scheme..
Last comment: After you get a reasonable ship (i.e. around delta and above level, the guardians become rather easy.. would be good to make the earlier ones a touch easier, but the later ones much harder. I really enjoy the level of difficulty in the game, nice work on that!
I had an interesting idea. I was thinking of a hitch module that would pivot like a trailer hitch. You could attach scrap modules to it and tow them like a trailer. Then detach at the hitch and they would hold together so you could continue the battle unhindered by the extra mass of it, afterwards reattaching and continuing on your way. Also, there could be trucker missions that you could take on for extra credits, from a scrap yard to a factory for example. Along the way pirates could try to hijack your cargo. What do y’all think?
@Berin, Like localhost:
—————————–
TELNET
SELECT HOST TO CONNECT
KEY- STATION – SIGANL
F9 – nav.localhost – ∞
—————————–
I like that idea
I LIKE Cptn Wm. Chase’s idea! A joint module! A chain of joint modules! with lasers at the end! Buahahaha! I could make a deadly jellyfish-like ship. Whichever direction I went, physics would push my laser-tentacles behind me so I can shoot whilst I flee! Love it! THIS is what I’d like to see in CJ!
Oh course, my idea wouldn’t work out that well and would probably have a tendency to shoot itself to pieces if the chains were that long
I thought of some great ideas this morning, but I was beaten to the punch by capt. Wm. Chase. I really think you should use his idea!
A Lima-difficulty boss at the end of the game??
Pirate factions? Not defined by types (e.g. needlers, merchants, etc.) but by AI tactics? Who follow you to the ends of the earth? With a large bounty on your head and more pirates for higher notoriety?
I have 20+ hours invested into Jameson and there is almost nothing about the core dynamics that I would change. I think it is a close to, and will ultimately be a masterpiece. My favorite games have historicaly been rogue-likes such as NetHack and ToME. Jameson has the same elements that always brings me back to those; “character” development that requires planning so intense that you really feel like you accomplished something and extreme consequences for mistakes.
What would I change? Exper from the first post has my favorite suggestion for a fundamental game play change:
“6)Another weapon, a drill bit. Whenever it’s in contact with a ship, it deals constant damage. Kind of the like the ramming spike, except you have to be touching the ship.”
Ramming spikes are practically unusable due to low damage, high weight and time-consuming ramming approaches that have a dismal chance of success. Drills could lead to a new paradigm in ship designs that are on par with lasers.
Also, add the ability to save & quit at anytime as well as port saves between browsers. Quicker/efficient telnet interface navigation will be greatly appreciated. The current time delays and number of keystrokes for routine actions kill the game flow and add essentially nothing to the experience. I would suggest having a single key press for frequently used actions. How about this setup?
#1 key) same as current
2) execute main function of station that ship is within radius of -> single keystroke to fill O2
3) map from closest NAV station
and wishful thinking…
4) unified macro level map like: http://hollowpointpuffin.com/toys/CJM/mapgenerator.php?mapID=3
I would keep the everything else in the existing menu system.
Sorry for the novel length comment. This game is just so good that I get fired up about it.
Hey Farbs
Just spent some time on Jameson 0.4. It’s pretty slick – I like the new atmosphere stuff. The one thing that stops me playing for more than half an hour or so is the sparseness of it. I appreciate a challenge, but the grinding aspect is a little too severe – you trek all the way out over endless space to unlock another Oxy station, then use your battered craft to fend off the boss from the nearby Scrap station, then you have to trek light-years out into space with just a booster and a laser to try and find some other ships to scavenge components and scrap off’ve.
I think what I’m missing is the sense of population found in Captain Forever / Successor – I’m finding that one tank full of oxy is usually only just enough to see you through one or two encounters, since they’re so far apart.
I guess there’s two ways to combat this – one would be higher population. The other would be a ‘lanes’ system, like that found in ‘Freelancer’, that fire you around the void when contacted over TelNet. Nodes in the lanes could even be unlocked like the stations are, only with smaller bosses (maybe ones that drop rather than destroy their parts when killed?).
Anyway, I trust you’ll get the balance right once all the features are in place, so I’m not too worried about the final product. I thought I’d just let you know how I’m liking it
Sponge
Cheers! Out of curiosity, were you playing the standard 0.4 map or the special sparse 0.4 map?