Another blog update

10.25.13 Update

The "shop" and the upgrade system.

Press

A few outlets have been kind enough to give Enemy Starfighter a shout out! Have a look!

• Showing Some Love To Enemy Starfighter @ Rock Paper Shotgun
• 14 Space Games You Should Be Excited About Right Now @ PC Gamer
• Somebody Is Actually Combining X-Wing and Homeworld @ Kotaku
• Space Combat Fever @ Game Rant
• Enemy Starfighter Conjures First-Person Homeworld Vibe  @ The Escapist
• Enemy Starfighter shown on Oculus Rift and more gameplay footage @ IncGamers

Thanks, everyone!

 

Twitch.TV

Brendon at BlendoGames gave me the idea to start streaming some of my dev work, so I gave it a shot. It turned out pretty well. There is a Marauder Interactive channel over at Twitch, so follow it if you want to get notified when it goes live. 

 

Dev Work

I've been working on a lot of small stuff recently: Things like tweaking AI behaviors for almost every ship, or working on the map UI so that subsystem selection is much cleaner.

I've also cleaned up one of my test scripts and turned it into sort of a last-stand mode which turned out pretty fun. I'm not sure how I'll integrate that into the game yet, but it made me polish a few underlying systems like my spawn points which is awesome!

 

Very nice!

Update from the tenth http://enemystarfighter.com/

I've been spending a lot of time (probably too much) working on the game's input and controller support. Unity's input manager does a swell job for simple projects, but it doesn't let you do a few key things: 

1. Build and load controller presets. I want to let the player say, "I'm playing with the mouse and keyboard," or "I'm playing with a Logitech gamepad," and have the game set up the best possible control scheme with no further effort.
2. Edit subtle control elements like dead zones on the fly. Normally this is not important, but it is in any sort of sim.

There are cool 3rd party libraries that will help you with these problems, namely Rebind and cInput, but neither did what I needed without a lot of modification.  So I wrote a system that integrates with the command console.

 Config files are read from a folder, and will set up your controls based on a simple syntax:

controls.action.bind +weapon_fire space mouse0 joy1button0

If you've ever written configs for an id engine, this should look familiar. You can even write aliases that enter console commands and bind them to buttons, but I imagine this is more useful for debugging.

If this stuff makes you go cross-eyed, have no fear. Most players will never have to touch a config file. This is there for those with crazier control hardware or those that want to have the freedom to rebind whatever they want. 

Control debugger shows what actions are down, where my analog axes ACTUALLY are, and the final input values after the game has corrected them.

What You See Is What You Get

Games are interactive, and your input devices are the glue between them and your players. So draw your input on screen. I don't care how simple your game is, you will learn a lot about how it handles by being able to visualize what's going on. Don't be lazy. Your game will feel better because of it.

Once I did this, I learned there were deadzone bugs in the pitch/yaw control. I learned that my digital inputs hooked up to axes were overriding input when you let off the stick, making re-centering feel sluggish.  I had never drawn the mouse steering circle/deadzone, but when I did I noticed that long ago it had been written to be configured by absolute pixel size instead of relative screen size.

For a space sim, Enemy Starfighter is on the super lean side of necessary controls and even then, seeing this data helped out with the feel immensely.

 "Draw debug info," should not need to be said, but it's hard to be diligent about writing this code. It takes a decent amount time to implement a good visualization for the data you're trying to present, time that could be spent elsewhere. But with critical systems, it's almost impossible to have too much good information.

 

Wonder when we are going to see a release for this.

About time, big update on the blog about Enemy Starfighter

Greetings, Starfighters

What's Shaking?

It's been a busy few months and too long since I've updated the dev blog, so here's what is happening in the world of Enemy Starfighter. 

• Solar systems are now "real" and not simply skyboxes as they were before
  • Landmarks such as planets, moons, belts, and nebulae are generated outward from the star based on a simple set of rules

• You can warp the Harbinger Fleet to any known landmark in the solar system (ANIMATED)
• ...but the same applies to enemy fleets, some of which respond to your last known location or destination
• Factions have been implemented, and each faction has its own set of traits that are applied to the unit
  • Traits modify unit stats or enable alternate weapons, making every weapon or ship I create stretch further
  • Some factions are always present in a solar system, such as Lane Marshals that run overwatch on jump nodes
  • Others factions are determined during solar system generation

• Lots of bug fixing and polish on other systems
• After a lot of iteration and pain, the game's overall direction has been focused even further

Grand Theft Starfighter

Watching, waiting.

Battle-planning has been replaced with hunting and hiding. Before, each battle was fed to you via a simple mission generator and menu. It wasn't dynamic, lacked tangible persistence, and it certainly didn't fulfill the fantasy of being a starfighter harassing the enemy deep in their territory. I can go into this in detail if people want, but I won't bore you with that here.

Now, when you enter a system you are told what flagship to destroy and are given free rein to hunt and deal with it as you see fit. Do you build up your forces and take out the flagship head on? Do you misdirect their escorts to a bogus landmark and then jump the vulnerable capital with a small group of beam frigates, knowing full well that you will lose them?

Once combat begins, gameplay is structured very much like a police chase with your fleet at the center of it. If you've ever played GTA or if you've ever done small-scale skirmishes in a game like EVE, you should have an idea of what to expect. In fact, a lot of what makes this game tick comes from countless hours I've spent running around in EVE's Syndicate region in an interceptor.

While a few of these systems are super rough, they are at least functional. They mainly need passes on readability and polish, which will happen soon.

Chatty Pilots

If you are watching a stream and go, "Damn these fighters are chatty!" you would be right! It's mostly because I use their VO to help me debug what they're doing. If they say a certain phrase at the right time, I know the AI is working correctly. This will be appropriately tuned and varied for the final game, I promise!

Escape Pods

One thing missing from the game was a satisfying currency reward loop for killing fighters. The tumble alone felt good and you earned points for it, but a new layer has been added: the escape pod.

A majority of your currency is acquired from killing the crew of downed vessels. If you have an autoturret, it happens automatically. As a capital goes down, the famous loot-piñata situation occurs as the crew abandons ship.

It's one of the first things I've put in the game that makes people feel like a villain. Several people reported feeling conflicted about it. Good!

The Future

Here's the roadmap for the next month:

• Iterate on the fleet AI and solar-system mechanics
• Pass on the cockpit art (it is woefully out of date, and I know more about what my requirements are)
• Create new models for units that share them (for example, the Federation torpedo frigate uses the pulse cannon model). It was done this way to get functionality working before worrying about the art
• Start capturing footage for a new trailer/gameplay video

In the meantime, if you'd like to get a closer look at the goings-on with the game, keep an eye on the Twitch.tv channel. I also post tiny dev updates and images on Twitter.

 

New video! And still no mention of release date or whatsoever

It's looking good but are we ever going to get to play it?.

RPS have had a hand on the game read here. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/04/25/enemy-starfighter-preview/

Each game of Enemy Starfighter begins in Overwatch, a region of space from which you can see five or six or seven other possible destinations. Each is represented by a white pip; there’s perhaps an asteroid field, a planet, a star, and then one region which has another set of symbols above the white mark. These tell you what ships are inhabiting the space. Corvettes? Frigates? I can never remember what the symbols mean, only that each represents an opportunity for death or derring-do that the dynamic mission generator has created for me.

 

Wonder if they are gearing up a crowd funding campaign with them sending out the Alpha of the game?.

Big blog about where you are read it on. http://enemystarfighter.com/

 

As soon as you allow roll in 3D space, you start requiring more brain cycles with every task you ask of the player. In particular, you're adding mechanical interest to each of the following tasks:

1. Tracking targets
2. Avoiding Obstacles in Local Space
3. Knowing your orientation and position at a solar system level

I mainly want to talk about #3 in this post, since that is what I have been working on most recently. Some games (namely Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, Halo: Reach) bypass this problem all together by disallowing roll, but that's not a method of player expression I was willing to give uYou Are Here

In Starfighter, you can warp your fleet around to different landmarks in a solar system. A landmark may be anything including a belt, a planet, a jump node, or even a nebula cloud. The goal is to let the player make both planned and emergency decisions to jump to any landmark without looking at a map.

The game will be at the PAX show http://enemystarfighter.com/

Pretty big update on the blog http://enemystarfighter.com/ just going to repost a couple of bits of it.

First up whats being going on.

 

It's been an incredibly productive couple months for Starfighter's campaign. Here's only a few of the things that have gone into the game:

• You can start and win a real campaign and it even has soft-locks that act as power (or skill) checks
• The campaign map generator went through several iterations (about 9 major updates if my change notes are to be believed)
• AI fleets are now able to move from one side of the campaign map to another
• AI fleets have behavior types such as watchdog, transport, patrol, or escort
• ALL Harbinger fleet movement can now be handled from the tactical mode
  • Related: Keyboard and mouse controls were brought up to par with the gamepad controls

• LOADS of AI fixes, mainly in regards to weapon usage
  • EX: Wingmen must be specifically ordered to use their heavy weapons (since they are limited)

• Harbinger Fleet warp state got a polish pass
• Faction paint schemes have been implemented
• Shader work, mainly making shadows work again on objects that pull ambient lighting from the skybox. This was broken in the last trailer (and PAX)!
• A lot of work went into making the tactical mode and star map feel awesome in VR
• Traits went through a rework, making them simpler to add to units (and save across star systems)
• A few more skyboxes have been created (with many more to come) along with per-skybox settings like dust color/density
• Last Stand is dead, long live Last Stand! Everything that was interesting about this mode has been rolled into the campaign itself, so it will be re-imagined at a later time.
• Renaming your ships works again!

And second and are we looking at a possible release.

 

Early Access Release?

Soon. Getting the campaign critical path in was a big deal. I'm now regularly doing campaign playtests of 20-35 minutes (even in VR) before I get fed up with something and fix it. That time is quickly and steadily growing as I knock these fixes out.

Over the next few weeks I'm also running old colleagues through the campaign to get some feedback and items to focus on for the next pass. These meetings will help clarify how much work is left before the campaign is sent out into the wild.

Awesome bit of new this. 😎 😎 😎 read more on the blog. http://enemystarfighter.com/

 

In space, no one can hear you work...

 

Early Access?

This summer. Soon.  It doesn't make sense to launch so close to E3 when there will be a lot of buzz about a lot of amazing games, so I have a little more time. But first contact is coming!

The game won't be a fully operational battle station, but it'll give everyone a taste of what's to come. I can't wait to read everyone's feedback and criticisms and then improve the hell out of the game.

 

What's Been Done?

A lot.

Everything that's ever said about the last 10% of a milestone being the hardest is true. I've been a developer for a long time and even I can forget about that until I'm in the thick of it. Here's some unscripted footage I recorded this morning:

Bit a of a Battlestar galactica going on here with the music and another combat game which appear to have no leading target reticle.

The game play is great in this trailer and I really liked the sound effects in this one.

Interesting update on the blog about various parts of the game http://enemystarfighter.com/ although this bit may stand out for all the wrong reasons.

 

I'm not super worried about teaching the player to fly. This is because Starfighter's been cold-tested at numerous trade shows AND combat controls have been designed around gamepad FPS paradigms that many players already know.

I can hear the joystick taliban hurling their joysticks at their monitors.

Some new screen shots up on the blog. http://enemystarfighter.com/

 

• Olivier wrote some incredible trailer music and sent it my way!
• Cleaned up some of the audio low end using some tricks an old colleague taught me -- everything is still beefy but it all ducks based on priority now
• Wave Clear is about done and ready now that I've integrated the pilot tutorial into the beginning (optional)
• Wave Clear needs more waves, and sometime this fall I'll revisit it to add more depth
• Mouse and keyboard controls are fixed up. Warrens now use the mouse properly if present. There's an odd case here or there but it feels much better. The pilot controls are not ideal, but I'll improve them with the right feedback. I feel like to do the best KBAM controls, it would be third person, but that would take a while and would have to come later if at all.
• The game is barking a lot more stuff at you in the form of a toast, which helps readability quite a bit. I would say that 80% of my work lately has been in regards to teaching the player the game or helping them to read what's happening.

There's still a little more to go, but we're getting there! Thanks for tuning in!

New update for ESF. http://enemystarfighter.com/

 

It's been a crazy few weeks, and my task list is getting smaller and smaller.

Completed

• Cockpit training has gone through some more iterations and is ready for Early Access.
• More waves have been added to the wave clear mode and it is ready for Early Access.
• The campaign is rolling itself out to the player in much more understandable way thanks to feedback from some old coworkers.
• A navigation/combat toggle has been added to the cockpit mode. This will show/hide navigation or combat telemetry and cleans up the display considerably.
• Some upgrades that you earn in the campaign now persist across playthroughs, and certain things unlock after you complete a playthrough.
• Several crashes and memory leaks have been hunted down and eliminated.
• Each difficulty mode is feeling more distinct.

   

  Priorities

  Getting ready for launch, the overall priorities are now:

• Keyboard and Mouse Controls - I need to spend some time on this due to some great feedback I've gotten.
• Gamepad Controls - The 360 controller has always been a priority, but it's now time to shift focus to DualShock4 controls for a few days.
• Campaign Tutorial - There are a few things that still need to be done to make this better, and make it work in VR.
• Stability & Bugs - The reason for this should be obvious!
• VR Support - There are a million little ways to improve this experience, and it doesn't help that the tech is still very much a work in progress. Along with some VR UI, there are some sorting bugs that are screwing up the experience.
• Marketing - I still have to create a new trailer. Olivier has written some killer music that is just waiting for some new footage!
• Balancing - After this weekend, this work will mainly be relegated to ship and weapon stats, fleet roster changes, and terrain layouts.

Thanks for hanging in there!

 

Looks like he may have been getting some grief about the choice of controllers. (ie the gamepad) http://enemystarfighter.com/

 

Control Standards

As Starfighter gets closer to alpha, I've been getting some emails and tweets like, "You've been working on gamepads and mouse controls, but what about <X>?" I think I've been pretty up front about Starfighter's focus and pseudo-sim nature, but to be absolutely clear, the only officially supported control schemes will be:

1. Keyboard and Mouse
2. XInput Gamepad (XBOX360 controller or equivalent)
3. DualShock4 (PS4 controller)

You can still rebind your controls in menus and even tweak some crazier settings by hacking the config files. You can do all sorts of things with the config files like set custom dead zones or even change the strings the tutorials/menus display for your buttons. Many other sticks and controllers will work with a little bit of effort on your part, but they are not a focus.

Why?

1. Most of the other controllers are completely non-standard in their layout and button/axis configuration. This makes it really hard to troubleshoot what's wrong, and that eats up time that I would absolutely rather spend working on gameplay. This is also a logistics issue -- I don't have another programmer to whom I can assign these tasks.
2. Starfighter was designed around gamepad controls. Everything from how the tactical mode unit selection works, to the radial menus, to the fighter input response curves and throttle controls were designed for a gamepad. If a mechanic could not be implemented because there was no room on the controller, it was cut or refactored.
3. I have 10+ years of console game design experience, so I leaned heavily on that. The control scheme feeds heavily off of my experience with console tactical games (Full Spectrum Warrior 2) and console action games (Halo: Reach).
4. Everyone has a keyboard and mouse, so a good chunk of time has been spent working on that control scheme too.
5. A lot of people have gamepads. The Oculus Rift consumer model will even be shipping with an XInput gamepad.
6. It makes porting to consoles easier if that ever happens.

Starfighter is an action game first and foremost. It might have some simulation elements, but it's never been concerned with the mechanical aspect of actually flying a starship. It's concerned with more action-game (or abstract) elements like target prioritization, twitch skill, and allied unit control. 

Again, your non-standard controller will likely work if you're not afraid to hack some easy-to-read config files. Most of my testers that use these sticks say that this experience comes with the territory.

Hopefully this clears things up!

New blog update. http://enemystarfighter.com/

 

PAX

A lot of people were up here in Seattle for PAX. This is great because even though I didn't end up showing Starfighter at the show, I was able to run many friends from out of town through the game. Many of them haven't played it yet, so it was great having fresh eyes on it.

Feedback was positive, especially for the cockpit combat, but there was some consistent feedback about the campaign mode framework that I'd like to address. These fixes don't involve adding major new features, just rearranging some mechanics that are already present and streamlining other aspects of the mode.

I'll talk more about this when the changes are ready.

So (surprise!) I'll be taking a little more time and fixing these issues, but that will just make for a shorter and better alpha/beta experience for everyone. It'll be ready when it's ready, but no one wants this out more than me.

Why not just open the game up into Early Access and get feedback that way? 

You basically get one shot at launch, Early Access or not, so it had better be good. Wave Clear is there and fun, but it's not enough to launch and then hold back the other mode.

Another aspect is the scope of feedback you receive from a large pool of participants. Detail-oriented feedback on balance, UI, and whatnot is great from a large group of people because it gives you a really good sample to pull from. 

But I don't believe a large group is ideal for offering feedback about the issues above, especially when under the unique constraints present with ES. I'm much more comfortable looking to other devs for feedback on these things. If it were a pure PvP game, or sandbox-MP game (Rust, DayZ, etc), that would be a different story!

Until next time!

New blog from E:S. http://enemystarfighter.com/blog/

 

If you celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you had a good one! I spent the long weekend taking a much needed break from the game, but I'm excited to get back to it tomorrow.

Progress

Long story short, I'm still simplifying the game. ES is working with an extremely limited set of resources (me) on some very hard game design/UI/code problems. Now combine that with VR support and it's quite a bit of work.

Early in September, the game was the equivalent of a film studio getting a 4 hour first edit of a film. There were a lot of good ideas mixed in with a lot bad ones, and mostly it wasn't cohesive and it lost a lot of my playtesters. So I'm trying to edit that meandering 4 hour cut into 80 minutes of focused awesome which is really tricky.

You've all heard of the time/money/quality triangle? That absolutely applies here. I'm not sure when it will be ready, other than ASAP.

Good News

In the meantime, here's some good news:

• Better joystick support. There's no need to worry about config files anymore, and I've gotten my hands on an X-52 to test. I personally don't like playing the game like this, and the it still feels like it's made for gamepads (because it was). But if you want to play with one of these beasts, you should be able to bind things easily enough in game.
• Instant Action is online again, letting you set up small skirmishes to your liking.
• Olivier has been tweaking the soundtrack and it's somehow getting even better.

Until next time!

Looks like he has changed his mind about the joystick.

One thing I have noticed in the screen shots of the game is that "wave 2 round 3" in the top right hand corner and I'm starting to wonder if the finish game will be more of a on rails shoot em up.

One thing I have noticed in the screen shots of the game is that "wave 2 round 3" in the top right hand corner and I'm starting to wonder if the finish game will be more of a on rails shoot em up.

Could be the "instant action" thing mentioned in the post. I don't see anything alarming to be paranoid about.

Could be but he not said much about the tactical part of the game.

A very small update from the bog http://enemystarfighter.com/blog/ and a couple of new screen shots to ogle.

Is now officially named House of the Dying Sun

http://houseofthedyingsun.com/blog/2016/5/25/house-of-the-dying-sun

Hitting Steams EA next month http://store.steampowered.com/app/283160/ 😎

It's out yesterday, anyone can provide first impression? From what I heard it's somewhat far too short (shallow?) but it's what to expect from an initially released early access product.