...and a couple general comments after my first day of playing SCO a lot. You should show ship point value in the ship thumbnails on the ship selection and lineup screens, and on the ship cards. The corners of the screen are irrelevant and can be used for interface. The player's attention is generally focused on a circular area of the screen and their mind is ignoring the corners. This means you can put interface in the c
Measured – This ship is way off. This is a part of a greater issue across all of the ships. It seems like you are failing to keep in mind that the ships are not supposed to be equal in Star Control, the points and ship lineup make that true and allow you to have a wide variety of wildly different ships that fight each other. This should be a very low point ship. If Scyrve cost 50, and Measured costs 5... then if Measured can do just 10% damage to Scyrve then
I played SCO for a few hours today. Here are just some raw notes I took down for a few of the ships... Scryve – His flak guns lose to tiny little measured AoE weapon in a knife fight, this is backwards. This ship demonstrates that “bigger” doesn't mean “badder”, it means “easy target”. Its one of the easiest ships to beat due to size alone,
I just played a few more games;-) Another way to weaken this ship, that has nothing to do with the missile, is the secondary point defense weapon. You have this acting as both "point defense" and "interceptors". "Point defense" shoots at missiles, mines, plasma torpedoes... "seeking weapons". Babylon 5 also had what it called "interceptors", a point defense-like system that engages incoming energy/ballistic (i.e. "guns"). The SCO Earth ship's "point defense" is
This ship's missile was a subject of discussion before and I had mentioned some general ways of dealing with missiles like point defense, electronic warfare, and the speed and maneuverability of the missile itself. I still haven't had a chance to play Super Melee much, but after having briefly seen how this is working there are a couple more specific things I can say about this now. An indirect way of making the Earth ship less effective at the retrograde it uses to make this mi
In 1998 I predicted that Team Fortress would live on for at least 20 years as a popular game due to the timeless cartoon look, much the same way as Bugs Bunny/Loony Toons didn't begin to look "old" until it was nearly 50 years old. Assuming everyone doesn't stop playing it all of a sudden in the next 6 months or so... I will soon be proven right on that one;-)
I haven't been able to play it much yet, but yes, the Earth ship's missile is retrograde heaven in this game;-) I assume I am not missing it somewhere... the BETA is offline only and it doesn't have gamepad support yet, right? I kind of suck at these games with the keyboard, so it's hard for me to play it well right now. In this kind of game there are gamepad players and keyboard players, and I am definitely a 100% gamepad player. I really suck with the keyboard.</
The secondary could be a "space scoop". So the ship would have some kind of big opening at it's front. In the lore you could say that it has some type of "gravity wave" that draws nearby things into the "scoop". This makes some kind of vague sense as a means of collecting almost anything (like asteroids, nebula, ship debris, etc)... as long as you don't think it through too much:-)
If I were to call her "the cute commander", would she beat me up? I always liked that about Ivonova;-)
I just put the design doc for Space Hockey up on my blog, if anyone is interested in seeing it. https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2263927-space-hockey/
Yes, even just "fighters" or "drones" controlled by the AI can be a problem. But it is a much bigger problem if you try and put a 3rd (or more) human player into the mix. They won't stay with either of the other ships like the AI is programmed too, the 3rd human player will go wherever they feel like going. And, obviously, if they ever wanted to do more than 1v1 it would be more than just adding a 3rd player. Once you have 6 players on the map, each wanting to go in a
Both of you mentioned cloak, but SC2's camera actually worked very well for a balanced cloak. I would even guess that they designed the auto-zoom almost entirely around the Ilwrath's cloak. The SC2 centered camera gave you a good idea of where the cloaked ship was, in a way that feels very much like the Star Trek cloak where you have a general idea of where the ship is. The centered camera is actually a very good way of doing cloak if you want to emulate the Star Trek explan
I got internet a lot faster than I was expecting. Unfortunately I am not in a direct line-of-sight for the only unlimited internet access in this area, so I have a very limited internet connection. But I downloaded SCO last night and played it for about 30 minutes so far. This was the first thing to jump off the screen at me... Because the camera is centered between the ships, instead of on the player's ship, the player can only
Yes, I can see from your previous post that she is apparently "out of time" in some way and looks a lot younger than she is. I liked the original older look better, but I don't think its a problem. Her story will make her cool or not, and explains her youthful appearance. I was lucky enough to look 10 years younger than I was right up until I cut off my hair, then I immediately looked my age;-) I am about to unplug my computer and move, so I will be gon
Yes, in ancient history things were very different in a lot of ways. Alexander the Great died at 32 and may be the single most influential single human being in all of history. I was talking more about modern times and likely into the future. I don't dislike the commander, I just liked the very first image of her I ever saw better because she looked more late 30's than late 20's. I've always thought that younger characters, which you want for the younger audience, ar
I don't have a big problem with her, but I did like the very first original image I saw of her way back when better than any incarnation since then. She originally looked older, and I always hate seeing young people portray as Admirals, Senators, and Presidents. It's just makes no sense at all. 20-somethings never hold those types of positions in real life.
It's a form of disqualification zone, which creates a whole new set of issues at the barrier that a no-nonsense inarguable line/wall doesn't. The point is to contain the faster ship, not give it a whole new set of options at the edge of the "tournament arena". The faster ship has to be put into a box and forced to engage the slower ship. You have to make attacking the best option available too it, so that the player decides to engage. Telling them to turn around and en
It's "Air Combat Maneuvering" within a different environment, on a 2D plane with no gravity (unless you are near a source of gravity). "Speed is life" is actually a mantra of the Israeli Air Force that SFB players shamelessly stole from the Israeli's in the early 1980's.
So you are a Gorn, then? Good choice! A tournament favorite, they are very powerful;-)
That was from many years of experience of explaining this. It wasn't an insult, we know from decades of trying to explain this to new players that most people get confused if you try to use the phrase "speed is irrelevant" while trying to get them to understand that "speed is everything". We've learned from experience that you want to wait until they get the "speed is everything" part before speaking the words "speed is irrelevant";-) "Speed is life"... but that
The the way the points work in this system achieves a lot more than they appear too on the surface when choosing a "fleet" or lineup of ships. It is a "self-balancing" system that solves a lot of issues if you want players to choose a lineup/fleet of ships of different sizes/classes. It can appear as though the points don't mean much, because in a detailed sense they don't mean much. It is the class difference that matters. In Space Hockey I am not even using points, j
If you try to explain this too early people get confused, so I had been intentionally avoiding mentioning this part. But it probably won't confuse everyone at this point, so here is an important point from the opposite perspective... As I had mentioned before, in the end you want the slower ship to be able to cut the faster one off in a reasonable amount of time and get a shot in. Damage is permanent in SC, so the faster ship wil
Aw, that's too bad. It's still great to have a Sinistar ref in the game. A boss fight that was like a Sinistar level would be pretty cool. It also fits in with the "Rifts"-like concept of encompassing all universes, having a player find themselves playing something very much like Sinistar for one fight. But even a Sinistar-like ship somewhere is pretty cool too me.
I couldn't resist after hearing about the Sinistar boss... You should go all out and just make this boss fight like a level in Sinistar where he has appeared! Come up with a technobable explanation for why the ship's energy will not recharge in this fight. Add moving asteroids, exacltly like the game asteroids, to the map in the fight against Jeff/Sinistar. The player's energy does not recharge, but luckily for them the asteroids
Cuore, we call that "disengagement by separation" which is a fancy way of saying just flying away. But SCO is like SC2 in that regard you will have the ESC-key escape like in SC2. A short delay and you use your FTL drive to return to the mothership. Flying off the map is redundant, but you could make that how the barrier works. The critical issue as that the fight be contained, how you contain it almost doesn't matter. Asteroids are the natural "walls" in space,