The Little Blog of Games

The forced leave from Eve made me consider my interests and I’ve found my inner game designer once again. With Eve hogging my free time I’ve followed the game industry with a passing interest, but after the Dominion patch came out and I started getting the “socket closed” errors my interest was rekindled. I’ve started spinning game designs in my head again and actually done some work in the area too.

I’ve solved the “socket closed” problem, by the way. It was due to my ISP upgrading my line speed to 8Mbs which simply was too much for the line. Once they lowered the speed back to 2Mbs everything has been smooth as a baby bottom. That doesn’t mean that CCP is free of blame here. I still believe that something changed in the Dominion patch that made the connection protocol more fragile. My kind of line problems now get you disconnected where as before you would only have suffered from a lag spike.

But if you are still suffering from the problem you should look to your end of the connection and see if you can improve your situation by yourself. I can give some advice (although I cannot guarantee how helpful it will be) if you need it. All you need to do is ask.

Also here is a choice pick from the Dominion 1.1 patch notes (due out today):

CCP Tuxford can no longer shut down TQ on a whim.

It’s good to see that improvements are being made. =)

And now for something completely different…

VGA Planets – A love long lost

If you are old (like me) you might remember a time when the Internet was just becoming the next big thing and most computer wiz kids used systems called Bulletin Board Systems or BBS’s. These were dial up boxes that functioned as a web site of sorts, running all kinds of interesting software that you could hook up to.

One of the obvious usages for such systems was running multiplayer games, mostly strategy or rpg types as the environment limited the suitable play styles. Back then there generally were no expectations with regard to the graphics of a game and having a separate client was straight out amazing. Games were great because they were great as games.

Back then 4x games were also just becoming popular with their roots in such titles as Empire (originated in 1970′s, but became popular in the early 1980′s) , Reach for the Stars (1983) and Civilization (1991). Although space opera games would reach their peak in 1993 with the Master of Orion, space was already a popular setting for 4x games.

In 1992 a man named Tim Wisseman released a game called VGA Planets which drew heavily from the previous 4x games and slapped in a healthy dose of themes from popular science fiction series (namely Star Wars, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica). The game was designed as a multiplayer game and it usually ran on a BBS as LAN’s and the Internet were not so readily available. Players would make their orders and submit them to the game host, which would then (at a specified time) generate the situation for the next game turn for players to download and peruse.

The game became really popular with version 3 which was published in 1994 and it actually got a windows client with a greatly improved starmap in version 3.5. I actually remember purchasing the full version of 3.5 via a magazine here in Finland and it took some time to get the license key. It was an inordinate amount of work required for getting the full version for the $20 or so and I imagine the magazine took a slice from the price. But it was well worth it in the end.

The game itself sets eleven players in the role of as many different races, each with their own abilities and ship types. It was the variable player powers that really made the game so interesting to me. Each race had a really (well, mostly) unique play style and required completely different strategies to succeed. I loved a race called Privateers above others for their sneaky playstyle.

The Privateers (modeled after Romulans from Star Trek) were a race with very small, but fast cloaking capable ships. Their main advantage was a mission called Rob. True to it’s name you could rob another races ships clean of fuel and cargo with the mission, making you a space pirate of the worst kind. As an added bonus the game featured a rule that a ship without fuel could be captured if towed. This combined into an elaborate strategy of luring other players ships into traps which would enable the Privateer player to rob and tow-capture them in order to expand their otherwise weak fleet. It was so difficult to organize and so much fun to pull off!

Otherwise the game was pretty much your staple 4x space strategy. You had a galaxy full of solar systems, each of which had a (more or less) inhabitable planet for you to colonize and improve. Ships were built from several components and were used to smite the opposition in simulated 1-vs-1 ship battles.

The genius of the game (imho) was in its apparent simplicity (there was only so much you could do in the galaxy) but underlying complexity growing from the varying player powers. It didn’t try to make the economy so complex as to take focus from the war and kept  the ship building in a pretty well defined frame. This enabled the battles to be rather deterministic in that you had pretty fair idea of how a battle would go based on the participating ship types. There was some randomness, but fleet design and tactics were a critical component of success.

The game had its share of problems too. The end-game turns could become bog down as your empire might have hundreds of ships and planets to manage and the player race balance was not perfect. Some races were simply better than others which could lead to players quitting mid-game as their position became impossible. There was also a 500 ship limit per game and while I just praised the ship building and battle tactics, the game could have benefited from slightly more options in this area. As it were the system was pretty much fighters > torpedoes > beams, which effectively lead to supercarriers ruling the battlefield.

Tim Wisseman started developing VGA Planets 4.0 sometime around 1997. It was conceptually a major departure from the previous versions and didn’t appeal to me enough to keep it on the radar. As far as I can tell it has become a dead (or at least a seriously mired) project although a playable version seems to exist on the Net. You can still find v3 hosts online if you’d fancy a try.

So…?

You might be wondering the reason for this trip down the memory lane. Well, I happened to be going through some papers the other day when I came across a particular folder. It was a very heavy folder, containing around 500 printed pages of various guides to VGA Planets. Of course I started leafing through it and all the fond memories came back. And that’s when I decided to start working on a remake of the game.

My version would be a browser based game (flash client?) and it would have some gameplay “improvements” over the original, but at the core it would be the same game. I decided to drop the whole Star Wars/Trek/Galactica theme and settled for the Uplift Universe created by the brilliant David Brin. If you haven’t read his works I seriously recommend that you do. I count him as one of the best sci-fi authors of all time and especially love his Uplift series.

The project is currently name Heavens Reach and I’m currently writing the design specification. I also took a jump start and wrote some galaxy generation algorithms when I felt like programming something fun. But the thing is, I’m not really capable of building the game all by myself. At least not with any sensible schedule.

I will need the help of an artist (what graphics will be in the game), a flash programmer (or someone experienced in creating clients for browser based games) and of course some help in playtesting the game when it reaches that point. Assuming RL doesn’t interfere.

I think I will start asking around the game development communities when the time comes. But if you have some skills in those areas and feel like contributing to a hobby project, let me know. =)

<<Games: Bargain prices and update horrors

EVE: Decayed existence>>

Tags: eve, gamedev

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 11:32 am and is filed under gamedev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.