Development log
by Ivan Kravarščan
TL;DR I’m not dead, project is not dead, rewrite is progressing.
I’d apologize for slow progress on the game but in my experience when a project comes to that stage the apologies don’t make it move faster. But I’d like to apologize for the blog being down for a good while. I was informed about Github Pages update, I was assured it will work like before, but I didn’t do my due diligence to check that myself after the update. Technically they were right for normal, by the book, pages while this blog relied on a configuration that got removed. If the root of the blog was not in the root of repository one could set desired subfolder path in repository settings. Now it’s done through a build script. Sure, you can do whatever you want in the script but it’s harder to find out and it took a moment of realization that the new “action” is for that and that I’m free to edit its script.
Well, the reason why I checked if the blog is up is because the progress on the rewrite has picked up. I’ve more or less figured out how to get the graphics in the way I want them, and how to render the star map. The „new game“ screen is almost done. And buttons make sound!
I’ve managed to get automated test working for the start screen. Players are not going to care about it very much but in my experience majority of bugs come from UI interaction so I’d like to cover clicking around with automation as much as possible. To the point I’m looking into how to make computer players play the game through human facing UI. But I’m not going to bend over backwards for 100% test coverage. The other source of bugs, where players do strange things, is going to be player’s job for the time being.
Well, I’m supposed to finish espionage for the currently published version and that’s being neglected for a good while. It requires mental bandwidth and patience that is rather scarce lately so that’s why I’ve been working on much more exciting (for me) rewrite. I’ll try to finish it this year. What I will do much sooner is make new opponent names and do all the updates Google requires for the continued store presence. This goes back to the roots of the game where I envisioned it as UniWar as space 4X, where you play against pretend people in pretend multiplayer. I’m willing to lean more into empire building fantasy.
Being focused on pure strategy closes a lot of doors for fun and experimentation (one can’t experiment much in production). I’ve hit some snags in that regard that I don’t know how to resolve myself and it’s super hard someone consistent to talk about it. Like, how to make ship types matter. Sure, there are combat 3 ship types that have rock-scissor-paper relation, and one type has an extra perk to make it the default entry point into cycle. But it stops mattering very fast, especially when you start building multiple ships per turn in each star system. It devolves to 1:1:1 construction cost ratio that you set and forget. I’d like to see more varied fleet ratios, and I’d also like to have star types to matter. Not having fleet size limits helps immensely in creating economy vs military dilemma but it also diminishes importance of ship types. I don’t know, I’ll need to think about it more.
Another thing I’d really like to do is to have megastructures you can build. The design problem is it could just make big players get bigger, a thing I’m consciously avoiding with other design decisions. The fairest thing would be to have megastructures appear out of thin air for everyone at the same time but that sounds dumb and unfun. I’d like to have a player have a hand in building them, so I inclined to take my chances with the first option, so the remaining problem is making UI for it. Current version has already too much going on at star system UI, so this whole thing will probably and up waiting until rewrite is finished because I can iterate on UI much faster there.
Ok, I’m shoot gunning ideas at this point. The point is I have great plans for the game, but a lot needs to happen to realize them. And I’m thinking about splitting strategy and power fantasy into different modes. Similar how Starcraft has more strict unit set for multiplayer and more loose rules for campaign.
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