Tag Archives: game design

May Dev Update: User Interface design & Galaxy Map features

Posted by Brendan Drain on

maydevupdate

Over the past few months, we’ve been designing Predestination’s main races and working on core gameplay mechanics like ship design, tactical combat, galaxy generation, and planetary colonisation. A lot of really cool features are now in the game, but it’s difficult to show how they work without a user interface, so this month we’ve been working on building a solid UI framework into the game engine and rolling it out on the galaxy map screen.

Our goal for the Galaxy Map is to make it look and feel like an advanced astrometrics lab, with all of  the information your race has about the galaxy at your fingertips. We want you to be able to do most of your turn-to-turn empire management without leaving this screen, and to be able to immediately tell what’s going on in the galaxy by keeping an eye on the map. When designing the Galaxy Map interface, we had a few rules in mind:

  • Every window or information pane should have a specific place in the UI, so that your screen doesn’t become a mess of open windows.
  • The player shouldn’t be overwhelmed with information. Information should only appear when necessary and text should be kept to a minimum.
  • The UI must be scaleable and easy for players to mod.
  • Every UI element has to have a smooth animation or transition and a corresponding audio cue. The audio is not currently in the game, but placeholder cues have been inserted into the code for every action.

Dev update video:

 

Feedback:

We’re still finishing up parts of the galaxy map UI, such as the quick fleet movement and mini-map, and will then begin rolling out the new UI framework into the planetary colonisation and tactical ship combat parts of the game. Head over to the official UI feedback thread to let us know what you think of the UI so far, and to let us know ideas you have for the UI or problems you’ve noticed in other 4X game UIs that you’d like us to avoid.

Cheers!

– Brendan, Lead Developer

March Update: Fleet Combat, Backer Reward Update, and Work Experience

Posted by Brendan Drain on

marchdev

The past month has been jam-packed for the Predestination crew. We made a lot of progress with the fleet combat part of the game, designed our first reptilian race (The Sauros), and hosted work experience weeks for two students aiming for careers in the games industry. We also moved to a new house with more office space to work in and applied for some government funding to help your pledges stretch further.

Update notes for fleet combat:

  • Added projectile weapons such as mass drivers, with their own graphical effects.
  • Added dumb missiles that travel to the target hex and explode, or explode early if they enter a hex with another ship or object in it.
  • Implemented smart missile AI that locks onto a ship and follows it, avoiding obstacles.
  • Added interceptors. They use the smart missile AI and attack the target ship every turn until destroyed.
  • Implemented area-effect weapons (smartbombs, area missiles).
  • Implemented proximity mines and cloaked proximity mines.
  • Created some basic explosion effects with screen shake, and a timing system to synch explosion graphics and screen shake with sound effect volume.
  • Implemented a module system that lets us create interesting non-weapon ship technologies. Modules added so far include: Holographic Projector Matrix (creates decoy holographic ships), Afterburner (double movement for one round, then takes a round to recharge), Shield booster (consumes movement points to boost shield hitpoints), Cloaking device (ship is invisible until its next turn, but then takes a round to recharge).
  • Fleets can now engage each other in the galaxy view, which switches to the fleet battle screen.
  • Ships can now retreat from combat. They will wait for one full round without moving or attacking and then warp out.
  • Combat now detects the winner when one side’s ships are all destroyed or warp out.
  • Ships destroyed in combat are now removed from the galaxy view.

Holographic projector ship module

Dozens of backers have now given us their ideas for interesting weapons and ship modules over at the Predestination Community forum. If you have any ideas, feel free to post them in the official fleet combat thread!

Kickstarter Backer Reward Update:

As part of the Kickstarter campaign, many people selected rewards such as your own custom-designed commander, missile, building, singleplayer level or core game race. Almost everyone has now submitted their commander and missile ideas, and our race and level designers have let us know how they’d like to be contacted to discuss their ideas. We had hoped to get back to all of you by now to confirm your selections, but are unfortunately running a little behind schedule due to moving house.

Those of you who have submitted commander, missile, or building designs will be emailed by Tina soon to confirm that your designs are good to go. Level and race designers will be contacted personally to get a brief outline of their ideas, but don’t worry if you haven’t got much of an idea yet as we don’t need the full details just yet. If you wanted to upgrade your pledge for any of these rewards but missed the end of the campaign, you can upgrade your pledge at our Paypal Upgrade page or send us an email with your inquiry.

workexperience

One of our big goals with Predestination is to help kickstart the Northern Ireland games industry and help emerging talent get into game development. With that in mind, we’ve spent part of this past month organising work experience weeks for students aiming to get into the industry. Our latest student was the extremely talented budding concept artist Nuala Mc Garry, who is already producing fantastic character art at the age of just 15.

In addition to giving Nuala some experience in the industry and advice on education paths, we were able to send her home with a new graphics tablet and an upgraded PC to help her continue developing her talents. This would not have been possible without all the support and pre-orders pledged through Kickstarter and Paypal. Your support has made a big difference to one talented young artist this month, and on her behalf we’d like to say thank you!

As part of her work experience, Nuala created her own race with unique concept art, technology and lore. They’re a species of intelligent feline humanoids whose culture revolves around entertainment and gadgets and treats fighter pilots and scientists as celebrities. The race isn’t named yet and we’d like to open that up to the community. If you have any name ideas or just want to give some feedback, please head over to the race’s official thread or leave a comment here on the blog!

Nuala's race (work in progress)

Background Lore:

The [Suggest a name] are a feline humanoid race discovered on a Terran planet near the Human empire’s borders. It’s not known whether the species is natural or the result of genetic experimentation, but they predate the Human empire and have shown incredible intelligence and adaptability. Their society revolves around entertainment and research, with great technological accomplishments being spurred by competition to make the ultimate gadgets and televised sports.

The race to achieve space flight, break the lightspeed barrier, and colonise other worlds were all sponsored by entertainment megacorporations looking for the next big show. When first contact was made with the Humans, the event was televised across the homeworld and eventually led to an alliance between the two empires that persists to this day. Not to be underestimated, the [Suggest a name] have repelled several attempted invasions of their space by turning the war effort itself into a form of entertainment. Fighter pilots became celebrities overnight, and research labs competed to make flashier and more inventive defensive technologies.

When the Revenants were unleashed on the galaxy, the [Suggest a name] were the only race able to sometimes successfully evade the attacking ships. Using clever holographic modules to hide ships and project decoys into space, pilots were able to evacuate millions of citizens from colonised planets across the sector. It’s thanks to their efforts that so many ships survived to take part in the final battle with the Revenants. Now sent back in time, they seek to explore space, find their former allies, and develop technology that can stop the Revenants once and for all.

Nuala's scientist

Possible race stats and abilities:

As a humanoid race, the [Suggest a name] are most at home on Terran worlds but can adapt to live in other environments. Their diminutive stature makes them poorly suited to ground combat, but quick reflexes makes them excellent fighter pilots. The celebrity status their society grants fighter pilots attracts a lot of legendary ship captains, and normal ship crew are more likely to achieve legendary acclaim following a successful battle. Their culture emphasises openness and honesty, increasing morale on all planets but making them vulnerable to spies. They also freely trade their entertainment programmes with allies, adding a free empire-wide morale boost to all trade agreements with other species.

Example stats: (not finalised, just to give an idea of the abilities we think they’ll have)

  • +10% Morale On All Planets
  • +2 Research Per Turn From Research Labs
  • -20 Ground Combat Rating
  • -10% Spy Mission Success Chance
  • Cultural Traders: Your empire freely exchanges its culture and entertainment with other nations. Trade pacts with your empire increase global morale across both your empire and the empire you’re trading with by 10%. This effect can stack for each new race you establish trade agreements with, up to a maximum of 50%.
  • Natural Fighter Pilots: Quick reflexes make your people natural fighter pilots who favour small hulls over larger ships. +50% beam and projectile defense on small and medium sized hulls, but -25% beam and projectile defense on larger ships.
  • Legendary Pilots: Double the normal chance for a legendary ship captain to emerge following a successful fleet battle, and ship captains will cost half as much per turn to employ.

Possible starting technologies:

Each race starts the game with several advanced technologies that are either not available for research or can only normally be researched late in the game. Possible starting technologies for this race include:

  • Camera Array (Ship module): An array of high-definition cameras are fitted inside and outside the ship, recording footage of fleet combat to be used as propaganda. If your fleet wins a battle with a ship carrying this module, all planets in your empire get +10% morale for 10 turns.
  • Holographic projector (Ship module): Holographic projectors are hooked directly to the ship’s power core, allowing the ship to project fake versions of itself into space. This ship module can be activated in combat to split the ship in three, moving the real ship into one of the three hexes directly ahead and placing decoys in the remaining two hexes. Decoys last for one full round and are instantly destroyed if fired on, but are otherwise identical to the original ship.
  • Cultural Hub (Building): You can only have one of this building in your entire empire. The city it’s built in becomes a huge cultural hub, completely eliminating all morale penalties on the planet. This allows higher taxation and prevents revolts and unrest.

Thanks for your feedback!

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported Predestination on Kickstarter or via Paypal, and a special thanks to fans who have contributed feedback on updates and shared their ideas on our forum. As always, we’re eagre to hear any feedback you have on this update or any ideas or questions you have relating to it. Head over to the official feedback thread or leave a comment on this post!

Cheers,

– Brendan, Lead Developer

Predestination Race Reveal: The Sauros

Posted by Brendan Drain on

Sauros race reveal

The Sauros are Predestination’s first reptilian race! The race is composed of three distinct sub-species:

  • The purple Monitor Sauros: The shamanistic ruling caste and diplomatic contacts for the empire. They are native to the desert regions of their home world and are worshiped as if they were gods.
  • The white Albino Sauros: A rare breed possessing an immense intellect. They are native to desert regions and are responsible for all scientific discovery in the empire.
  • The green Jungle Sauros: Have been selectively bred to be the perfect labourers and ground combatants. They are native to the jungles of their home world and make up the majority of the Saurosian population.

Background Lore:

The Saurosian Empire is one of the oldest and most feared cultures in the Predestination universe. The desert-dwelling ruling caste conquered the jungles of their homeworld, enslaving the primitive jungle race as a worker force and military army. In breeding massive slave armies, the Sauros soon overpopulated their home planet and were forced to expand into space. The empire slowly grew without interference for millennia, producing colossal armoured hulk ships and protecting its borders from intrusion.

The Sauros watched as other species emerged into space and began colonising the stars, but rejected all attempts at contact and co-habitation. No-one dared enter Saurosian space, and they liked it that way. When the Revenants were unleashed on the galaxy and started destroying their hatchery worlds, the empire finally broke its silence and led the younger races into war. But despite their advanced technology, even the ancient Saurosian hulks couldn’t stand against the Revenants.

At the final battle with the Revenants, the last surviving hulk was torn apart by temporal rifts and pulled back in time, crash-landing on a terran world. Now cut off from their empire, the Sauros have only a few scraps of advanced technology remaining and several technological relics whose secrets remain to be unlocked. The Sauros now aim to rebuild their civilisation and stop the younger races that might foolishly wake the Revenants again in the past.

(Sauros story trailer still to come)

Race stats and abilities:

As a reptilian race, the Sauros are at home on Desert worlds and have a penalty to living on Ocean and Tundra worlds. Military expansionists by nature, the Sauros have a bonus to armour hitpoints, ground combat and diplomatic intimidation. The species’ isolationist ways give them a large diplomatic penalty with other races, and their starting planet contains ancient artifacts left over from the crashed ship. Example stats for the Sauros are below: (Stats are not finalised but are intended to give a general idea of what we’re thinking of)

  • +10% Armour Hitpoints
  • +15 Ground Combat Rating
  • +10 Intimidation (bonus to diplomatic extortion)
  • -20 Diplomacy (penalty to friendly diplomacy)
  • -50% Population Growth Rate
  • Ancient Artifacts: Home world contains ancient artifact resources that increase research output. Once your race reaches a certain tech level, the artifact turns into a usable item.
  • Low Metabolism: Population use half the normal amount of food per turn.

Sauros starting technologies: Each race starts the game with several advanced technologies. The Sauros start with a number of technologies left over from the crashed hulk ship:

  • Assault shuttles: Armoured shuttles are fitted with shaped charges and fired at enemy ships. They pierce the enemy’s hull and deliver marines that try to capture the ship and kill its crew. Enemy shields must be down for the shuttles to penetrate.
  • Reactive armour: An inert polymer is inserted between two layers of hull armour. Dissipates some of the impact energy from projectiles, increasing the effective toughness of the armour. Reduces damage from projectile weapons by 10%, and cannot be penetrated by assault shuttles unless the hull is exposed (armour hitpoints are all gone).

Sauros Shaman

Reptilian race archetype:

Unique gameplay: Each of the four race archetypes in Predestination (Humanoid, Aquatic, Reptilian and Mechanoid) has its own unique gameplay that will hopefully feel iconic to that type of race. Reptilian cities feature a unique hatchery for storing and hatching eggs, and an organised breeding area to speed up their usually slow reproductive habits. Players can decide what percentage of the hatchery building to dedicate to each particular sub-race of their species: Workers/Ground troops, Scientists, or the Diplomatic ruling caste. This will in turn provide bonuses to Production, Research, or Morale/Tax at that colony.

Unique tech field: Reptilian races have access to a unique technology field full of upgrades to the hatchery to let you specialise each city to a particular task. A few ideas we’ve had for possible upgrades include:

  • Heat Lamps: Improves the population output of the hatchery by 25%.
  • Farm Upgrade: Uses up one food resource linked to the city, but gives a large bonus to population output of the hatchery.
  • Training Center: All workers are trained as ground troops and give a bonus against invasion. *We could also have training centers for scientists and diplomats
  • Forced Breeding: An emergency option to produce extra ground troops.
  • Euthanasia: Can kill existing population and replace them with another species. For example, can kill workers and replace them with scientists. Has a huge morale penalty.
  • Genetic Manipulation: Can convert existing population units from one subspecies to another. For example, can turn all workers into scientists. No morale penalty.

Have your say!

What do you think about the Sauros? Head over to the Sauros thread on the Predestination Community forum to leave us feedback, and don’t forget to share this post on Facebook and Twitter if you like it!

New colony system, what do you think?

Posted by Brendan Drain on

In last week’s development update, I showed recent work on the planetary colonisation that made the exploration grid visible from orbit. This week I updated it so that you can even direct your exploration efforts from orbit and developed a new resource distribution algorithm, but I ran into a small problem: If you add in enough resources to keep exploration interesting, you’d end up with a ton of colonies to build on each world. To solve this problem, I decided to try out a new system inspired partly by Civilization.

Explore Planet

The old system:

Planets are currently covered in randomly distributed resources and pre-defined city locations. Cities are residential colonies with lots of building space that is used for housing and big buildings like shipyards, while resources are small colonies with 6 building locations. Resources are only accessible in the resource towns themselves and the materials collected are stored in material silos. You’d need to design separate blueprints for each resource and for residential cities, and there’s not really much choice in where your colonies go or what they’re set up to do.

The new system:

The new system covers planets randomly in resources as normal, but players can decide where to build their cities! You can set up a city in any suitable location (on flat land for most races). Resources are no longer mini-cities with building spots, instead you set up an extractor like a mining drill and then tell it which city to ship the materials to. It’s up to that city to use all the resources that are linked to it. There may be a logistics cost for linking a resource to a colony far away, and you would be able to set up trade routes between cities to move resources around more efficiently.

There’s only one type of colony in this system so it’s up to you to decide how to lay it out and balance housing space with industrial output etc. You would only need to design blueprints for the different types of colony you want, for example you could have one for a production colony that uses 4 ore per turn or a residential colony that needs 20 food and 2 coal per turn. To keep things balanced, we would simply impose a limit to the number of cities you can have on a planet based on its size. Instead of having 5 residential cities and 30+ small resource towns pre-placed on a planet, now we’d just have 5 manually placed cities that split the 30 resources among them.

What do you think?

Which system do you prefer, and are there any other issues you can see with the new colonisation system?

Are you designing a commander, missile or building?

Posted by Brendan Drain on

gameplay

As part of the Kickstarter campaign, many of you picked the option to design your own commander, missile or building for Predestination. This post will explain all of the options you have to choose from for each. When you’ve made your selection, email the details to tina@brainandnerd.com along with your Kickstarter username. If you have any ideas that aren’t in this post, please post a comment here or include them in your email.

Continue reading →

Kickstarter success! Wrap-up post with stats and graphs

Posted by Brendan Drain on

kswrapup

Last week Predestination officially succeeded on Kickstarter! Thanks to a huge push in the last few days of the campaign, we managed to hit over double our initial goal and smashed the three biggest stretch goals. We’ll now have a full singleplayer story campaign, play-by-email and full online multiplayer for release.

We’ve decided to wrap up the campaign in the same spirit of transparency that we intend to keep up during Predestination’s development, so I’m releasing a ton of stats that are normally kept for the project creator’s eyes only and discussing some of the lessons we learned throughout the campaign. This kind of info from previous projects was invaluable when I was researching and putting together this campaign. I posted this originally as a Kickstarter update, but am posting it as a blog post so it can reach more future Kickstarter project creators. It’s a bit of a wall of text, but hopefully future Kickstarter creators will find it useful!

(More updates on the way)

Continue reading →

90% funded on Kickstarter, help push us over our goal!

Posted by Brendan Drain on

We launched Predestination on Kickstarter a few weeks ago and the response has been absolutely immense! Over 500 people have backed the project so far and we’re at around the 90% mark. There’s just 10% to go until we’re guaranteed funding and can press on into stretch goals. It’s very important that we hit 100% as soon as possible, because that guarantees we’ll get our minimum goal and we can take that guarantee to banks and government grant schemes. If you haven’t pledged yet, head over to Kickstarter and take a look at some of the rewards you can get for supporting Predestination.

Thank you so much to everyone who has pledged their support so far! If we exceed our goal, we’ll move into the stretch goals to let us add extra features like multiplayer, a singleplayer story campaign, tools to let players mod the game and design their own levels, and other features we can’t realistically fit into the $25,000 minimum goal. There’s still a long way to go if we want to make the ultimate 4X game, and with your help we’ll get there!

New screenshots: Galaxy map, planets, system window and planet exploration

Posted by Brendan Drain on

There are some big announcements coming in the next week or so for Predestination, but until then we have some new screenshots of the game in action. These screenshots show the three main parts of the game: Galaxy Management, Planetary Exploration, and Tactical Fleet Combat. All three areas are still work in progress, but they’re really starting to come together.

Concept art: Robotic races

Posted by Brendan Drain on

Not all the races in Predestination will be organic; The race below assembled itself from a crashed transport full of worker droids, service bots and military hardware. To survive, they had to adapt themselves  to their new home and fossil fuel energy sources. We haven’t named the race yet, but the population and ships will have a steampunk visual style. Different tasks like industry or research will be completed by specialised robots, so the military robots may look very different to the researchers or workers. Below is concept art for the race’s industrial worker droids, produced by our new character artist Connor Murphy:

Unique race gameplay

In the last post, I talked about the fact that each type of race is specialised for a particular type of planet: Aquatics on ocean worlds, robots on ice planets (so they can overclock themselves), lizards on deserts etc. But the differences between the races go a lot deeper than just their preferred planets and some stats. Every race type will have its own unique gameplay that suits that race, and a research field that only that type of race can access. Our current thinking for the robotic races is to give them:

  • Factories that build new population rapidly.
  • Population consumes energy instead of food.
  • Unique technologies let you upgrade the population or produce huge mechs and ships.
  • Terraforming technology lets you freeze over planets, turning them into ice worlds.

What kind of unique gameplay and technologies would you associate with robots? If you could have any feature in a robot race, what would it be?

Planet exploration update and terraforming idea

Posted by Brendan Drain on

The Predestination team gained three new members this week: a new concept artist, a 3d modeller and a composer have officially joined the crew. The artists have been working on  new animated buildings for the colony screen this week, and our composer has been producing some awesome sci-fi music for the game. I’ll properly introduce the new and current members of the team in my next update and can hopefully show you some of their handiwork soon.

This week we’ve been working on fleshing out the designs for the races we plan to have at launch, and I’ve been implementing a hex-based planet exploration system to go with the hexagonal colony system described in the previous update. Players now have to explore outward from the starting colony as you can only explore hexes on the border with unexplored areas. Exploring a tile reveals what’s on that tile (if anything) and pushes your borders back, letting you see what all the surrounding squares look like. Below is a screenshot of the new system in action:

This is the way it looks in-game right now and this is how you’ll explore your planet at the start of the game before you develop scanning technologies and satellites.

 

Terraforming:

If you saw our QCon trailer, you probably noticed that terraforming is listed as a major feature in Predestination. Our planet engine can morph a planet’s surface and environment in realtime, which we can use for things like bomb craters, raising and lowering sea levels, changes to how rocky a planet is, and gradually changing terrain types. We’re currently discussing how to use these capabilities for terraforming, and I want to publish some of our current ideas so people can provide feedback:

  • Each race type is happy on one particular type of planet: Aquatics on ocean planets, Robots on ice worlds, Reptiles on Desert etc.
  • On your race’s preferred planet type, there are multiple suitable locations for cities and all resources are visible and can be colonised. On the wrong type of planet, a race will have penalties, and will only be able to find a small number of city locations and resources.
  • You’ll be able to research technologies to convert some planet types into others, such as a massive reactor or greenhouse gas generator that can slowly transform an ice world into an ocean planet. Each use of the device will require a massive burst of stored energy, so the player will activate it every now and then when the colony has built up enough energy and see the change instantly.
  • As a planet gets closer to your race’s favoured environment, new resources and city locations will be revealed.
  • Terran planets contain ice, ocean, desert and temperate climate areas, and all races are happy on these worlds. Every race can colonise all the resource and city locations, but will still have the ‘wrong planet’ penalties in cities in unfavourable environments.
  • Terran planets will be delicately balanced environments, so heavy fossil fuel use could cause the planet to heat up and the ice caps could slowly melt, raising the sea levels and destroying valuable coastal towns. Nuclear bombs could also trigger a nuclear winter and turn it into an ice world, and heavy industry could pollute the oceans and destroy resource towns under the water.

If you have any feedback or ideas of your own, please feel free to leave a comment!