[Prototype] Caelum - Build Spaceships!
Hey guys,
For our new weekly prototype we present Caelum, in which you build your own totally custom spaceship and fly around and do things, like shoot other spaceships.
Edit:
Build is updated (31 Jul) so some more relevant things:
Game links
Web build
Focused Feedback
1. Does controlling your ship feel intuitive enough? Do you think the environment needs more drag (linear or angular)?
2. Does the current manoeuvrability of your ship in combat (and speed and damage of projectiles) feel good? If not, do you have any suggestions on what needs to change?
/Edit
We’ve actually had the idea for this one for a while, and some people will have seen an earlier version of it at the last meetup. The UI is completely redone since then, and some other suggestions have been implemented as well. Thanks @blackshipsfillthesky, @Aequitas, and everyone else who played it.
The core concept we want to play around with in the prototype is the idea of total customisation of the player avatar i.e. the spaceship.
There are many ways we can take this game further, but we want to find out if the core component of ship-building is fun as is before doing that. We're still keen to hear pie-in-the-sky ideas, but we'll likely not act on them unless (until?) people tell us they want this game made.
That said, on to the game!
Original Focused Feedback
1. How did you find the current gameplay? Intuitive enough? Fun?
2. We’d appreciate any suggestions on which aspects you think we should focus on and how we should go about doing so. We would especially like to hear any idea you might have on aspects that would be quicker to implement / make for a simpler development process.
3. Does the frictionless environment work for you? Or do you think we should scrap realism in this case, for a space that's more easy to navigate?
@Riocide decided he had to go recreate some well known ship designs:
For our new weekly prototype we present Caelum, in which you build your own totally custom spaceship and fly around and do things, like shoot other spaceships.
Edit:
Build is updated (31 Jul) so some more relevant things:
Game links
Web build
Focused Feedback
1. Does controlling your ship feel intuitive enough? Do you think the environment needs more drag (linear or angular)?
2. Does the current manoeuvrability of your ship in combat (and speed and damage of projectiles) feel good? If not, do you have any suggestions on what needs to change?
/Edit
We’ve actually had the idea for this one for a while, and some people will have seen an earlier version of it at the last meetup. The UI is completely redone since then, and some other suggestions have been implemented as well. Thanks @blackshipsfillthesky, @Aequitas, and everyone else who played it.
The core concept we want to play around with in the prototype is the idea of total customisation of the player avatar i.e. the spaceship.
There are many ways we can take this game further, but we want to find out if the core component of ship-building is fun as is before doing that. We're still keen to hear pie-in-the-sky ideas, but we'll likely not act on them unless (until?) people tell us they want this game made.
That said, on to the game!
Original Focused Feedback
1. How did you find the current gameplay? Intuitive enough? Fun?
2. We’d appreciate any suggestions on which aspects you think we should focus on and how we should go about doing so. We would especially like to hear any idea you might have on aspects that would be quicker to implement / make for a simpler development process.
3. Does the frictionless environment work for you? Or do you think we should scrap realism in this case, for a space that's more easy to navigate?
@Riocide decided he had to go recreate some well known ship designs:
Comments
EDIT: this time with a bigger ship!
Just one comment. I know that there isn't any drag in space. But sometimes moving gets a little bit frustrating (I know that the movement is part of it all), but I think if you added the slightest bit of drag, it could make the movement feel a lot more friendly. Obviously not too much so that it becomes too easy.
EDIT: I just finished with this ship:
It basically can't stop rotating since it has an unbalanced setup with torque in only one direction. If you want to fly straight you have to time your thrusts so that the engines line up in the right direction (and stop thrusting when it spins around). And guns and shields all over. Obviously :P
I haven't tried the new version though (I really have no time). But I just wanted to comment about the action in the video.
The projectiles you fire don't do a lot of damage, and it takes several volleys of bullets for you or the enemies to do significant damage.
This means that engaging with an enemy is a bit of a war of attrition. If your first volley misses completely it doesn't matter because you have several more volleys before the enemy is destroyed. Meaning hitting any one volley correctly isn't very important, and avoiding any one volley from an enemy isn't very important.
I guess you probably didn't need that long explanation... what I'm suggesting is tweaking the damage values on different ships and seeing what happens.
If there was a delay, it would hopefully make this design less viable, although weakening the shields might end up encouraging the users to compensate by adding even more :D
Actually, having a state-machine type system could be really awesome for this sort of game: Hit a switch to go to that state, then when you hit spacebar, all the modules wired to that particular state activate at the same time. Could be neat and allow for interesting ship designs if states were a limited supply: Have a ship that can only turn in 1 direction so that you can have a firing and shield recharge state as well as full forward thrust, etc. If wiring was also a concern, that would make the ship's internals be pretty interesting as well, plus you could have other modules as well, like missiles or batteries or reflectors or matter miners for sucking energy out of asteroids/wrecks (actually, that probably needs an energy economy too).
@BlackShipsFilltheSky: Good point, we need to spend some time tuning the values, and showing some explosions... many explosions are required.
@dislekcia: You can remap the keys with a button in the bottom left as @Denzil pointed out. For some reason this button is mostly obscured in some of our builds, but it still works, and we'll fix that soon. EDIT: fixed in the current build.
There is a lot of space in wiring the controls so that you can have very complex ship behaviour. In the end I think we probably want to have a "many keys to many modules" mapping, but we need to figure out how to make that intuitive. Adding a physical element that requires wiring is a really cool idea...
More modules, including reactors and an energy budget, is definitely on the cards. Just wanted to get something out the door first. Glad to hear you guys are having some fun with it :)
E.G. If you have generators to supply energy to the components, then if the energy visibly propagates across the ship, charging the close components reliably, but struggling to reach the more distant components, especially when there aren't enough generators, or stuff has been blown up in combat.
(Protecting the thrusters and guns with shields is already like that, I guess I'm saying more of that)
Some things about the key bindings. For the thrusters it is certainly possible to dynamically calculate when the turning thrusters should be fired based on pressing W,S,A and D (or arrow keys). Captain Forever does this as I recall.
Also:
I agree with @BlackShipsFilltheSky about making more of the spatial arrangement. The game has already some emergent properties; if you could add more that could be great. For instance, two guns in a line shoots a super bullet. Or you could add different types of energies (as in BlackShips' idea) for different guns, that can mix for new types of guns. And magnets and deflectors may be cool too. (Can ships break into two??? Edit: they can't :--( )
(If you go hard-core with the idea, maybe allow the player to design modules, to allow the player to build those in addition to the the individual components).
Although figuring out how to move arbitrary chunks of metal around is cool, it may be more satisfying if these have some sort of symmetry (throw rotational symmetry in for some cool spinner ships).
You should also investigate to possibilities of generating more interesting enemy ships procedurally. Using symmetry, a bit of randomness, and "fractal-like" composition rules should go a long way (I imagine). You could even use a GA to have them get better with the player. (And of course, if the ships get ever more complicated, you want to allow some zooming out too :P)
(And in a fuller game, wouldn't it be cool to have fleets, and be able to setup how ships fly based on surrounding ships for some emergent formations?)
About the game itself:
- Some background could be nice to judge the speed.
- What is the green dot with the number in it?
- A quicker way to set up shortcuts would be nice (especially in bulk).
- I built quite a few ships that were difficult to control, and would then fly far from the action. It would be cool if enemies sought you out more aggressively.
I really want to play more of this; I hope you guys take it further!@BlackShipsFilltheSky, I'm also really keen on the idea of more choices with regards to the spatial relation between modules. In the version of the game we had at the meetup, we had generators but without any meaning to where they're placed. We want to try out hooking things up to power sources. Even having multiple types of power sources as @hermantulleken mentioned sounds cool to me.
The Captain Forever style automatic keybindings are cool, but I'm afraid of a couple of things. Firstly, I actually like making my own keybindings a lot, and I'm afraid of the automatic thing cheapening it, although it will definitely make it more approachable to new players. I'm currently considering adding a button that calculates these keybindings, but that still allows you to change it. I kind of hope that the naive keybindings aren't 100% optimal, to allow room for improvement for advanced players, while also allowing new players to jump in right away as well.
@hermantulleken, I like your idea of making the modules feed into each other. This would (or could) solve the problem(?) of the limited placement options you have for weapons, and this system might make it more feasible to limit engines in the same way weapons are. It might get a bit unintuitive if we add more modules, especially adding more similar modules (like different engines or weapons). On a related note: What do you think of adding modules that are larger than the normal 1x1 ones? Like a strong beam weapon that takes up 3x2 slots.
On the ship not breaking apart, we want to do that soon, but there were a few technical difficulties.
Procedurally creating ships is awesome. I really want to get there, but it might be treading on territory which leads to spending too much time on a game that we're not sure people will want yet.
Zoom is something we want to add, and should be simple. We need to make sure it makes sense and does not subtract from the game though.
We also want to add different AI types and ship types for the enemies, but that might come a bit later than other changes.
The green dot shows you in which direction your goal is, and the number is the distance towards it.
Keybinding can be made faster (and more intuitive), but there is a shortcut you might not be aware of: After setting one module to a specific hotkey, all new modules placed will automatically be assigned to that key, until you set a new key.
And @hermantulleken, that last ship is awesome!
Lastly, here's one of the ships that was posted on facebook by a friend:
Secondly, about the shields, if you are going to implement an energy based system, this might solve it, as having too many shields will drain power I suppose? It could be hard to balance otherwise.
Also, enemy ships with more than 1 shield would force the player to instead build more weapons and fewer shields.
In particular @hermantulleken 's suggestion about having modules with more complicated/emergent properties and somehow opening the system up to community involvement. It's the right sort of game for that, though I know implementing that is a huge technical challenge.
Battleships Forever did that and got a pretty significant community of modders making ships for them. Here's someone's Battlestar Galactica ships in a video:
As I've said before, I fricken love Captain Forever:
And if you're wondering, both these games are loosely based upon the procedural boss-fight game Warning Forever:
My laptop also doesn't have a scroll wheel, can you change the rotation to a keyboard input?
Thanks
Among a few UI and UX changes, we created a new mission structure to replace the "KILL mission", which gradually increases the difficulty and available budget for search & destroy missions. We also made creating a basic ship simpler by creating a default ship to try out and adding an automatic keybinding feature. There are also a few enemy types now, to give the progression through the 'campaign' more flavour (and to make it harder :D).
Some points we'd love feedback on:
Another thing we added was a background with some parallax, and changing it so your ship always faces up and everything else rotates around you instead. Does this make it easier to control the ship? Does it feel more natural? Do you think it still needs more drag (or even less now)?
This ties in with the previous point, but does the current manoeuvrability of your ship (and speed and damage of projectiles) feel good? If not, do you have any suggestions on what needs to change?
A last quick note: We added zoom functionality, but the hotkeys aren't stated anywhere; page up to zoom in and page down to zoom out.
I hope you guys enjoy it!
Edit: @Fengol, it is stated in the wall of text help message, but left and right arrow keys now rotate pieces you want to place. Also, the default window size is now much smaller, and still resizeable.
I'll be trying it some more to give more feedback if I think it's necessary, but my first feel towards the controls is that I like it a lot. The automatic controls works nicely, and coupled with the always-face-up and rotating world view makes it control easier than normal in my opinion. I find that you also feel more drawn into the world by having it rotate, and it makes it that little bit more immersive. You feel the world rotate around you, and not the ship, which makes it more enjoyable to try and aim at the target.
The third level started off weird. I think it was a bug? I was spinning super fast and start 500 units away. It's a little far to fly over with the amount of drag/engines possibly too weak. I am all for drag, but if the levels are to be huge, it should be decreased slightly, or the engines should be stronger (or perhaps build up a little the longer they are on, maybe over a span of 5~10 seconds). Boosting for short periods allows precise control, boosting longer gives good power and speed. But yeah, I suppose it was a bug?
EDIT: No, I am not 500 units away, I am more than that away, the rest are just clipped off :) I'll restart
EDIT2: Yeah I also noticed that the background didn't load that time. It was fine when I restarted. I really really like the feel of the controls now. Last time it was fun to was your ship in action, and less fun to play. Now playing is equally fun in my opinion. GG. Though I like the movement as is, I have one suggestion. I think you should prioritize turning over going straight. What I mean by this is, that if you have back facing engines, and engines on either side facing diagonally backwards, if you push forward, they should all fire, as is, but if you push forward, and rotate, then the necessary engines should turn off to execute the rotating maneuver as fast as possible. Basically switch off engines that oppose the turning motion.
Second example, if I have two back-facing engines, one on either side of the mass centre, if I hold forward, they should both fire, but if I then also hold rotate, the rotate should take preference. The reason I argue this is because when you fly forward, you dumbly press "W", turning is more of a conscious move I feel, and I don't want to remind myself to let go of forward to do so. I guess it's a bit more of an implementation hassle, but I feel this last change would really make it feel perfect for me.
Keep up the good work!
EDIT 3: I've been thinking and realize it may not be as simple as you are currently mapping the controls once off, and when engines get shot down, you may get some off balance components. So it's not horrible if my above suggestion doesn't work out, but cool if it does
The idea of prioritizing turning sounds good, and I can think of a way to implement it, but yes... it doesn't work in the system as it is. Specifically, I want modules to have more than one function, where each function can have its own keybinding. We might not actually go this route, but this is what I'm currently planning. With this system I might be able to have another function on weapons which turns them off, and then I can bind the turning off of "right-turning" engines to the left turn button, and vice versa.
The option of turning a module off with a keybind as well might lead to depth in manual keybinding, think minecraft's redstone. I'm not keeping my hopes up though, as I'm not currently planning to make the modules use a system like that, although it is something worth discussing.
Thanks for the feedback :D
On the design as well, you could even go sim city level of detail with power cables etc running through the hull. Not sure if that would be fun, but its an idea. Could be a nice feature for really powerful enemy ships, so you can take out sections to destroy the ships if they use the same rules you do for building a ship.
Some other feedback:
Some kind of space dust would be nice to show you moving forward or some kind of parrallex scrolling in the BG. I didn't realise i was moving forward at first.
PS. This is THE ship
It's got nice power so you can capture your target between your 2 outer gun columns, and fly off with them while quickly melting through their shields/hull
EDIT: Your bug is almost definitely caused by spawning on enemy ships I think. During play now I flew my massive ship through a crowd of enemy ships (lots of lag), and then I slowly moved on top of them, and each laggy frame I got, my speed and angular velocity increased, and every now and then an enemy ship would get flung off hard. When all the enemies finally detached from me, I was at the edge of the background graphic, spinning quite violently
I played to level 91 btw xD
Cheers,
-
Adam
http://www.playgroundsound.withtank.com
@Denzil You got far! :O That's a sneaky strategy, flying off with the target. Thanks for the help with the bug, but I'm pretty sure I've prevented spawning on other ships. I think the bug is a result of something not being reset between levels as I've never seen it happen on the first mission after launching. I think what you experienced was due to how we're handling collision at the moment. I'll look at this again if I can't find it where I expect it to be. Thanks a lot for the feedback :D
@MCA We'd love to hear the kind of thing you have in mind :) At this point we're not too worried about the quality of SFX though, but we'll change that stance if we start prioritizing Caelum over more prototypes.
I don't know how to embed a soundcloud frame, but youtube videos are automatically embedded by just posting the link as is. It would also be handy to put your website link in a url tag.
https://soundcloud.com/aglinder/sound-design-caelum-sfx-reel
@MCA: thanks for the samples. As @Ramperkash mentioned, we aren't really too worried about SFX yet, but we'll see what we can work into the next update when we get a chance.
Quick update: one of the things we'll probably work on in the next update is making the ship building more interesting. We have a few ideas we want to look at, such as having a few simple "crafting recipes" like gun-gun-gun becomes a laser. But we'll see what happens in the next update :)
The mechanics of the world rotating around the ship makes me a bit dizzy, and might be a handicap for small ship designs.
Keen to see you develop this further...good for user based game design.
May I ask why you choose Flash? why not HTML5.
Not sure if you mentioned this already, but do you have a specific target platform in mind?
Good luck!
We first tried to have the frame of reference static, with the player ship spinning within it, but then people found it harder to navigate. Still not sure about a solution here, but I want to try making the camera take time to catch up to the ship so it's not as jarring.
We'll most likely be targeting PC with this, but it can always change. We're using Haxe to develop, so it's quite simple to port to other platforms, supposedly including HTML5. There are quite a few things that don't work properly (or take a bit of work to get around) in HTML5 at the moment though, which is why all our web builds are flash.
I think there are actually quite a couple of games in a similar vein, Reassembly being just one of them. At the same time, I'm not sure if we've really figured out exactly what Caelum is (or is striving towards). It's a fun little prototype, but it's a bit unclear (at least to me) exactly where it's heading. I think the fact that there is this lack of clarity and the relative market saturation is the main reason(s) why we haven't spent more time here. However, we haven't totally abandoned it, so we may still come back to it if someone on the team has more enthusiasm to take things further :)
I don't think we currently have a Windows build available, but maybe @Ramperkash can whip up one for you? (I don't dev on Windows)