In space, no-one can hear you be gratuitous.
Space is gratuitous. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly gratuitous it is.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Gratuitous.
Ack, it’s no good. I just can’t decide which stereotypical sci-fi quote to tiresomely rip-off. Instead, just watch this video of Cliffski ‘Gets A Bit Feisty’ Harris’ new’un. BOOM.
A pretty apt demonstration of the hard split between scheming and smashing, no? Also: I can’t help but dig the John Williams-esque score.
Very much looking forward to this one – but if it isn’t at least 84% gratuitous, I’m going to kick the ear off a man so hard that it hits a planet three solar systems away and makes a sun explode while 12,000 naked girls dance in celebration and a 399,996,534 foot slug sings La Cucaracha. And then spontaneously combusts. GRATUITOUS.
Related Stories:
Hearty congratulations on a soundtrack which sounds like it is truer to the spirit of the original trilogy of Star Wars than the three prequels’ soundtracks.
Certainly looks to be very tempting, I’ll be keeping my eye on this for sure. Well, when I say “Keeping my eye on this”, really I mean, wait for further coverage of it here on RPS. :-)
When will we see a demo cliff? And whats the price point cliffski? Will there be a bargin post this week? If not i have a few to point out, but no forum access.
Myros: Switch to firefox, dude. Or Chrome.
I’m on a mobile phone. 3/10 see me after school.
I switched away from IE7 when it suddenly decided to stop loading this – and only this- website all of a sudden. No reason I could discern, eventually gave up and installed firefox. That was pretty much the last straw for me.
Looks great! I’m not a huge fan to tower defence either but on the other hand I really loved Defence Grid and PvZ so I may be acquiring the taste.
This one particularly appeals to me partly because it’s both tongue in cheek but also appears comparatively realistic in it’s mechanics for a space combat sim in that if you did have two huge close range battle fleets about to come to blows then if you were commanding one of them then choosing an exact formation and setup and setting them going and keeping your fingers crossed would seem about right tactic. There are a couple of reasons for this, firstly micromanaging a large fleet just seems a really bad idea and the other is that space combat might well all happen really fast. I think the later would actually make a really good in game explanation of why you can’t order your ships around mid-battle, it could be claimed that the battles actually take place in something around a second and the instant resolution is real-time option and it all happen too fast for you to see and the only way for your feeble human mind can keep up with what actually happened and learn from it is to view the battle in super slow motion.
I’m not a huge fan of culture style ship naming but the option to name ships would be very cool and with that in place a culture style name generator option could only be a good thing.
This one has fired my imagination somewhat so if the price is similar to Cliffski’s other games I’ll very likely buy it.
It’s looking pretty good. I was going to suggest much the same thing as Cigol for a replacement to the entire ship glowing red.
If it’s meant to signify the armor absorbing a hit, a localized effect would look a lot more immersive, like perhaps the spot turns brighter or redder as though made hot by the force of the impact and then it fades away.
Maybe even little bits of red-hot shrapnel floating away from the impact like shards of ablative armor.
Hey that looks sweet. I’m still playing Homeworld 2 and Sins of a Solar Empire (get the expansion! nearly free) , so it’s pretty much up my alley. Theres a niche the size of Grand Canyon in the space strategy genre i think. Finally someone jumping at it. I hope you didnt make the same old ‘let’s build totally massive carrier ships and even bigger starbases’ mistake like they all do. Unless you’re flying a tiny ship yourself, which of course hardly ever happens in a strategy game, size is pretty meaningless in a space game. You just zoom out more. Homeworld does it to the point that the drawing distance becomes too near. Am i rambling about techie details again? Anyways go go indies!
You play homeworld 2? We need to hook up! Me i like carrier games with slow res, feels more like a real skirmish.
Everything about this sentence is perfect, more developers like this please.
This has probably already been mentioned in various places but I’d love to see localised damage. The explosion of the single ship at the end was cool but it didn’t seem to affect the model at all. I’d prefer to see half of a ripped apart by the blast, rather than little fires etc. Difficult? Probably. Worth it? Totally.
“DrazharLn says:
Then again, I’m a Banksonian (I may have just made that word up)”
No, some-one else got there before you:
http://banksoniain.netfirms.com/
This is looking really exciting now. I liked the look of it in the early vids, but now I’ve seen the prep screens, I can’t wait!
Do we have any idea how individual the ships are? Can you configure every ship individually, or are the smaller ships generic?
Finally, a Positech game that interests me. Soon, I will be giving money to Cliffski despite disliking him.
It’s probably a sin against gaming to like games where the player relinquishes control as much as I do.
/clap /clap /clap /clap /clap /clap :-)
looks awesome, soo far. Looking forward for it :-)
This looks like a game I might actually buy, Cliffski. Reminds me a bit of Battleships Forever, with bigger scale, and more gratuitous.
Looks excellent, might well be a must buy for me.
Personally I don’t mind the red flashes, they’ll certainly help to tell which craft are taking shield hits, regardless how small the ships are or how much carnage is going on. Yes it’s arcadey, but arcade damage systems are designed like that for a good reason. Anything else is only going to reduce clarity there.
Sorry back to OT: agree on the firefox browser. I have both, just a bad habit I have of clicking IE … comes from lotsa years of internet browsing/time-wasting ;p But as it seems from web logs IE is still a hugely popular browser so having a website that causes it to crash is kinda bad for business IMO. Just wanted to make sure the web site devs we aware of the issue.
The problem with sit-back-and-watch battles to my mind is that they have the potential to become tedious and quite explicitly game-like (unimmersive). Let’s say you get to Battle/Mission 7 and your first attempt at putting together a fleet yields player-side annihilation; what are you going to do? Try again, tweaking your approach here and there, and then watch the new battle unfold. Maybe you’ll watch more carefully and study which laser blast comes from where and start thinking about what further adjustments you can make to take advantage of the precise positioning and loadout of each enemy warship. Once you’ve begun to think that way (and if there’s nothing to do but watch, then why wouldn’t you?), the game will become a chore of trial-and-error in which you repeatedly make small changes and then watch their effects, accumulating and banking upon foreknowledge of the enemy’s strategy.
That’s my concern with the non-interactive aspect. Now, I like the spirit of the idea there, and I’m not looking to have this become another RTS or Plants vs. Zombies. My suggestion is that some lesser forms of interactivity be implemented during battles; things the player can do that are helpful but small in scale and effect when compared to the importance of all the setup. For example, individual ships could have abilities (based on their modules) that share some form of charge, and the player could make on-the-fly adjustments to how they allocate that if one need if unexpectedly perceived as more important mid-battle. Or perhaps some small trajectory manipulation could be allowed so that the starting formation remains the primary thing but can be built upon somewhat.
Barring these sorts of actions, if they do compromise the play-by-email plan (and I suppose they would, as I can imagine a battle set up well enough that both players could win through small in-battle changes to the tide), then I think some increased depth of information could assuage the potential repetitive quality of setting up battles and letting them fly. This depth could include stuff like appointing command personnel to the vessels and then being able to view or at least read up-to-the-minute reports about how they handle situations from the interior like fire suppression, emergency staff redistribution, tactical decisions, self-sacrifice vs. cowardice, and other condensed forms of classic starship bridge activity. If you did something like that, it would not only give the player something less Newtonian to observe during battle but would also provide an interesting way (assigning the big ship commanders and maybe fighter squadron leaders) to tweak the behavior of units in a way that equipped tech would not. It might also present an opportunity for surviving personnel to gain ranks or levels that allot bonuses to their command, sort of like Cannon Fodder or more recently games such as Company of Heroes. That wouldn’t work in non-campaign standalone skirmishes of course since there would be no continuity from battle to battle, but maybe that opens up the idea of play-by-email campaigns in addition to one-time challenges.
Whatever you decide on this front, I am glad that you are avoiding certain aspects of RTS play. If you had the player effecting an area-of-effect superlaser from his god’s eye view or choosing the moment to use a board-wide space climate change bonus (Advanced Wars style) that gave his side a maneuverability advantage amidst an unforeseen wave of solar wind, I would just cry.
Anyway, the game looks wonderful. I’m a sucker for the kind of abstract component-based, setting-building customization and action you get in games like Homeworld and Battleships Forever, and I know that GSB will pull be in right away. Keep up the good work!
I’m sold already.
The new armour impact effect seems like a pretty decent choice.
Non-interactive battles seemed to work out pretty well for Dominions 3.
@James Allen:
If the game is more like Space Empires 4 / Galactic Civilizations / whatever turn based space 4X you can compare it to the (currently a bit overpriced) jewel of a game called Dominions 3. Dominions 3 has a lot more in it than just non-interactive battles. Research, army mobility on strategic map, non-combat spells etc.
I like the set-up-and-run aspect of the gameplay, but I worry that without any interactivity it the battles at all, gorgeous as they are, after a while you’ll just want to skip through them. I’d prefer it if you had a few points in the battle where you could change your orders a bit, perhaps Laser Squad Nemesis style, so that at least you had some reason to pay attention.
@Dizet Sma
Damn! Foiled again!
Thanks for the link though, I may read a few of those…
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only gratuitousness.
You pay attention to find out the detailed results of your orders – ‘Oh, when I have a carrier(?) with a PD destroyer (?) in this arrangement and set the PD to high aggression, the shields help out the fighter wing…’ etc.
If I could make a suggestion, I think a round gradient (red at the edges, yellow-orange at the center) emanating from the point of impact that quickly shrinks would work. It should give the impression of a piece of metal being heated up and then quickly cooling down.
Game looks smashing, BTW. :)
Whoops. Seems someone else suggest pretty much the exact same thing. -10 originality points. :(
I almost switched off when it said ‘Tower Defence In Space’. This seems much, much more fun than that.
Yes there is a pickle. How to market it to appeal to both the tower defense crowd and those who may not ordinarily enjoy tower defense titles but would like the space splosioney bits.
Some of the ship shapes (hehe) look very similar to the ones from Independence War, while a handful others are reminiscent of MoO2.
This battle system in a 4x sandbox campaign would be awesome.
@Dizet Sma
It’s Diziet not Dizet.
Heh heh, i am reading Use of Weapons right now…
“machineisbored says:
It’s Diziet not Dizet.”
Diziet Sma is a character in a book. I’m not. :o)
I can’t wait to try this out!
The whole thing just looks amazing, the different weapons and fighters with capital ships. Kind of like the battle at Endor…or when they have those big battles in star wars.
The only thing that bothers me (kinda), if I’ve read correctly, is the lack of sandbox/galaxy domination gameplay involved? It’s just the battles? No tech-tree advantages to be had or ship building priorities?
(I know these would add to the development time, and I’m not expecting them to be in. But after initially watching the videos I was suprised to learn those elements were not in a game like this.)
Aside from that though, I’m sure this will knock mine and everyone elses socks off once we get a go!
Reminds me of “Return to Infinite Space”. It was a fantastic little game adventuring and collecting artifacts, only problem was the short length. Anyway I’m interested in this game.
My only disappointment with Infinite Space was that there wasn’t that much content. Each playthrough was meant to be short, but subsequent playthrough would encounter much the same content. Perhaps the game didn’t sell well enough to rationalize it, but I for one would’ve snapped up expansion packs just to keep the fun stuff coming. The interplay of things was interesting, and play could become more advanced as you became aware of the many options and how to take advantage of them. It’s just hard to be interested in shuffling the deck and trying again when you know it’s going to be the same 20 things just in a different order.
Looking forward to Space Exploration – Serpens Sector for more of that kind of gameplay though.
Gratuitous Space Battles mostly has my interest for the shipbuilding and fleet mechanics. The lack of control during the battle just keeps the focus purely on the preparation phase. If I could change the outcome of the fight by jumping in and giving out orders, then I could fail for no fault of my designing and preparation phase. If, instead, victory or defeat comes from the design of the fleet, then I’ll just back into the fleet design step every single time, tweaking and refining it, and each attempt will start with something new.
In other words, I think it could be more repetitive to have to go through the motions during the fight, herding cats as RTSes usually amount to, just to have a chance of winning, even /after/ putting together the right fleet.
It’s kind of like how in Rainbow Six (the original PC version), you’d need to set up these complicated tactical plans before getting into the action. Even if you designed it perfectly, you could come around a corner and die because you didn’t click the fire button fast enough. That’s why it was a tactical FPS, not a tactical planning game.