Design and Development

Design and Development

In order to develop Star Dancer I had to design the game on paper first.  I am the sort of person who writes things down rather than simply jumps in and gets started.  Planning, preparation is very important.

So at the beginning of the year I put together a design on paper.  

Many sheets of paper.

Much of the design changed over time but the core idea remained the same throughout and much of the interface and back end is still very strongly based on the ideas that came out of this design process.  

Also - the budget was included in these documents. I sat down and worked out how much I believed it would cost me. I was fairly off in some cases but all in all I've kept close to the budget I indicated at the beginning of the year.  Whether I've gone over or not depends on whether I include a handful of costs that were 'bad expenses' or items that weren't used in the end (such as a library of classical music that I bought a licence for).  

Here are some sample documents in the design.  I have approximately 200 pages of notes that went into the making of this game.

Four Ship Types

Fleets in Star Dancer have a maximum of 16 space ships per fleet, much like a game of Chess.

There are 8 Fighters, and lesser amounts of Bombers, Cruisers and the Capital ship.

Fighters are easily destroyed but with researched firepower and good AI behaviour settings can cause a lot of grief to larger vessels.

Bombers are very good general purpose craft and can easily take down larger ships but have enough armour to withstand the assaults of smaller fighters.

Cruisers have heavy firepower but are often quite different from faction to faction. Earthhope's cruisers lack anti fighter and bomber capability but carry a lot of beam weaponry for instance.

AioSenti's cruisers are general purpose with a good mix of heavy and light weaponry.

The Capital ship often carries more weaponry than the other vessels but can find itself easily outnumbered - keeping it alive can be quite tricky and if it is destroyed you will wait a long time for it to rebuild - unless you've been researching Economy.

Marketing idea

As an attempt to improve my sales figures (2 sales so far!) I thought that what I would do is make a little 2d javascript game and publish it on a few sites with links within the game to my real game.....the javascript game (so far) is here..... I wonder if that will appear in the post? if not the link is here:

gameplay video 2

Game Play Video 2

Here is another gameplay video with my dulcet tones explaining how to play!

Note the video is supposed to be rotated to the left but Youtube seems to have stuffed it up....I'm trying to rotate it as I type this........

from Matt

Single Player Added

Single Player Mode Added

One of my users put in a request in their rating on Google Play for single player mode or the ability to practice against bots, so I did.

By selecting the option marked "Training" in the drop down menu on the create game option the game will also create 4 other players in the game for you to play against.  

Because of the way battles are pre calculated (and the time they take) I cannot allow the bots to launch attacks against each other or the player but they are able to be attacked and they also perform research and adjust their AI settings from game to game based on the settings of good human players.  

Otherwise the feature is not too different from a regular game.  

Hopefully my user who put the rating in gets to see and enjoy playing against the bots.

In the Lite version the bot is named the imaginative name "AiBot" but in the Full version they have more human sounding names that are based somewhat on the faction theme, eg the "Mars Colony/Russians" have Svetlana, the "Hushami Corp/Japanese" have Tanaka, and so on.

I might do another walk through of how to play, a lengthier one at some point soon I think too with audio - me the developer explaining how to play.