Going to make a SW Turn Based Naval Combat Game

[MKSheppard]

1. The first, and most important step, is concept development. You must determine at the very beginning what it is that you want to do.
2. Next comes research. You will have done a little of this during the concept development stage. At this point you must fill in as many of the gaps in your knowledge as you can.
3. This is what I have dubbed integration. This is where you take all of the research material and your knowledge of game mechanics and integrate it into a prototype game.
4. Now you flesh out this prototype, coming up, in effect, with something that looks remarkably close to the finished game. In some cases, if you're lucky or the phases of the moon happen to be just right, your prototype will be exactly like your finished game.
5. Prepare a first draft of your rules. Many people overlook this step, preferring to keep the rules in their heads for a while longer. They usually come to regret this.
6. This is one of the more difficult steps: game development. This means play testing and changing the game and rewriting the rules and taking a lot of abuse from people who would rather play than design and don't appreciate at all the problems the poor designer has in getting anything done.
7. I call this step blind testing (computer game designers call it beta testing). This is where you take your physical prototype and your written rules and send them out to somebody who can play the game without your presence. This is often very revealing.
8. Editing. This step occurs when all of your blind-testing results have come back and have been integrated into the manuscript. Somebody else should now take over the manuscript and edit it. This also means trying to play the game with all of your final corrections and changes and generally attempting to smoke out as many gremlins as possible.
9. Production. If you are going to publish the game, this is the production step. This is where many things can go wrong. Rules have to be typeset and things can get scrambled about. The art work has to be prepared from your prototype and things can get changed again. There is much potential danger in this phase of game design.
10. Feedback. This step is also extremely critical if you are going to design any more games. This is the feedback step where you must systematically collect feedback from those who play your game to see where you went right and where you went wrong.

[MKSheppard]

The game scale is one hexagon = 75,000 km across.
Each game turn represents 30 seconds of real time.

(this can be altered later to 1 minute of realtime, I'm just laying out
ideas here)

For ships such as Star Destroyers, weapons will not be controlled
individually, like on smaller ships, but in batteries of multiple
weapons ranging in size from 5 to 10 weapons (still open on which
I should go with)

SPEED OF SHIPS:

Speeds of ships will not be a set figure, as in WEG, or traditional naval
wargames. It will be done on a newtonian system, through "Engine
Points" that each craft will recieve every turn.

A ship like the Millenium Falcon would have a HIGH engine point per
turn ratio, along with TIE Fighters, representing it's astounding
accelerative and manuvering capability, while Capital Ships would
have low engine point per turn ratios, representing the fact that
they can go as fast as the fighters, it takes a WHILE to get up to
speed.

SHIELD SYSTEM:

Each Ship/Craft equipped with Shields shall recieve a certain number
of shield points per turn. This can be decreased or increased by
routing more or less power through the shield systems.

Craft/Ships with highly regenerative shield systems shall get more
shield points per turn than slower regenerating ships.

DAMAGE SYSTEM:

Still up in the air; To be announced, but aiming for a realistic damage
simulation with specific areas of the ship damaged...ships will not be
destroyed when all of their systems are knocked out, like other naval
combat wargames. Instead, they will be assumed to be adrift with minimal
power, unless the ship is small enough to be vaporized either by unstable
reaction elements within it's hull (aka Federation Starships) or by sheer
energy transfer (aka a HTL striking a TIE)

[Soulman]

Sounds nice. Good damage moddelling will be a big bonus, a fight between two almost crippled ships is a lot of fun in Starfleet Command and Battlefleet Gothic....

[Robert Treder]

Sounds great!
One question I have is what the scale of battles will be. Will ISDs usually be the largest ships in a battle? Will it be able to scale up and down, so you can play a battle between two corvettes or a battle between thirty cruisers just as well?
Keep us updated, and good luck!

[MKSheppard]

Sounds great!
One question I have is what the scale of battles will be. Will ISDs usually be the largest ships in a battle? Will it be able to scale up and down, so you can play a battle between two corvettes or a battle between thirty cruisers just as well?
Keep us updated, and good luck!

I'm aiming for two versions: A superdetailed version which I will do first, which
has a lot of these "effects" such as individually controlling batteries,
for small battles between 2-3 ships on each side, and a much simplified
version for mass fleet battles....where each ship simply has a combined
firepower rating...sort of like Panzer General

[The Yosemite Bear]

Need a playtester?

[MKSheppard]

Need a playtester?

Yup. Mew.

[The Yosemite Bear]

I remember General Colinoff surrendering Stalingrad easily, just so that my reinforcements could cut off all support and ZOC out all of the SS Elites with my puny conscripts.....

Hope they enjoyed that ruin of a city, for the two turns they held it....

[Aaron2]

Will you set it up for Cyberboard?


Aaron

[MKSheppard]

Will you set it up for Cyberboard?
Aaron

I didn't even know about Cyberboard until you mentioned it......


ISD Pair in Cyberboard

[pellaeons_scion]

Ahh. A glimpse of what may come.
MK, you said you got some games to work in DarkBasic. Would you mind posting them or a link to them so we can have a look?

[MKSheppard]

Ahh. A glimpse of what may come.
MK, you said you got some games to work in DarkBasic. Would you mind posting them or a link to them so we can have a look?

No...all I did was get the program to display those two pictures
on the screen.....

[Sea Skimmer]

Ahh. A glimpse of what may come.
MK, you said you got some games to work in DarkBasic. Would you mind posting them or a link to them so we can have a look?

No...all I did was get the program to display those two pictures
on the screen.....

Given that this project is what, two days old? That’s not to bad.

[The Yosemite Bear]

cool

[pellaeons_scion]

Oops:) I thought you meant you had coded a game in that language
My Bad

Still, thats more coding than I know how to do.

[MKSheppard]

Oops:) I thought you meant you had coded a game in that language
My Bad

Still, thats more coding than I know how to do.

CLS
SET DISPLAY MODE 800, 600, 16
LOAD BITMAP "SDNET.BMP"
WAIT KEY
LOAD BITMAP "TITLE.BMP"
WAIT KEY
SHOW MOUSE
WAIT KEY

That's my program written in DARKBASIC.....

Crude....But I also found a FREEWARE, OPEN SOURCE
program....some screenies of the OPEN SOURCE GAME:



I think I can mod it with enough knowledge into my engine...

[pellaeons_scion]

Cool!
Simple yet easy to understand code. Might be worth me investigating further.
Whats the name of the prog? Be interesting to play around with.

[weemadando]

Chatting with Shep the following proposals are put forth by me:

Multiple layers of the game:

Overview - Fleet movements etc Based on a sector or even galactic map. Say 1 hex is a system...

Strategic - Fleet battles etc, based off Sheps 1 hex = 75,000km

Tactical - For use with starfighter strikes etc... 1 hex = 1-2km

The goal of this is to allow various styles of play. If someone wants to use a large fleet of cap-ships then most, if not all of their battles will be in the Strategic level. But if someone wants to "wolf-pack" lonely vessels with snubfighter raids, then they can use Tactical level gaming to get the most out of their fighters.

[Setzer]

When you say "absolute n00bie" what exactly do you mean, any experience with game creation or even game modding or just completely new to it all?

When I was a kid I used to program stuff in BASIC from this magazine
on my old tandy, so I'm not a total noobie to programming

...

I've made mods for XCOM which involved hex editing, etc

But if you mean building a computer game from the ground Up, yes, then
I'm a noobie

If and when you finish it, will it be free?

[Andras]

Are you familiar with FASAs Leviathan for Renegade Legion? It was FASAs version for SW before WEG got the nod. They even had a( 2d,turnbased) computer game for the fighter version Interceptor.

[Sea Skimmer]

When you say "absolute n00bie" what exactly do you mean, any experience with game creation or even game modding or just completely new to it all?

When I was a kid I used to program stuff in BASIC from this magazine
on my old tandy, so I'm not a total noobie to programming

...

I've made mods for XCOM which involved hex editing, etc

But if you mean building a computer game from the ground Up, yes, then
I'm a noobie

If and when you finish it, will it be free?

It would be a felony for him to charge for the game.

[Robert Treder]

Actually, he can charge for time and materials, but he can't make a profit.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Yup, but since I have playied leviathian I am remembering the game quite well and have slipped into rabid wargammer mode.

[EmperorMing]

Are you familiar with FASAs Leviathan for Renegade Legion? It was FASAs version for SW before WEG got the nod. They even had a( 2d,turnbased) computer game for the fighter version Interceptor.

I had all three Renegade game systems at one point; couldn't find any players..

One of the reasons I was saying do a mod first; get the basic feel for it and push the system you are currently modding; then come up with your own engine.

And yes, I have played SBF and SFC. Sci-Fi naval battles hold a certain fascination for me...

[Typhonis 1]

Ever play Knight Hawks for Star Frontiers?