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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Dev Diary: Space RPG - Definitely not Star Trek.
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| Malibu Senior Member  Joined: 07/07/2018 Location: AustraliaPosts: 259 |
Brilliant, loving this... You gotta be proud!  edit: Is there 'too close' a range to fire, one that causes your own ship damage/sheilds depletion? ... maybe even a 'set ramming speed' command for desperate times? just a coupla suggestions  Edited 2025-01-14 14:06 by Malibu John |
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PeteCotton Guru  Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
Thank you. And I like both of your suggestions. Because I'm using a slight variation on the inverse square law for the phaser damage (i.e. exponentially more damage the closer you are), firing at point blank range does a lot of damage. Having "blow back" on the player's shield would help balance this tactic out. Thanks! Edited 2025-01-14 14:16 by PeteCotton |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
I'm having an absolute whale of a time designing this game. While ruminating on things this weekend, I recalled a game that I haven't thought about for 25 years. Back in 1997 I bought a PC game called "Battlecruiser 3000AD" which promised to be amazing. A bit like my game, this game allowed you to customise and control a huge starship. The cover said that it was better than Elite (high praise), and various magazines had given it outstanding ratings. I couldn't wait to get it home and play it.   ...and it was an absolute nightmare. It kept crashing. I persevered for a number of nights, but eventually consigned it to the shelf (and possibly scrap heap), bitterly disappointed, and cursing the developer for releasing such a terrible game. I haven't thought about it since. But now that I'm looking back and reading the developers story - it turns out that he was against the release of the bug ridden version - but the publisher did it anyway. I feel guilty for maligning the indie developer now.  He released a bunch of bug fixes for it, and it's now available in an updated version on steam. It's an interesting view on the indie developer world. https://dereksmart.com/2018/10/bc3k-is-22/ Edited 2025-01-15 03:11 by PeteCotton |
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LeoNicolas Guru Joined: 07/10/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 498 |
This feeling is the best part of making a remake for these old games. It brings us back old memories. I love it Pete. We didn't have time to have a coffee together... If you want, I'm back to Canada next weekend |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
You are right! Are you anywhere near Airdrie/Calgary? I would love to meet up. |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
I've been working on the ship floor plans. One of my core memories of seeing Traveler (an old 80's space RPG) stuff printed in magazines, was the individual ship floor plans. So, I wanted to immerse the player in my game by giving them different floor plans for each ship model. I also really want to give them a huge selection of ships (and prices) to choose from. My first attempt - was - er, a bit rubbish. (See below). I used the existing 10x20 font and Max-SCII characters.  I decided to create a new 20x20 font for the floor plans. I really wanted the player to have the option of installing and upgrading ship components. So the floor plans now have dedicated squares that are designated for weapons, cargo, crew or systems, which the player can select and install various components on. In the image below, you can see the icons for the crew, cargo, and systems. The icons in the left column are the empty icon for that type (on the floorplan) - then the player can install a matching system on top of it. i.e. If you select an empty cargo slot, you can decide if you want to pay to convert it to general cargo, gas storage, temperature controlled cargo (for food and medicine) or torpedo storage.  Different components will affect the weight of the ship (and therefore it's speed and maneuverability). This gives the player the option of how they want to play the game. Do they build a light fast ship with few weapons and no storage? Do they build a luxury passenger liner and make money ferrying people around, or a slow cumbersome heavily armed dreadnaught? By building a formula based on the ship floor plan, I don't have to sit down a calculate each ships stats. I can just draw the floorplans and auto calculate the ships stats and cost straight from that - vastly reducing my workload. I did think about adding the option for the player to completely edit their own floorplan. But I think that would be game breaking, as people would just design the minimum floorplan with no corridors, and max weapons. I want to be able to curate the plans, so that they all have something to offer. There will still be vast scope for the players to customise the ships by swapping out the various components and upgrading them. Having said that, I am going to make it so that you can add ship designs to the game (loading from a "ships" sub-folder), so if you do want to try your hand at ship-design - you can. But it's not part of the core game experience. Back to the floorplan graphics, and I've tidied things up, and added some logic to darken the space outside the ship. But this confuses the graphics that are part space, part hull. So I need to put a bit of logic to change the background colour if it's on the outside of the ship.  Now, it's starting to look at lot more like the Traveler plans I remember (see image below). I've also added firing arcs for the weapon mounts in red. This ship design would be one of the larger (and more expensive) ships available. I'm working on the principal that each grid square is 2 metres x 2 metres. Which makes this ship 62m x 22m (for our American members, that's is about the length of 3 blue whales ). The ship below is the sort of starting ship players will begin the game with. This ship is only 12m x 7m (about the length of a large anaconda in U.S. measurements).  Keeping the ship compact, made me come up with another game mechanic. Engines now generate power, which can be assigned to movement, shields and/or weapons. But larger ships can also have separate power generators, which supplement this power, allowing you to shoot faster, move and have full shields. I'm trying to make sure the game mechanics mimic common sense, so that although there maybe some quite complex maths going on in the background, the player doesn't need to worry about that - they can play around configuring their ship until it matches their needs. Edited 2025-01-23 08:58 by PeteCotton |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
I've been thinking about the name again. Much as I love Star Trader and Star Defender and those sort of things, I feel I'm straying away from the original intent of the game - which was to reproduce (and upgrade) the old 70s'/80's Star Trek ASCII game. While I'm going to steer clear of stepping on CBS/Paramount's IP (so no Klingons, Romulans etc.), I still don't want to sever that nostalgia link completely. So, it's back to the original name of Mascii-Trek.  I also want to include box art, manuals etc. as part of the program (accessible from the Escape-Menu) so that the player really feels like they're back in the day, when programs came with lots of goodies inside the box. The player will have a choice between what sort of media they want shown in the pack, whichever tickles their nostalgia the most - cartridge, tape, 3.5" floppy, 5.25" floppy, Sinclair Micro-drive, and the rather unusual 3" floppy diskette (I loved my 6128 - so this is definitely going to be an option). Here's the 3.5" floppy.  If anyone is curious, the logo was generated from this site: https://www.textstudio.com/logo/neon-cyberpunk-text-effect-1735 |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
While we are on the subject - which sounds better Mascii-Trek or Maxscii-Trek? I'm on the fence. It's easy for me to update the renders above. |
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| Malibu Senior Member Joined: 07/07/2018 Location: AustraliaPosts: 259 |
Edit: I was at work today, pondering Life, the universe, etc... and over my lunch-break my tangent working brain touched on your game design, and I had a strange idea for the game play. As a suggestion (if you're still going down the 'Not Star Trek' path), maybe have a fearsome foe that can pop into the battlefield randomly (Re: think of a Borg ship with a sub-space transport drive) With massive amounts of weapons fire needed to destroy it, maybe you could even (temporarily) assign game control to ALL the ships in the area to combine the efforts for destruction of that single entity. It might give the player one of those unexpected, exciting gaming moments of a 'do-or-die' outcome. A hair-brained idea that might be fun Just a thought... Edited 2025-02-04 16:45 by Malibu John |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
Sorry for the late reply, been a bit of a hectic week. I really like this idea, and it kind of ties in with my thoughts that I want to give more "depth" to the game. I don't want it to be a repetition of "fly around and shoot bad guys". I have an outline of the bad guys - who are called Karathians - definitely not Klingons - they're Karathians - a warrior like race, with bumpy foreheads and a taste for Phlebotomist wine.....  . They are the big bad wolf in the game - a brutal occupying force who outgun everyone else.I want there to be situations where the player can help out other races through various missions etc, and then, when the player is in a pinch - they can call in that favour. Maybe in a fight with a huge Karathian dreadnaught, the player calls in all of these races that they've helped, and they all all warp in for a huge battle. But the point is that you can play this card at any time - but only once. Then you have to build up a new "friend list" before you can call on them again. I love that you are coming up with these exciting ideas - thank you. I really want to build on this more "depth" idea, with these sort of game mechanics. I love my space sims (Elite, X4, etc.), but most of the missions end up being very similar (pick up this package and deliver it to planet X). In contrast to that, one of the games I loved back in the 1990's was Privateer II (The Darkening). It had an involved plot that felt significant. I would like to replicate that. I'm hoping to introduce some sort of text adventure RPG style missions when you are docked at space stations, so that you can haggle prices, and maybe do something significant to help/or hinder the rebellion against the Karathian occupiers. But it won't just be a one trick pony of you helping out the rebellion. Maybe you cast your lot in with the Karathians and crush the rebel scum, or work for the giant corporation that has their own star system, or aid the Synth world who have been oppressed for decades, or run illicit goods for the family (definitely a legitimate business and not criminal in any way). |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
While digging through the history of the original Super Star Trek, I came across this interesting article. https://emabolo.com/article/super-star-trek-meets-star-trek-25th-anniversary What I find interesting about this article is that I feel it parallels my own experience of writing the game - which is that it will never be finished. I am sure there will be a working version - but there is always going to be room for that little tweak here and a tiny wee tune up there. |
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Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7341 |
Programs are very rarely completed. Programming can stop for any of a number of reasons: The time deadline has been reached and it has to go on sale or made "live". The platform has run out of resources. The source has become lost or corrupted. The programmer has been interrupted by life in the real world. It was considered a good idea to switch to a different programming language. (It never is). Someone forgot to pay the electricity / phone / ISP bill and lost access to it. All the usual fire, flood, alien invasion stuff. The programmer just got bored. Probably umpteen more that I can't think of at the moment. :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
I think that's what I'm enjoying about writing this game. There is zero pressure for me to finish - which ironically means I'm doing quite a lot of work on it, because it's fun. Even today - I'm re-writing the menu system. The current one works fine - but I thought of a much neater way of programming it. This sort of extravagance wouldn't be justifiable if somebody was paying me to do this - but it's my time to waste - and I like the process of tweaking and refining. This exercise/project has been an absolute god-send for my mental health. Truth be told - it's not even that great of a game. But I don't care. I'm reliving my childhood with the home computer that 12 year old me could only have dreamed of. |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7341 |
When I was a kid I used to *dream* about owning a computer. lol! At that time they were big steel cabinets with terminals plugged in, paper tape and mysterious washing machines. Well, I thought so. I finally did own a computer, but I was 27 by then and it was nothing at all like that. :) It was 11" x 8" with a Z80, a PIO and a UART, I had to build it myself and also make my own power supply because that was an optional extra and cost too much! Now I'm designing PCBs on a system that is probably not far off the power of a few of those early cabinets put together. And I have the same trouble in hardware - the PCBs are never *really* finished. There's always one one tweak... :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
Nascom 1? |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7341 |
It was indeed. :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
Nice. I have very fond memories of pouring over the electronics and radio magazines my dad would bring home in the late 70's (there were no computer mags), and reading all of the little programs that people had written for the Nascom and the UK101. It seems so simple now (finding the first 100 prime numbers, Tic-Tac-Toe etc.) - but it was an exciting taste of the potential that home computers had. I had no idea as to the constraints of any computer - in my imagination they were magical machines that could do anything. ... and I've literally just noticed your Nascom link in the footer of your post... wow - my wife is right - I am unobservant  Edited 2025-02-10 04:13 by PeteCotton |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7341 |
I spent hours and hours on that machine. And way too much money on expansion! By the time the Nascom-2 became available I couldn't afford it. I have a couple now (I think one still works, I know one doesn't. There might still be a third of unknown condition in a box. Strange... I was only thinking the other day... LD HL, <start of source block> LD DE, <start of destination block> LD BC, <number of bytes to copy> LDIR On exit DE holds the address of the last byte copied +1 and BC contains 0000 And I don't think I've programmed a block copy in Z80 assembler for 40 years. It might even be right. :) Of course, until I had a (probably pirated) tape of ZEAP I had no assembler. It was all hex codes. 3E n was load A,n C9 was return. C3 hh ll was a jump CD hh ll was a call I'm having to think. Not used this info in ages. It wouldn't surprise me if I got these wrong. lol NasSys lived at 0000 BASIC (if you could afford the ROMs and a board to put them on) was at E000 IIRC There was something at D000... NasPen? can't remember now. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 490 |
Wow! You've got a great memory (pun intended). I struggle to remember what I had for lunch yesterday. |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7341 |
When you've entered a few thousand bytes of hex, especially into a system with a lousy editor, you get to remember a few of them. :) NASBUG (and T4 IIRC), the early editors, had a line editor. All you had were Delete, Backspace and Enter. You had to type in the address of the byte you wanted to change. Each time Enter was pressed the address incremented to the next byte automatically. Sheer luxury! NasSys, originally written for the Nascom-2, had a proper screen editor with cursor keys so you could display a block of memory and edit anywhere on screen. The Nascom-1 didn't even have the cursor keys, you had to add them if you wanted to use NasSys. The Nascom-2 also had BASIC in ROM. A proper Microsoft BASIC c/w line numbers that you can still get. In fact, you can get the source listing for it I think. You needed some quite severe hardware hacking to get a Nascom-1 to run that BASIC. It didn't even have enough address lines decoded and had no ROM sockets apart from the two taken up by NasSys (which you had to have in order to edit BASIC). I'm afraid my meanderings are way off topic now. Sorry Pete. :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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