The TurnEngine Blog

Game Types

When you first join a game, two major game types will be available: Casual & Dedicated. Casual games will be a configured to be more beneficial for new players or those who are not able to play regularly. Dedicated games will be configured to be most beneficial for those players who are experienced or able to login daily.

There will also be tournament games regularly for those die-hards who want to challenge for a title and cash prizes. These games will typically be very short and intense, and only a few players can play in each game. A tournament can also be set up at any time between players who wish to do so. These games will take place in very small galaxies.

Casual Game Type

• Longer build times
• Longer movement times
• More expensive and time consuming to hire planetary governers, fleet admirals
• Protection time to allow players to colonise home system
• Defences more powerful
• Large sized galaxy
• All systems are the equal

Dedicated Game Type

• Shorter build times
• Shorter movement times
• Less expensive and time consuming to hire planetary governers & fleet admirals
• No system protection
• Defences less powerful
• Medium sized galaxy
• Neutral systems will have better planets than home systems

Tournament Games

• Intense one-day games, also longer one month games.
• Pay-to-play, premium players only
• Winners receive cash prizes
• Small number of players
• Tiny galaxy

Officials

To control the rate at which players can aquiring planets or create new fleets, officials must be hired to administer them. These measures protect newer players by giving some guarantee that a number of planets will always be available to colonize or even invade. Dedicated players will still be able to aquire planets more quickly than casual players, but not take more than their fair share.

Officials can be hired at any time, if you have sufficient credits. They do take time to hire though as well, so don’t think you can just hire them at a moments notice in time to colonise or invade, you will need to plan in advance.

Planetary Governer

• Hire Planetary Governers to administer Colonies
• Can not colonize or invade without a free governer

Fleet Admiral

• Hire Fleet Admirals to command Fleets
• Can not create a new fleet without a free admirals

One of the most important features of Shadow Wars is the galaxy layout. Rather than the traditional Dark Galaxy ‘anywhere-to-anywhere’ model, the Shadow Wars galaxy has a much more intuitive layout. The basic idea was to restict travel to specific wormholes between solar systems in the galaxy. This makes movement very linear and creates battlegrounds where the major travel route bottlenecks are located.

Writing a system like this seemed relatively easy, but once I started working on the project a few issues came up. The first was linking the systems together. The algorithm i wrote aimed at linking each system to its nearest 3 neighbours. This worked fine, but once i rendered the links on an image an issue was immediately obvious - some of the links crossed each other, messing up the visual experience. To solve it I checked ALL the existing links when adding a new one, not adding it if it crossed any existing link.

The second problem was not only a visual problem, but a show-stopper. If the galaxy was not densely enough packed with stars, isolated collections of stars would be generated, small islands of stars, not conneted to the rest of the galaxy. To solve this I added a special checking algorithm that identified all the islands of stars in the galaxy and connected them together by their nearest systems.

These initial algorithms and a demonstration applet were actually written last year. This code has been pulled out, cleaned, polished and improved, and now its ready to back the new Shadow Wars game. I added a little image-generator utility to the code so i could quickly generate galaxies and play around with the settings. Here are a few of the generated images to give you a little more of an idea of what can been done with the layout.

As there are two factions in this game, take note of the green/red - these colours are there to represent the starting positions of the players in the two factions.

The galaxy systems (including faction colours)

The galaxy systems (including factions & wormholes linking them)

There are quite a lot of options that will allow the galaxy to be made larger or smaller, increase/decrease density and number of lines (wormholes), and number of systems per faction. The above example has 2000 systems, 500 for each faction (red/green) and 1000 neutral in the middle. Here is another example with 600 systems, 200 for each faction and 200 neutral in the middle.

600 systems, 200 for each faction

600 systems, 200 for each faction (only two wormholes per system)

I’ll play around with the settings, perhaps make a really crazily large one and a tiny one for fun

A lot of people have been asking if we are working on anything specific, and the answer is, well, yes.. Yes we are.

ShadowWars was originally slated to replace DarkGalaxy as a dominant Space Based Strategy, we’ve taken what could be defined as a lot of the problems with the DarkGalaxy game play, and tried to improve on them as much as possible, resulting in a game which is much easier to pick up and play, and is more balanced. Below I’m going to list a few of the features, and attempt to explain the reasoning behind them. Please note: All information provided here is subject to change during game development.

Endless Gameplay

One of the things that gets frequently brought to our attention about DG, is the inability to complete games due to the turn limit, one of the first things we want to do with ShadowWars is just give an end condition of “total annihilation”, and leave the game running permanently until this occurs. This has been made possible with faction based game play (see below), and allows games to last weeks / months maybe even years if people continue to fight the good fight.

Faction Based Gameplay

One of the bigger problems in DG is the ability for a single large alliance to just dominate, the goals were to get as many good people into your alliance as possible, resulting in what could be defined as ’superpowers’ in the universe, if any small alliance stepped in the way, they were trodden on, and newer players to the game were having difficulties getting any sort of foothold without submitting to them.

The concept behind factions, is that there are only two opposing sides fighting against each other. The concept of alliances will still remain inside the greater faction, but you can only war against those on the other side. This essentially allows for ’squads’ of people forcing their way forward (see Navigation below) and working together towards the end goal. We will be looking to add bonuses for working in an alliance, so it’s not something to be completely ignored, but those at this point are changing frequently. This allows players to not only go lone-wolf if they choose, but it gives them a chance to make an impact in some way.

Linear Navigation

The change to navigation is quite substantial, we will be moving from the current system, and making something new and shiny. We’re basing the entire game in a single galaxy, which happens to be dark (just a coincidence :p). We’re running around the idea that to get from A->C, you have to go through B. Each system will have several planets, and at least one ‘SpaceGate’ (Name subject to change) connecting it to nearby systems. You will go through the gates, travel across a systems, then go out the gate on the other side, then rinse / repeat until you’ve reached your destination. To make things interesting, it will be possible to place fleets on either end of the gate, and have them ambush opposing fleets coming through. This adds an interesting dynamic to the game, as due to navigation paths, there may be some key systems which should be defended to the best of their ability, but at the same time, the opposing faction will be working together to destroy your block and exploit it as a good entrance into your territory. This is where teamwork comes into play heavily, the fighting will be a tense back and forth in the center of the galaxy.. Oh, and to add to the fun, there will be no homeworld protection, it will take a LONG time to get back there and the journey will be full of peril, but flanking them would be hugely beneficial to your faction!

At the end of the day, pictures speak louder than words, so there are some example images of something that’s been worked on. Again, this is FAR from complete, it’s more of a test application which we’ve been playing about with, but should give you a reasonable idea of what i’m talking about. Click the thumbnails to expand them.

Simplified Gameplay

To help keep new players participating in games, the game mechanics are going to be easier to understand, to that end, we hope to drop the number of resources down to two (maybe three), but there will be no location population, and we’ll also be doing away with research. Game cues will prompt users on how to do things, and a UI featuring more modern web technologies (for example, drag and drop) will allow the user to do things like edit queues easily and efficiently. We will also be dropping the number of combat ready ships to a handful, and adopting more of a ‘rock-paper-scissors’ approach to combat, but maintaining enough depth for the hard-core strategists to put their skill to use.

Admittedly, there will be a lot of questions / comments about this subject specifically, please feel free to voice them in the comment section, please remember that all comments are moderated to avoid inappropriateness. Thanks for reading

Something I’ve learned (possibly the hard way), over the past few years, is that playing games in a development environment is absolutely no substitute to playing the games against other people, which, at the end of the day, makes a lot of the decisions made personal. I can sit here for hours and say “Yep, they would like this”, but I’ve never really stopped to ask the question “But would they?”.. So, with this in mind, I’m hoping to extend an olive branch back to the community with some posts known as ‘Ask the Players’, where I chuck out general ideas, and you form them into something a little more specific, not only to see if we are on the same page, but to allow the creativity flow both ways. There may be some ideas which your thousands of game play hours may be able to contribute and have taken on board.

To allow for everyone’s voices to be heard, i wont be asking for technical implementations, or for users to produce code (I’ll be handling that myself!), but instead just general descriptions or if you’re feeling creative, a few images, and with a little luck, I’ll be able to generate something which meets most peoples need.

Obviously, I have full discretion on the features / functionality implemented, and may not be able to give feedback on every suggestion, and you may not see every suggestion plugged into the next produced game either, but I’ll endeavour to have the best suggestions implemented in some form or another, so when the new games come along, we’ll have something which is intuitive, accessible and easy to play for everyone.

The first ‘Ask the Players’ will be coming in a couple of days, so stay tuned!