The TurnEngine Blog

Hi all,

Firstly, I need to apologise for the general ’silence’ coming out of TE HQ as of late, real life, jobs and a lack of time have caused us to somewhat neglect the blog here a little bit, but never fear, we’re still progressing.

So, onto news! Firstly, happy new year, hope you all had a good holiday season.

Progress on ShadowWars has slowed a little recently, I know Zedd is activly working on the nuts and bolts, and I’m progressing with the frontend UI, unfortunately, it’s a lot of boring technical stuff, mostly internal code which handles part of the game and backend/frontend communication.

A lot of work has recently been put into error handling, and simplifying the ability to debug problems, if you end up doing something wrong, you’ll get a very specific reason as to why in an attempt to avoid situations where an action seems to make sense, but doesn’t work without you knowing why.

Zedd has also been working on and tweaking the combat system, trying to get the maths to make sense and work properly which he’s been having some fun with.

That’s all for now, hopefully we’ll try and keep everyone a little more updated in future.

All the Best — Frosty

With the Alpha approaching, I have nailed down the core concepts and will give you a preview of everyone’s favourite … Combat!

Space Combat

The most common type of combat is Space Combat. This occurs any time two fleets from opposing sides end a turn at the same location. Unlike Dark Galaxy, combat has been scaled down for the casual version, with only three combat-capable ships.

Fighter

The fighter is the cheapest and most numerous ship. It is very fast, but does little damage with its dual lasers. Its primary roll is to intercept and destroy opposing Bombers and Fighters. It can be used to attack larger ships, but will only be effective at destroying them in sufficiently large numbers.

Bomber

The Bomber is the most important of the combat ships. Its purpose is to destroy large ships. Although similar in size and speed to a fighter, bombers are equipped with nuclear torpedoes capable of destroying even the largest ships. They are however significantly more expensive than fighters, so should be protected with fighters of their own.

Battleship

The Battleship is a very large and expensive ship. Heavily armoured, the battleship is armed with an array of flack cannons. These weapons are particularly important as they not only fire at incoming fighters and bombers, but can target and destroy the nuclear torpedoes launched from the bombers. A fleet with one or more battleships is very well protected, and any opponent should think carefully before attacking it.

Defence Platform

The orbital Defence Platform is not a ship, as it can not move from its home planet, however it is a critical addition to space combat. Those wishing to protect their planets more effectively can build defence platforms. Like battleships, the platforms are armed with flack cannons, making them an important part of any planetary defence.

Invasion

Once a planet has lost all its orbital defences, it can be invaded. To add an interesting twist to invasion over the version in Dark Galaxy, more effective defences can now be constructed on a planets surface.

Soldiers

The Soldier is a powerful, biologically enhanced, technolgically advanced war machine. Although they are the only units that can be used to invade a planet, they can also defend planets them too. They are slightly more effective at defence than attack.

Defence Tower

The Defence Tower provides a more powerful defence against invasion, however it can not move from the planet on which it is built. It is very heavily armoured and draws power for its laser cannons directly from the colony fusion grid.

Overkill

Already mentioned previous, overkill is being introduced in Shadow Wars. With the addition of more effective defences, comes the ability to completely overwhelm them, dramatically reducing their effectiveness. Although it needs careful balancing, overkill will allow a fleet or invading/defending force that outnumbers the opposition by a significant factor to gain a bonus in combat.

Well I’d better get back to it. Progress has been slow recently due to a few technical hitches, however things are still moving forwards at a respectable pace.

Cheers,

Zedd

Firstly, I’m sorry for the general quietness around here recently, we’re working on a lot of stuff under the hood which is just generic and boring, coding is hard work and we’re putting together all the important parts which have mostly been described already.

We’re really happy with our current progress, we have spent a lot of time discussing how we want things to behave and the best way to implement that which is simplest to the user, and ensuring that we individually decide how components are going to work before actually implementing them, which is giving us a strong image of how the game is going to play, and it’s going to be great!

I’m going to be spending some time today discussing actual design concepts for visuals over actual implementation of features, this does unfortunatly mean SCREENSHOTS (are you happy now?)!

The header design has gone through *MANY* iterations over recent weeks, starting off with a single design and moving forward to what you’re going to see at the end (no cheating and scrolling to the bottom).

The first version of the header was made by Zedd, and is below (remember, not the final version :p)

Obviously, looking at this post you can see the general goal of having ‘cut away’ edges and a lot of gradients to help create a ‘futuristic’ and appeasing idea.

The general issue with this is the amount of space it used, on a 1024×768 screen, it leaves very little room for actual game content. The general concensus was it needed to be simplified but still contain the same content.

I personally thought the title bar with the Shadow Wars logo was gorgeous (but not the actual logo itself!), It had a darkness too it and a smooth design, but seemed far too empty. The first thing i decided to do was move the buttons up there and introduce them into the bar (I don’t have a screenshot of that anymore), This didn’t look right, other than the incredibly small size of the buttons to make them fit right, fonts became illegible, and the blackness of the buttons themselves interfered with the smoothness of the bar itself.

The next step i took was to resize the bar and place the buttons *BEHIND* the bar and allow for it’s opacity to ‘wash’ over them.  This fixed the issue with the buttons looking bad, but resulted in the rest of the bar not really being justifiable for the logo. The final solution was not to resize the bar, but instead, have it expand around the icons.. Introducing some of the ‘corner cuts’ of the design so far, progress was made (I recoloured the ‘active’ button as well)!

Both myself and Zedd concluded that this was a much nice approach, it gave the title bar more meaning and removed the need for the large box underneath for navigation.

The issue now remained, what about the ‘user’ box? we discussed moving this to the left hand side of the content, but it shouldn’t really be something that has a lot of focus. When you are logged in, you know you are logged in, and the only part which is important is mail / news / credits, but they are not important to warrant a lot of screen space! The second idea was to attach the box to the right hand side of nav and trim it a bit, but we found that a box there not only killed a lot of space, but it also didn’t quite feel right along side navigation (It’s not nav, so why is it in the nav box?!). After several attempts to place it anywhere else, we decided to attach it as a ‘low profile’ yet separated box along the main header, and place the turns there too.

There would be a screenshot here, but apparently Word Press doesn’t want to attach it, click here to view it

Everything is clearly evident, We decided not to put turn info into user box because they are considered two separate entities, the choice to keep the bars at different lengths allowed us to break the ‘flow’ a little, to emphasise the detachment and remove some of the symmetry which was in the site.

The last thing to focus on was the logo, as seen in earlier pics, marginal effort had been put into it, and with the new ‘condensed’ header it doesn’t fit very well. After several hours scouring the net for a font which fits, I found one that emphasises the arbitrary corner cuts, and fits well in with the design, add a little transparency, give it a light gradient and place it over the moon, and we have a logo, and a completed header.

When designing a site, one of the hardest parts is making the design fluid, coloured using a specific colour set (here we work on gold, black, and shades of blue), and ensuring everything gets the importance it requires, placing emphasis on something which isn’t really important to a user will result in a bad experience, but there has to be a balance. Dominating a page with something that is important can sometimes backfire and make the experience work. Following pages has to be simple, and not obscure, you need to know where you are and what you’re doing, sometimes that can be simply achieved, but sometimes it requires more effort.

Until next time, stay cool :p

–
Craig “FrostyCoolSlug” McLure
Shadow Wars Developer

I often find myself asking the question, ‘What is innovation?’, the actual definition is ‘The act of introducing something new.’ which is as unhelpful as it could possibly be. Innovation to me is the act of creating something that breaks out of the boundaries of what exists already.. But is that always possible?

My main project over the last couple of weeks has specifically been the mail system, arguably one of the most important features of any game, the home of communication and team work, bringing people together for the common good of the galaxy, as simple as this may sound, it is indeed no small task.

I’ve done a lot of research into the matter, and created several prototypes each behaving in entirely different ways, I’ve tried the ‘Split Panel’ approach (the concept of clicking on a mail and reading it immediately below), I’ve tried threading views with a full collapsing tree of Subject -> Replies -> Mail, I’ve tried ‘New Window’ techniques, and all of them with their own distinct benefits have quite a few flaws as well.

I’ve reviewed 10 different mail clients (some harder to uninstall than others!), 15 different mail websites, eventually realising that simplicity is best, the easiest mail clients to use had very simple yet powerful interfaces. For Shadow Wars we aren’t looking for folder views, extensive filtering systems, multiple window reading or sophisticated spam management, we’re looking for a very simple read and reply system.

This got me turning back to the previous DarkGalaxy system, excluding the bugs, this was a reasonable solution, and can be easily tweaked and improved to fit a new game. Add styling to easily determine read from unread, attach the ‘Notifications’ as mentioned in my previous blog post, include some nice features like simple BB Code for formatting, mail forwarding etc. And you have a powerful mail client.

Innovation is a powerful word, it conjures up thoughts of creativity and stepping outside the box, but on a few occasions after doing the research and demos, you may feel that you’re standing a few miles from said box, when it wasn’t a bad box to start with!

One of the first things which needs to be considered when designing an interface for a web-based game is the architecture of the display. I’m going to use DarkGalaxy as a place for comparison as it’s something most of you are familiar with and can hopefully relate to.

One word which is being constantly thrown around TE HQ is ’simple’. A lot of ideas and plans get thrown out at the drawing board simply because they are too complex, not from the development side but instead from the usability side, but how do we evaluate this? It comes down to a few simple rules:

• How many clicks will it take to perform the action?
• Will the action interfere with the users current objective?
• Will a user need prompts and tool-tips to understand the concept?
• How long will the action take to perform?
• Is there any unnecessary input required?
• Is it easier to have multiple browser windows to handle this task?

These points may seem pretty obvious, but unless you specifically analyse each one before development begins, you may end up wasting time at a later date trying to improve behaviour, or possibly worse, leaving it as it is.

Lets take the following scenario as an example, I’ve just received an important mail which I have to read immediately. I’m currently in the middle of organising a planet, lets look at the DG way of handling this:

1. You spot the Mail text highlighting in the top right corner
2. You click it
3. You find the mail which you just recieved
4. You open it, and reply if nessecery
5. You hammer the back button to find the planet you were at, or go via. the Planets list

This is somewhat considered the ‘Standard’ way of handling mail, and I’m sure you would forgive us for following this methods for Shadow Wars, but lets look at our criteria, We have 5 or 6 clicks (including returning to the start point), you loose your spot during planet management, the prompt for a new email is vague (lack of info as to who mailed you from the initial look meaning you cannot spontaneously decide whether to ignore it), including page loads it can take a few minutes to reply, and it’s mail, so there isn’t any unnecessary input. In most cases it’s easier to have a separate browser window to handle mail.

So we spend some time taking a closer look at this, looking for ways to streamline the process and make it more accessible. One of the solutions is as follows:

• A notification window appears in the bottom right of the screen telling you who the email is from, and the subject (as well as the standard ‘Mail’ button update)
• If you click on this, an ‘in-page’ dialog window pops up across the current page with the mail details and reply options
• The dialog has a little close (and possibly minimise) button in the top right which allows it to close or hide the mail taking you immediately back to your original position

With those small steps, we’ve significantly simplified the ‘dynamic mailing’ procedure, and have given the user the ability to easily interact with mails, as well as the choice to easily ignore them if they lack importance. It will still take a moment to download the full email, but you’re receiving content which is directly relevant to what you need (as opposed to having to download the entire mail list).

This hopefully gives you an idea of some of the approaches we are taking to improve the online turn-based experiance, and make Shadow Wars a fun game to experiance and play.

Non-Combat Ships

There are four non-combat ships. The colony ship is important early on in the game, allowing you to expand your colonies to the planets and asteroids surrounding your homeworld. The trading ship provides a means of transferring much needed resouces between those worlds.

As the game progresses and you start to encounter hostile fleets and worlds, you may wish to build up forces to invade those worlds. The drop ship carries troops to invade hostile worlds.

Finally the jump ship is a special ship only worth building later on in the game. It can establish new wormholes between planets. If protected heavily and deployed where most needed, they could easily tip the balance in a long running game.

Colony Ship
- Create new colonies on neutral planets/asteroids

Trading Ship
- Transfer Mass & Energy between colonies

Drop Ship
- Capture hostile colonies

Jump Ship
- Very Expensive
- Establishes Planetary Jump Gate at a Colony
- Can be used to travel to any Planetary Jump Gate in any adjacent system

Colony Types

A planet is large, with the most room to build all the different structures, but has a low abundance of Mass & Energy. An asteroid on the other hand is relatively small with little space for structures, but has a high abundance of Mass & Energy.

Planet
- 80 structure spaces
- Standard mass abundance (+100)
- Standard energy abundance (+100)

Asteroid
- 40 spaces available
- High mass abundance (+150)
- High energy abundance (+150)

Colonization
- Settle uninhabited planets/asteroids
- A single Colony Ship is required to colonize a planet/asteroid
- Must have a Planetary Governer available

Invasion
- Capture Colonies from hostile players
- Fleet must be in the same square as the hostile Colony
- No hostile fleets present in the same square as the Colony
- Only Droids can invade a Colony
- Only Drop Ships can carry Droids in a fleet
- Must have a Planetary Governer available

Inter-Planetary Travel
- Inter-Planetary travel is travel between two locations in the same system.
- Within any system travel time is 4 turns

Inter-Stellar Travel
- Inter-Stellar travel is travel between two jump gates in connected systems.
- Travel time to an Allied system (allied colonies, no hostile colonies) is 4 turns.
- Travel time to a Contested system (allied & hostile colonies) is 6 turns.
- Travel time to a Neutral system (no colonies) is 8 turns.
- Travel time to a Hostile system (only hostile colonies) is 8 turns.