We had another Utah Indie Game Night down at BYU this past Thursday. I had lots of people looking at my game, which means I got a lot of feedback, which was great. But it also meant I didn’t get to see anyone else’s game, which was unfortunate.
In watching people play I came to the conclusion, again, that the interface needs work, also it was way too hard, but I think that’s primarily since I had a lot of enemies. As I was watching, I noticed that the strategy seemed to mostly be waiting for the enemies to come to you, then doing a little bit of maneuvering to keep them within your firing arcs. I paid close attention to how I was playing it as well,, and noticed the same thing, not a lot of movement. The ships just kind of pull up next to each other, and start slugging it out.
So I spent some time watching space battles from various sci fi properties on Youtube, and I noticed that in battles between capital ships they fight the exact same way. Almost always it was the two opposing sides moving their ships into range of each other, then just sitting there shooting each other. What makes the battles interesting is that they have lots of smaller ships, like fighters, flying around through the battle like WWII planes dog fighting. But I’m really having the big ship to ship combat be the focus of the game, so I’m going to have to find a way to make it more interesting.
Something I noticed with Steam Birds is that a lot of the interesting stuff is trying to get behind the enemy, because they can’t shoot you, and it’s hard for them to shake you off their tail. Another big Steam Birds strategy is staying out of the enemy firing arcs, it really affects your entire strategy. In Flame Warrior the back of the ships tend to have very weak armor, shooting a ship in the back will make it explode pretty quickly. Of course nobody realizes that, and the ships just rotate too much for that knowledge to be any good. They move around so much that any shots at the back are just based on luck. The fast rotations also make it difficult to stay out of their firing arcs.
So I’m actually wondering if slowing the ships down would make the combat more tactical, it would probably make things more predictable, which I think is another big part of the problem. The enemy ships move a lot, and it’s hard to predict what exactly they are going to do, which makes tactical planning almost impossible. I think a part of the problem is that ships that handle with more realistic physics are something we just aren’t used to seeing. Usually in the movies the big ships move like water based battleships, and the fighters move like airplanes, so that’s kind of how people expect these ships to operate, but they don’t. At least not usually, they can behave that way, it’s a simple matter of having the ship rotate as it turns to always face the direction it’s moving. Since I added smaller thrusters all over this ship this doesn’t even violate the physics.
I feel like that robs the game of some of it’s uniqueness. But then there really isn’t any point in being different just to be different. If it doesn’t add anything to the game, then there really isn’t any reason to violate people’s intuitive sense of how the ships should be moving. I almost wondering if I should have the ships mostly move like sea-ships, but have some special maneuvers that could only be preformed by a ship in space. At the moment the game does have those, but the player kind of has to manually execute them, having the ship rotate while moving, then really turn on the thrusters to make a quick turn, etc. I’m thinking that maybe I should give the ships a button that said ‘rotate while moving then accelerate in the opposite direction’, and when they press the button the ship executes the maneuver. That might work, I’ll just have to figure out how to implement it in a way that makes sense.
Well, nothing for it I suppose but to spend a lot more time play testing and figuring out what works and is fun.