Rainbow Six Siege, single, co-op, & competitive play

This weekend I’ve been playing the (I think) third and (definitely) final Beta before the game releases properly next Tuesday December 1st. I played the previous Beta also but didn’t share my thoughts. I just want to do so today as it follows nicely on from last week’s blog about First Person Shooter campaign modes dying off.

This isn’t a review of the game. The game isn’t out yet (so, technically this would be more of a Preview anyway) and I’ve only seen a fraction of what the game has to offer, so it wouldn’t be fair to judge. However, the fraction I saw was a huge chunk of what the gameplay is, and enough for me to make up my own mind about the game.

The Beta had three maps, which can be played in day or night modes. The final game launches with eleven but more will become available for free download. The Beta’s maps were the artistically-named ‘House’ (which everyone is probably familiar with by now from all the gameplay footage), ‘Kanal’ (it has a big cargo ship in the background but is set on the quays), and ‘Hereford’ (which is the base in the UK where Rainbow Six operate from in the original Tom Clancy novel).

View of the hostage and two terrorists from the small, wheeled, spy bot that all attackers get to use before and during rounds.

The maps didn’t offer much variety for my money. They’re all pretty strong levels, don’t get me wrong, but the gameplay, at least for a beginner, is pretty much the same wherever you are. Breach, clear, try not to get flanked, repeat. Each level will of course have its own quirks and characteristics, and when teams really get used to them and develop preferred approaches, that’s when we’ll see the levels really shine. But for now, I didn’t care which map I was on, which was good because none of the game modes let me choose what level to go to, not even single player!

Lone Wolf mode (Single Player)

This mode was new for the Open Beta. The closed beta a few months ago didn’t have it. When you select “Terrorist Hunt” mode, the game’s 5 player vs AI co-op mode, you can now choose to tackle it as a ‘lone wolf’. I was informed on the menu that the AI are a little less accurate and do a little less damage. I have to say, it didn’t feel like the case.

As I said last week, I prefer to play single player modes, so this was the first one I went to in the Beta. It’s exactly the same as the 5 player co-op mode. There are two bombs to be deactivated and the interior of the level’s buildings are full of enemies. Almost every room has enemies, and when you alert them by shooting, breaking a window, or just being seen, many of them will break out of windows and move around to flank you.

Suffice it to say, this makes the game extremely difficult to play on your own. You really need other players to watch your back. If you go down in co-op mode, there’s a chance that another player will revive you before you bleed out. Not so in this mode. And your health doesn’t recharge like in so many modern shooters (I’m not complaining, but it’s hard in Lone Wolf mode). Every bullet that hits your armour brings you that much closer to death, and you can’t take many hits either. If you’re ever surprised from two angles at once, or ever caught in the open, you’re pretty much done for.

Back to the wall + gun reloading + bomber comes around the corner = dead!

Add to that the heavies who have guns and explosive vests. They’ll charge you down and attempt to explode in your face. They were my most common cause of death. They take so many shots to kill that unless you spot them at the far end of a corridor and have a full clip of ammo, you’ll most often not have time to kill them before they get you. They do at least have a give-away Darth-Vader-breathing kind of sound that alerts you to stay on your toes.

Once I’d learned to allow for all of that, I finally managed to make my way to one of the two bombs on the map that have to be disarmed. These are always located in rooms with multiple entrances. Where there wasn’t an entrance before, there soon will be one. The AI spawn and start attacking from all directions, including second story windows and solid (looking) walls if they have to. As a single operative, it’s almost impossible to survive this stage. Indeed, I never did. If I had, I’d then have to do the same with the second bomb, with even less health than before due to all the bullet-sponging I’d have done at the first bomb site.

This was in ‘Normal’ difficulty. This is the easiest difficulty (go figure). There’s also ‘Hard’ and ‘Realistic’. I’m not a bad shooter player. I’ve twenty years of ‘training’ behind me. But even I couldn’t beat this mode. That said, I was using the default operative, as you have to earn points to unlock better/different operative who may have certain tech that makes the game easier (like heartbeat monitors. Are these real? They were in the original book, so that explains their presence in the game, but they amount to wall-hacking which gets you banned in other multiplayer games… anyway). But every class seems to get those robot spy droids, so it’s not like I couldn’t scout out rooms before getting to them, and still I couldn’t do it. Maybe heavier use of stun grenades might help me avoid those early hits and survive the later stages… hm.. must try again.

You know you don't have to respect his political views because he hides his face. — You know you don’t have to respect his political views because he hides his face.

Another massive criticism I have for this mode is that it still gives you that 30 second timer for multiplayer levels to choose your character and ‘vote’ on your insertion point for the level. If you want to take longer with nobody waiting on you, you should be able to. You also can’t select the game level! I imagine that these things might be patched in the final game, but they’re ridiculous restrictions for now, and when added to the fact that the mode hasn’t really been re-balanced for play by a single person (never mind giving the player AI squad mates of their own), the mode is almost worthless.

Co-Op

This is how Terrorist Hunt is meant to be played. 5 players versus the AI team, securing two bomb sites, covering each other, reviving each other, and using 5 diverse gadgets and abilities to find an optimal way towards the objective.

In theory.

In practice, if you log into a random game, you’re unlikely to find anybody co-operating or speaking to each other, so it kind of becomes like 5 players just thrown into the single player mode. This is typical of any co-op game really. Unless you log in with 4 other friends and agree to co-operate, you won’t be playing the game the way it’s really meant to be played.

If you do have said friends, the party-creation system seems solid, and this could then be a great co-op game to play, but I can’t speak to that yet.

I do like the AI though. They talk to each other intelligently (“move up, move up”, or “I heard a noise in the basement”) and that lets you respond a little to what they’re about to do. They’re also quite intelligent, and I’ve already mentioned how good they are at flanking you.

Multiplayer 5 v 5

This is the real game. This is what Ubisoft intends to become an e-sport and their Counterstrike-beater. The new trailer (above), while not gameplay, does manage to summarise the wide range of gameplay possibilities in a very short amount of time. Give it a watch.

There are modes where the attackers must either rescue a hostage, deactivate a bomb, or just wipe the enemy team. Hostage rescue was missing from the Beta, unfortunately.

The defending team has a short period at the start of each round to fortify doors, set up portable cover and barbed wire, barricade windows, and take positions. There’s nowhere near enough time or equipment to barricade the whole house, so they have to work together to fortify select rooms effectively. Technically, they’re also meant to communicate and decide on their defensive strategies, but you so rarely see any of that. This really is a game designed for serious players and clans.

During this time, the attackers can only control little wheeled spy robots and zip around the level trying to spot where the bombs, hostages, and enemies are. If the defenders see these robots, they can try to shoot them to remove the spy, but they’re hard to hit. The attackers should formulate their attack plan based on the information, but again… sigh..

This cringey, hyper-scripted, uber-rehearsed gameplay video from E3 2014 is how the game is meant to be played.

Quite cool, no? This is how it’s usually played..

“Guys wait! We should plan!” “lalala, can’t hear you! I got this!…. oh.. medic!”

I’ll re-iterate; This game could really be special if you have a small clan to play with. You’ll learn to work together, you’ll have a dedicated shield guy, a hacker, and become a really specialised crew, competing online against other skilled teams (a nice feature is that each of the 20 specialists on offer can only be picked by one player at a time, so you can’t all be the shield guy, and are forced to work together). What Ubisoft intend for the game to be is something really special, but I think most of the people who buy the game will never get that experience.

RealBlast Destruction Engine

As you may have known, or should probably have worked out from the videos by now, the destruction engine is the real star of the show. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Blowing through select doorways is common enough in other games, but in nothing else have I been walking down a corridor, happy enough with life, only to have the dry wall to my right start exploding in on me with random gunfire.

The fact that almost anything can be destroyed, including with simple gunfire or melee strikes, the fact that it all looks good and convincing, and the fact that that destruction effectively changes the layout of the level is what makes this game unique.

It can get fairly chaotic, but it’s far more realistic. It’s a lot more like being in an action movie than a traditional shooting game, at times. I love how, no matter how well you know a level, and what way you’d normally like to approach it, the ways in which defenders reinforce certain walls, or whether enemies are rappelling in from the roof or invading the basement can completely change the feel of the level, giving them all a lot of mileage.

I also love how a stray gunshot could open a spy hole in the exterior wall and your silent flanking manoeuvre could be scarpered by someone catching a lucky glimpse of you.

Plans have to be adapted on the fly, and communication is key. This could make the game great, but I think it also means it’s not really for casual players.

In Summary

I think we’ll see pro players get a lot out of this game (if they migrate from playing Counterstrike), and we’ll see a big e-sports community form around those pro teams. The game is exciting to watch, no doubt! It’s just actually not that fun to play! That’s totally my own opinion (and while Planetside 2 is one of my favourite games, I’m not really one for smaller competitive multiplayer games).

Moreso than other multiplayer game, this one really requires cooperation and communication; something casual gamers aren’t known for. I think the destruction engine is beautiful, and for that reason alone I think it will do well enough on sales to casual players, but I think these same people will tire of the competitive mode and drift into Terrorist Hunt with one or two friends before ultimately moving on. I won’t be one of the ones buying it. €60 is too much for me to drop on a game I don’t actually enjoy playing. I feel I got all I wanted from it in the two Betas. There are so many shooters I can play without spending new money.

If you want a similar single player game (though the destruction will never compare), try the old but fantastic SWAT 4. It’s still not on GOG or any digital outlet so you may have to get creative to find a copy, but do drop GOG a request to get it on their store. You never know. “Squeaky wheels”, and all..

Until next time..

First Person Shooter Campaigns Dying off?

I read an article during the week by Ryan McCaffrey at IGN (video format below) positing that the single-player first person shooter game might be dying off. It’s hard not to agree with Ryan’s points. While the ultimate fate of campaign modes in FPSs hasn’t been decided yet, we do see more and more shooters releasing without single-player modes, or with lame, half-assed campaigns. It’s a while since I’ve played something that really wowed me, and longer still since that was a game that didn’t feature multiplayer.

I just wanted to share my own thoughts on the questions raised by the IGN article, and hopefully get some of yours too. Note that that article and mine both focus on “first person shooters”. Not third person shooters, cover shooters, or first person RPGs. If you want to watch the IGN article before reading on, feel free:

What I love about Single-Player

So I love single player shooters. They’re pretty much my favourite genre (or have been, at least). When I started playing games I didn’t have internet access, and once I got it I was nearly 20 before connections in Ireland near my home were good enough to reliably play multiplayer. I grew up with single-player games and so developed a fondness for ones that draw you in as an individual; whether it’s with great gameplay or story, I don’t really mind. Preferably both!

I’m a gamer with limited time so I like to commit to some sort of journey for 6 – 20 hours and know that it will resolve satisfactorily and let me get back to my life. I’ve less interest in multiplayer games because they never end. You can sink way more time into them and merely wind up frustrated at your defeats or pissed off with hackers, griefers, trolls, n00bs, or just ignorant adolescents with big mouths. There’s also the danger of becoming addicted to the progression systems. I don’t like how I feel about myself when I’m working and I can’t wait to get back to the game just so I can unlock a new scope after about 3 more hours of online play. I’ve done it, mind you, and enjoyed it. There’s some great multiplayer experiences out there, but that’s just why I prefer the single player, anyway.

I’ve been feeling a lot in recent years that my interests are being under-served, as shooters become more and more focussed on online play. Take Call of Duty, for example. The biggest kid on the block! That series started as a WW2 shooter to beat Medal of Honor with the focus on the single player campaign. Multiplayer wasn’t a big genre yet, though the game had it. The campaign story was great! You could play it again and again. The same with CoD 2 and 3, and a few since.. CoD4 (Modern Warfare) had a stellar single player story, but it also had great multiplayer and that’s when the public started flocking to the series in earnest.

While I enjoyed the stories in Modern Warfare 2 & 3, and Black Ops 1, I feel (personally) that less and less time has been going into developing the single player sides of the games. They’re getting shorter and shorter, and the stories worse and worse.

Multiplayer used to be a bit of a sandbox where you take the levels and assets of the single player game and let players have fun with them after they finish the main game. Now it seems like the CoD games are developed the opposite way. More like “oh we need jetpacks and lasers for multiplayer. Cram them into the single player too and try make it make sense”. Ghosts’ story was pretty underwhelming. I can’t accuse them of cheaping out on the Advanced Warfare story (hiring Kevin Spacey and all) but the cracks were really showing in that story too. It just didn’t come together. Most of the marketing now focuses on selling the multiplayer.

The newest game, Black Ops 3, even shipped without the single player mode on Xbox 360 and PS3, proving which half of the game is the priority when compromises must be made. If players on those consoles buy the game anyway then Activision will have their “proof” that players don’t really care about story modes in shooters, as long as they have multiplayer.

The Business

I’m actually surprised that Activision and others haven’t scrapped story modes already. It’s an expensive side of the game to develop, needing the bulk of the writing, voice recording, direction, and set design, all for a mode that most players only get their 6 hours or so out of and then never play again. If players would still buy the game with multiplayer only, a lot of time and money could be saved in producing these annualised titles without single player.

Releasing both seems like splitting attention. I often cringe when I see games that are supposed to be primarily single-player experiences just tacking on multiplayer. Batman: Arkham Origins and Max Payne 3 arguably didn’t need multiplayer, and I’ve heard nobody say good things about them. Money was spent to create half-assed modes and the best reason I can think of for doing this is to justify the ‘full’ price tag. €60/€70 for a single-player only game is probably hard to justify. The same goes for multiplayer-only. Full priced games have usually had both modes, and publishers/retailers want to charge full price, so both branches of a game are usually developed to varying standards. I can’t justify spending €60 on the new Star Wars Battlefront, for instance, because it’s just multiplayer. Where’s my single player? Not to mention that the DLC pass is €50!! I protest! But I digress too..

Alien Isolation could have tacked on a ruinous multiplayer mode and upped their price from €50 to €60 but they stuck with single player only and crafted a masterpiece! Its 20 hours of play also justifies the price tag when compared with 6 hour games for the same money.

Alien Isolation wasn't really a shooter. Like my friend Niall said, the pistol is like — Alien Isolation wasn’t really a shooter. Like my friend Niall said, the pistol is like “throwing Tic Tacs at the alien”. Evasion was the only way to win.

I think it makes the most sense to make either a single player game, a multiplayer game, or some co-op half way point. Not as an absolute rule, mind you, but a developer can focus on making their primary game better, save costs by not developing a secondary side, and still charge 5/6 of the price without batting an eyelid. Battlefront are even charging a premium despite having no single player and a very shallow game overall. We know that developers are very keen to do what makes the most business sense wherever possible (especially the big boys!) so I’m surprised we haven’t seen more devs trimming the fat yet. I do believe it’s coming, though.

We Can Already See The Split

The point the IGN article made was that we are seeing more titles focus on just one side, but unfortunately, that seems to be almost exclusively the multiplayer side, prompting the article on whether single player shooters will become a thing of the past.

Star Wars Battlefront, Titanfall, Evolve, Rainbox Six Siege, and the upcoming Battleborn, LawBreakers, and Overwatch are all multiplayer only (some have some 1-4 vs bots, technically allowing “single” player, but have no story mode).

Even Halo, traditionally both a strong narrative game and a strong multiplayer game, has fallen with the rubbish (my opinion, yes, but come on!) Halo 4 story mode. Halo 5 has now been designed with the story mode focussed on being a multiplayer co-op experience, with squads of 4 in all story missions (I haven’t played yet, correct me if I’m partially wrong).

Halo 5. Master Chief is no longer such a lone wolf.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that single player first person shooters are dying off. I mentioned Alien Isolation earlier, and that’s not even a shooter. Deus Ex is a first person stealth-RPG with guns; not a shooter. Even Fallout 4 isn’t really a shooter, though I won’t argue if you want to treat it as one.

The only (AAA/ high quality/ high-exposure) games I can really place on the scales as honest-to-God single player shooters from recent years are the Metro and Wolfenstein: New Order games. All fantastic, by the way! Play them! They have no multiplayer at all, but instead focus on really high quality campaign modes (and challenge modes in Wolf).

Reasons to include single and multiplayer modes

Plenty of games are still doing both modes, and there will always be good reasons to have single and multiplayer modes. Multiplayer is where most of the time is spent by players, and it’s where developers can make more money with microtransactions or cost-effective DLC. But multiplayer-only worlds like the ones seen in Evolve and Titanfall lack depth and character. Single player modes are needed to lend credibility to a narrative setting and really create hardcore fans. Without emotional investment in the world, the setting is all just white noise. Sci-fi games in particular need single player to make their worlds come to life.

Something something, reason to shoot, don't care! — Something something, reason to shoot, don’t care!

The new DOOM game will have both modes, though how story-driven the campaign will be is unknown. DOOM’s story (and Quake‘s) was traditionally a mere paragraph of text followed by non-stop blasting action until another paragraph at the end.

Battlefield (originally multiplayer only, or single with bots) has had story modes for a while, but let’s be honest, they’re pretty crap. Battlefield 3’s story wasn’t up to much (how do you make nuking Paris lack drama) and my all-time most hated single player game is Battlefield 4. The Bad Company games were good though; humour helps.

The Far Cry games are still strong AAA single player shooters, it must be said, but are also trying to bring in more multiplayer elements with each title. Dying Light deserves an honourable mention as a primarily single player FPS from 2015, though.

The Real Question

Where the hell is Half Life 3?! HL1 & 2 were both total game changers for the genre. What will 3 have to say about all this, if it ever comes out?

Okay, the “Real” Real Question

While it may look like shooters are slowly moving towards being multiplayer-only games, we have to recognise that this creates a vacuum. A shortage of supply of narrative-driven single player shooters will be created, yet demand for these titles will presumably remain pretty steady. All sorts of games are made nowadays, serving all types of interests. While AAA studios have traditionally cornered the markets on shooters (because graphics are very important in first person games, and big studios can afford better graphics, models, and animations), what could smaller studios do with the genre if the bigger developers move on?

We might lose some scope and spectacle if single player shooters start becoming the domain of indie studios (and that will sadden me), but I don’t believe the genre will ever die out. It’s too much a main-stay of the games industry. Also, indies are the ones who take risks and create genuinely interesting new titles. There’s no particular difference between Black Ops 3, Modern Warfare, and Battlefield 3. Nothing major. They all offer the same basic gameplay. We could actually see some great new stuff!

What could indies do if they take over the single player first person shooter genre? Will it ever happen? Will the AAA studios ever totally cut out single player modes and would you stop buying their games if they did? I know I already have, as I’m less and less willing to spend €60 on a crappy 6 hour story when I could just replay Metro or Wolfenstain for my shooter fix.

Please discuss in the comments, anyway.

Until next time..

Making Crow’s Nest (part 4 of 4): “Sons of Sol” & “Crow’s Nest”

I'm still looking for an artist. Can you tell? — I’m still looking for an artist. Can you tell?

Hi! This is Part 3 of me offering some insight into the development of my game, Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest.

In Part 1 I explained my pitch “Asteroids meets Total War”.
In Part 2 I talked about the games that are influencing the design of Crow’s Nest.
In Part 3 I discussed a design challenge that the game faces.

Now we’ve reached the final post of this ‘Making Crow’s Nest’ series. You may recall from Part 1 that these four posts were written together and scheduled to post while I was on some down time. Next week I’ll be back to blogging on more mainstream game topics.

Today I’m talking about what Sons of Sol and Crow’s Nest actually are. This will be a more autobiographical post than normal, so you have been warned. This tale will interweave a little bit with my previous blog on how I got into game development, which I was uneasy about writing but which people seemed to respond very positively to. This won’t be as much of downer, though, promise!

Together, “Sons of Sol” and “Crow’s Nest” are the working title for the game that I’m working on, which is my (and RetroNeo Games’) first game ever. Hopefully there’ll be no need to change those names, but these things happen sometimes in development. Better names come along or products with similar names get released before yours.

An Evil Empire

Sons of Sol actually began in 2012 not long after Disney bought Star Wars from George Lucas. I was a life-long Star Wars fan. The films, games, and especially the books. My brother bought me one of the Expanded Universe (EU) novels in 1997 for my 10th birthday; a Han Solo trilogy one. From then and for the next 15 years, 4 out of every 5 books that I read were probably Star Wars books. I loved how the stories interconnected. I loved that a character could be introduced in one book, and survive fifteen fictional years, then be killed off when you least expect it.

There were a lot of bad books in the Expanded Universe, but far more good ones. I loved how you were rewarded for your time by seeing threads of stories affect each other decades apart. The rebels eventually take Coruscant, Han and Leia have three kids, these kids get dozens of their own books and become their own proper characters, grow to adulthood and war with each other, for example. There’s a book for more than every year of their lives. You can observe their whole character arcs from birth to… well.. if you put the time in. The EU was all internally consistent, and all canon. It all worked together.

There are a few early exceptions and a few game stories that don’t fit, but otherwise the EU really rewarded fans for their time. In 2012 I finished reading to the end of the Star Wars chronology. That’s 40 years of story after Return of the Jedi, not to mention the Clone Wars books and books set between and during the movies. I didn’t read all the books, but read most from the timeline of Episode 1-6 and beyond. None of the Old Republic stuff, though.

Anyway, I felt I’d achieved a monumental reading goal that I set myself in 2007 (before that I’d read the books a little randomly). Five years of reading little but Star Wars, and the stories I got out of it were great. No other franchise could achieve this (well, maybe Star Trek).

Then Disney bought Star Wars, and soon announced that there would be a new trilogy, but that they’d be throwing away all of that canon. The EU didn’t count any more. Timothy Zahn started with Heir To The Empire in 1994. 18 years of work and some great stories now didn’t count because Disney felt there was more money in movies and merchandise.

I’m not naive. I know there is. I know entertainment is a business, but I’m just trying to convey my disappointment at the news. They could have set new movies inside the EU, easily. Instead they threw it away for.. well, we don’t know yet. This blog is posting 1 month before the release of JJ Abrams’ Episode 7. We’ve no idea if the new movies will be good or if the stories will be better than the ones discarded. I’m still totally reserved at the time of writing this.

I also know that I now have two timelines. More Star Wars! Yay! Well, that’s just not how I feel about it. I’m allowed to feel disappointed, particularly after the loyalty I showed the franchise.

A Great Journey

Anyway, also around this time, I moved back to Ireland after unsuccessfully attempting to get a permanent visa in Australia. So I was back in Ireland and unemployed with no decent chances of starting a career any time soon. I decided to start writing science fiction to fill the Star-Wars-shaped hole in my soul (okay, I’m being overly dramatic. I’ll watch it. Sorry).

I was going to write a universe of my own that I would promise to keep consistent with itself. I didn’t believe that this would become a big thing, or even necessarily that I would get a single book published, but it occupied the time.

Building a Galaxy

I started watching tonnes of science fiction movies and documentaries and designing my universe. This took a long time. You have to design whole new physical rules for your world. You have to say “you can do this, but not this” and consider if that statement even makes sense. If you have one technology available, like artificial gravity without rotation, then you have to consider what else you can have. With that, for example, you’re kind of saying that the theory of ‘gravitons’ existing is correct, and that we’ve managed to develop technology to manipulate them. Well, keeping someone fixed to the deck in a spaceship (as seen in almost every sci fi movie and show ever) means that you can cause attraction towards a point. In that case, you can probably cause repulsion in the opposite direction. This would make hover technology a reality. Did I want hover cars and hover crates in my sci-fi? Because if not then I have to solve the artificial gravity problem in another way.

How long does it take to travel from one star system to another? That’s going to have a major impact on stories later on. Armies can’t reinforce one another in the middle of a battle if it takes two weeks to travel to the nearest star.

In the end, I came up with rules I was happy with. It’s a lot like Battlestar Galactica with some Mass Effect and Starship Troopers thrown in. A cold-hard-metal feel to things but with certain sci-fi tropes like artificial gravity. Warp speed is accomplished assuming that Alcubierre’s (real) theories are correct and realisable. There’s no light swords, weapons fire hard projectiles, and there are no shield technologies. Armour and photo-chromatic materials are all that you’ve got in battle. There’s also ABSOLUTELY NO TIME-TRAVEL OR ALTERNATE DIMENSIONS, EVER!!

Next I was writing broad story arcs and setting up so that the universe could grow wide, and so that you could have human factions appear in all parts of the galaxy. After all, it’s easier to dress the actors as humans than aliens. You’ve got to think forward! 😉 Look at Stargate!

I sketched out a 3 part story that told the tale of Earth’s first expansion beyond our solar system, our first contact with aliens, and our introduction to the wider galaxy. I designed alien races called the Cestral and the Skulaari, the latter being the villains, themed on terrifying sea creatures like giant squid and crustaceans. I even wrote a little language for these factions.

I Need a Name

This all took several months, and I got a job for a few months which led me to drop the writing project for a while. Then I lost the job and took the writing back up again. I started writing the real story, finally, and decided to call the story at large “Sons of Sol”, after conducting extensive web searches for similarly named things.

At the time, I found none. I bought the .com address and set up a wiki to lay some sort of claim to the name. I’ve since found some similarly named games, a Korean TV show called “Sons of Sol Pharmacy” and a hoody company with the very same name. Apparently, I’m still fine to be using the name, so for now I’ll keep it unless I can think of a name I like more.

In early 2013 I started studying tax in Ireland, believing this would be my route to eventual (permanent) employment. I worked hard at it, but I was unemployed and it was a part time course, so I still had some time to give to writing and designing the world. I also had been writing down game ideas as they came to me and designing them out in .txt files for fun. I never expected to make a game, though, as I didn’t want to study another degree course just to go into a risky profession.

A Flirtation with Games

One day I was very sick of studying this boring topic and posted on the forum Boards.ie to see if any game developers needed somebody with “great ideas” (I know, right?! haha) but who could also record audio, compose music, write, and manage the business/marketing side (okay, that’s a little better).

A guy called Rob Reinhardt in Dublin got back to me and he was actually interested in doing some collaborating. We struck up a friendship and met a few times, talking about games and what we might make together. I was only going to be involved part time as I was studying and hopefully going to get a normal job, but I’d help with the writing and other stuff as much as I could. I wasn’t looking for pay or anything.

Eventually, we decided to use Sons of Sol’s universe as a setting for a game. It would be a prequel for the book I was writing. The book focussed on the people of Earth (at first), but the game would focus on a lost human civilization called the Kolrir and how they came (secretly) to Earth, setting up the events of the book I was writing.

Nothing came of the game ultimately, but we’d designed a lot on paper for Sons of Sol: Exodus (that name would have to change if we’d done it because Sol: Exodus came out from somebody else).

An Earth-shattering Kaboom!

2014 rolled around. I got a job in tax.. for 6 weeks, then lost that one too. Rob and others had told me that Unity was easy to pick up and start using, so with game design now on the brain and no tax to work at or study, I started at Unity and learned how to do some basic programming through their tutorials. It was only a couple of months before I had a very early version of a space game up and running. I later returned to this very first game for Crow’s Nest.

I started going to gaming events in Dublin and meeting the great community here, as well as improving my own skills and looked into starting a company through the unemployment enterprise scheme.

The game that Rob and I had designed was still well beyond my skills still (probably his too. We weren’t good at ‘scope’) but the space game currently on my screen could work inside the Sons of Sol universe too. After all, I’d designed it very openly. I can plug in new civilizations wherever I like and the story still all holds together. I’d put a lot of time into the ‘Exodus’ story (with Rob) and thought it was solid, so I wanted to keep it in tact. I decided to write a prequel to the prequel and tell the story of the characters that you would meet in Exodus and call it “Crow’s Nest”.

My very own Game

The game would be ostensibly about a private military company from Kolrir protecting their territories from pirates. The ‘Crows Nest’, the lookout spot on a sail ship (like a pirate boat) sounded suitably pirate-y for a name. In space, though, particularly in another non-Earth culture, the crow’s nest wouldn’t really be a term in use, both because you can’t sit outside a spaceship, and the Kolrir culture may never have had sailing ships as far as we know. So in this case, the “Nest” would refer to a pirate base hidden inside a large asteroid, and “Crow” would be the pirate villain in question who owned that base.

I’ll fully admit that I didn’t finish a book, didn’t finish a game, and am now starting another game, but bear in mind that I saw writing the book as just killing time while unemployed. The first game was killing time in between studying. With the current game, I’ve formed RetroNeo Games as a company. This is now my job, and that’s a hell of a difference. I also now have the skills to make a game (or at least prototype it) by myself, without just being in a position where I’m giving ideas to other people. I have the time, ability, and drive to deliver Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest.

The Future of Sons of Sol

I plan to release in early 2017. This will then be the first Sons of Sol product to exist, almost five years after I first created the universe. I hope people will like it!

I could take the same game and abandon the Sons of Sol name. It’ll make no difference to the players. They don’t know what Sons of Sol is! But I’ve a whole universe worth of stories to tell and why shouldn’t I make the game a Sons of Sol title? It fits. It works. But what if it’s bad and I wreck the name before I even begin?

Well, then I released a bad game, I guess. That’s the risk with any creative work. And it’s still better than releasing no game at all and Sons of Sol never getting its chance in the public domain. But I’ve worked too hard for years for no reward to approach this half-assed. Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest is going to be my absolute best effort, and nobody can ask fairer than that. I’ll be a very proud daddy the day I finally release the game. And who knows, maybe I’ll get to those other story lines some day, either through game sequels, or finishing the novel. The novel was only a couple of chapters in, though, when I last left it. If that were to be finished now I’d be better off having a different writer do it while I make a game. And I could only do that if a Sons of Sol game were wildly successful and there was the interest in a book.

That’s extremely unlikely, I know, but it doesn’t bother me either way. I feel that if I can release one Sons of Sol title at this stage, I’ll be happy and it will all have been worth the effort.

Is he done yet?!

If you read this far, well done, and thanks very sincerely for your interest! Especially if you read all 4 parts. Sorry for the lack of images today, also. I’ve really got no pictures of this topic, though. Next week we’re back to non-Crow’s Nest gaming topics for the blog.

Until next time..

Making Crow’s Nest (part 3 of 4): A design challenge

Okay, not game-related but I can't resist a caption.. From left to right: Manager, Supervisor, new Job Bridge Intern, old Job Bridge Intern they're about to claim they can't afford to hire.

Hi! This is Part 3 of me offering some insight into the development of my game, Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest.

In Part 1 I explained my pitch “Asteroids meets Total War”.
Last week in Part 2 I talked about the games that are influencing the design of Crow’s Nest.
This week I want to talk about one particular design challenge I’m facing: Meaningful Character Death.

Crow’s Nest is a space combat game meets a strategy game. You fly missions like Wing Commander or X-Wing missions (but in 2D) and then go back to a strategy map like XCOM or Total War. I spoke last week about how I’m very fond of the attachment to your soldiers that XCOM can create for the player. It adds a real tension and a greater range of emotions for the player when a soldier dies or barely escapes.

The Problem

I decided very early on that I wanted meaningful character death in my game. So I thought “fine, I’ll have you play as one character, and you have wingmen. Those characters can live or die or get captured by the enemy. After that they could stay captured or you could rescue them”.

That sounds reasonable enough, but there was something that I didn’t take into account. In my game’s battles, you control one character directly. You can give orders to your other wingmen but you have very little control over what they do beyond that. In XCOM, you’re the commander. You’re not on the field. You control every one of your soldiers individually, one at a time. You are responsible for everything that they do. Therefore, the consequences are yours alone to deal with. You can’t blame the game or the AI for making your beloved soldier do something stupid (usually) and getting themselves killed.

I only realised the full importance of this distinction when I watched the following interview. In it, Adam Sessler brings together Jake Solomon (lead designer on 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown and 2016’s XCOM 2) and Julian Gollop, the designer of the original XCOM from 1994. The whole interview is very interesting, but if you don’t want to watch it all, skip to 12:32 and watch for about two minutes.

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Jake Solomon made the point that without turn-based gameplay you can’t have meaningful character death. I saw this and I thought “oh crap! He’s completely right”! If the player isn’t directly accountable for the decision that led to a soldier dying, then they won’t feel survivor’s guilt, or the guilt of having ordered somebody to their death. They’ll probably feel nothing, or worse, they’ll blame the game for the consequence. If that happens, the system may as well not be in the game. As I said, I think it’s a very powerful feature of XCOM that I want to try and emulate insofar as possible, so I have a problem.

Now, I haven’t built the system into the game yet, so it hasn’t been play-tested, but I am at the design stage for it, and I’m left considering what I can do for the best results.

Poking a hole in that theory

If I’m to bother implementing meaningful character death into Crow’s Nest (a real-time game), I need Solomon and Gollop to be (at least somewhat) incorrect. They’re far better game designers than me, so maybe it’s not possible, but if I could poke a breathing hole in the design-bag they’ve placed over my head, then I might be okay.

My starting point for designing around the problem is this: We know that we can develop strong emotional ties to fictional characters. This is why we can cry when Bambi’s mother dies or celebrate when Luke blows up the Death Star. Empathy is real, even if the character isn’t. Game of Thrones in particular proves that the unpredictability of death can have a great impact on fans and really raise the tension.

Real-life battles happen in real time (obviously, hence the word “real”), and while the commander’s soldiers will have been trained, they operate of their own volition. A commander doesn’t control them with their mind, or decide whether they run left around a barrel instead of right. But the tension they feel at ordering their troops into danger is no less real for the lack of direct control.

Perhaps, then, you don’t need total control over your units in a game in order to feel something for them. They are your team mates, after all, whether they’re AI or not. Maybe it’s possible to bring the emotions of XCOM to a real-time game, then. Maybe meaningful character death for Crow’s Nest is possible.

How?

XCOM lets you make an awful lot of decisions, and it gives you the time to make them so that you’ll feel (if it goes wrong) that you didn’t think the problem through well-enough. You’ll feel that it was your fault!

If XCOM shows us a formula for meaningful character death, then, it might look like this:

Quantity of player decisions + Time to make them = Meaningful Character Death

Time to make them

Let’s look at this part first. A real-time game doesn’t really offer you time, typically. But it can! Many RPGs will let you paused the action to give orders and then resume it to see them play out in real time. There’s an option! The problem with this is that is interrupts the action, and in Crow’s Nest, if you spend too long paused, you might forget that you were literally a half a second away from smashing into an asteroid before you paused.

So how about a compromise? The Bureau: XCOM Declassified (2013) was a real-time cover-based third-person shooter that tried to implement meaningful character death. It utterly failed because it was so story-driven that the main character (you) couldn’t die. If you did, you just went back to a checkpoint. Your squad mates could die, permanently, but if they did you could just get yourself killed, reload the checkpoint to before they were hit, and everybody’s happy again. That’s what they did wrong.

What they did right was their ‘pause’ system. Like the RPG system I mentioned, you could pause the action and issue orders, but it wasn’t really paused. Time was still moving, albeit very slowly. You had more time to make decisions, but the tension remained as you saw an enemy moving (very slowly) to flank your sniper and you tried to decide whether to order your him to move back or to take a headshot on the enemy before it was too late! That’s one way I could buy the player the “time” part of the formula.

I could just acknowledge that in real time you have to make quick decisions and just live with that, however, this will then allow the player to make far less decisions in the same amount of (game) time and so the formula is less healthy looking.

Quantity of Player Decisions

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There’s a lot that I could do to give the player more decisions. In the combat demo I have currently available (see video above) there’s a lot that will be changed. In this demo you have infinite fuel, infinite (bullet) ammo, and recharging health. The enemies also come in equal waves each time.

First off, I intend that when you encounter the first enemies of a battle, they’ll call reinforcements, who’ll take a certain amount of time to get there, but who will be stronger that the first group. Think of it as a wave system, but where you don’t have to beat one to spawn the next one. It’s a truer reinforcement system. You want to deal with one problem before the next arrives.

Of course, different mission types could have different rules and spies might disable enemy communications, etc, but imagine that some missions as they go on get harder and harder, to the point that waves will spawn that you couldn’t possibly beat. This is one option that opens a lot of doors.

This set up would force you to chose to flee at some point. That choice alone means that if you or your allies die, you know you stayed one wave too long.

If I then make ammo, fuel, and health limited, then you have to choose if you and each of your wingmen have enough of those three resources left to take on the next set of reinforcements, or just run whenever you get the chance. That’s at least three choices that you make for each of three (or more) craft, every couple of minutes. That’s a lot of opportunity for the player to start blaming themselves if something goes wrong.

Other decisions would have been made before the battle. Do you take the more experienced pilots or train up rookies? Do you arm missiles, or save the weight to make the craft more agile? Did you invest in an armour upgrade last month or did that money go to set up a spy drone in an asteroid field where you suspect the enemy to be?

I could go on, but you can see that quantity of decisions shouldn’t be a problem, even in a real-time game.

The Real Trick; AI

Assuming we can get the formula balanced correctly, the whole thing hinges on whether or not the player will accept that, if a wing mate dies, the fault lay with their decisions. According to Gollop and Solomon, the player would blame the AI. I think that the more you stack decisions and input from the player, within an interface that allows them to make decisions in good time, the greater the chance you have of the player accepting the consequences of those decisions and arriving at our goal of meaningful character death.

Balancing the AI is the key ingredient, and this is where so many games have failed in the past. I may well fail here, too, but I don’t plan to make meaningful character death my game’s only selling point, so it wouldn’t be a fatal failure.

Your wing mates have to be good enough that they can survive on their own for a while against reasonable odds, but they can’t be so good that you can just let them beat the whole mission for you.

In the demo at the moment, because the Arrow Fighters are harder to hit, turn faster, and have recharging health, they’re actually capable of taking all of the kills if you do nothing. There aren’t enough enemies on the map at once to stop them, usually. This is an unbalanced demo, however.

The AI will run if they’re damaged, usually saving their lives. They’ll call to you for help, and if you don’t give it, the enemy might just catch up and kill your ally. This is already more intelligent behaviour than many games would bother giving to computer-controlled characters, and it’s essential to meaningful character death in a real-time game, but it’s not nearly enough.

Alien Isolation is known for its brilliant AI.

To be honest, I haven’t figured out the balance yet, and it will require a lot of play testing.

I’d like to caveat that all of the above is assuming that you actually do things to give those wing mates a personality. They have to have a face, a voice, a backstory that you are spoon fed during quieter moments, as well as skills, abilities, a record of confirmed kills, and a rank that progresses as they gain experience. They have to taunt the enemy when they get a kill. They have to call you for help. They even have to react to incoming enemies believably; either with confidence, or the realisation that they’re truly outmatched.

Some of those latter points are observable in the demo already, but most have yet to be implemented, and I only have one voice pack so far.

What say you?

This is an open problem, not a post-mortem. Moreso than with any other blog that I’ve posted, I’d really appreciate your opinions in the comments below. What do you think of my problem? What do you think of my proposed solutions? Have you anything you might recommend as other player decisions or wing mate behaviours? What pitfalls should I avoid? Are there games I should be looking at to see how they handled this problem? Thank you in advance.

Next week is the last of these posts focussing on Crow’s Nest (for now). I’ll be talking about what Sons of Sol and Crow’s Nest actually are (fictionally speaking) and how they came to be.

Until next time..

Making Crow’s Nest (part 2 of 4): Influences

Hi! This is part 2 of me offering some insight into the creation of Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest. In Part 1 I talked about my “Asteroids meets Total War” pitch and what, exactly, the hell that meant.

This week I’ll be basically talking about some of the games that are having a big influence on the development of Crow’s Nest. If you’re a space and/or strategy game fan, this may be of interest to you. Fair warning; there’s going to be a lot of Star Wars games in here!

These aren’t “games that are similar to my game”, but instead they make up more of a history of the games that I have personally played that influence Crow’s Nest in some way.

First up..

Asteroids (1979)

Last week I talked a bit about this and Total War as influences so I’ll be brief. Here is one of the very original space shooters, and a classic game. There’s the three-life formula with a single hit and you’re dead. There’s extra lives, speed, intensity, high scores, and great use of limited technology to deliver imaginative graphics. The key ingredient to itss addictiveness is the quick restart. You can instantly hop back in for another round to try and beat your previous high score. It’s a simple, but proven method of keeping players pumping in quarters (or nowadays, playing and seeing advertising).

The computer room in my school when I was a kid had this on some machines so I’d race through our typing lessons so that I could play. In years since I see it every now and again as a web link and I always click in for a few rounds. The thrill of dodging through asteroids at high speeds and evading incoming laser shots never gets old, and it’s a mechanic that I’m endeavouring to capture in Crow’s Nest.

Total War series

Again, I talked about Shogun specifically last week, but to reiterate, I loved the two-sided approach to a strategy game. Until Shogun, I’d only played strategy games like Command & Conquer (C&C) where you fight one battle at a time and it never influenced the next battle. It didn’t matter how many losses you took in exchange for victory, and if you lost you would just restart the level. In Total War, you finally could say “we may have lost this battle, but we’ll win the war” and it would mean something.

At the time, I was unaware that XCOM had been doing this since 1994, and there were probably several other games too, but this was my first and the experience of playing Shogun for the first time shaped how I would view games forever more. Now, as a designer, the strategic depth of Total War and games like it is something I want to incorporate into my games whenever possible.

I also liked how special units could affect the war. Diplomacy and assassinations could drastically change the course of the war. I’ve always kept in mind the influence that special units could and (I think) should have on a strategy game.

X-COM series

X-COM: Ufo Defense (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) (1994)

There were a whole bunch of XCOM games starting with 1994’s original, but the series wasn’t well managed, wasn’t always in the hands of the original creators, and really took a dive until the 2012 remake by Firaxis and 2K, ‘XCOM: Enemy Unknown’. When the latter was announced, it was the first time I really noticed the series. I’d never played it. I picked up the original before the release of the remake, and played both games in 2012. My world changed!

I’d always avoided turn-based strategy games. I just had never liked the few examples I’d played. I thought they were too unrealistic because you wind up with two soldier just looking at each other instead of fighting. What I didn’t appreciate was that in the moments between the action, when you’re making your decisions like in a chess match (ironically, I loved chess), you’re getting a whole different type of gameplay. Instead of trying to simply react quickly like in an RTS, you’re really trying to solve a problem in the most efficient way possible (like a puzzle game) but with the added element of random chance getting in the way of your best laid plans. RTS games have this plus speed, but turn based games forego the speed in favour of really making you think about the consequences of your actions.

I’ll be talking next week about a design challenge that this posed to my game. The turn-based element buys you gravitas insofar as the player has made every move and so they have nobody to blame for the consequences. In any real-time game where you have allies, they’ll likely by controlled by the AI, and if they die you may be inclined to blame the designer or the AI, and not your own command skills.

Chances are they're not all coming back! — Chances are they’re not all coming back!

What I love about XCOM is the same thing that I love about Total War: persistence! The game allows you to fail and recover, not just restart. What XCOM does that Total War doesn’t really do is make you care about individual soldiers. In dealing with small squads over dozens of missions (and especially if you choose to name and customise them yourself) you get to form relationships with individual soldiers. Sending your best veteran sniper into a risky situation to try and rescue your best medic is a weighty decision that C&C or Total War can’t really deliver. The tension is immense because the consequences are permanent. That means that success is vastly more rewarding here than in normal games. You’re always glad to see troops come home alive. The range of emotions you can evoke in the player is what earns the XCOM series such devoted fans.

I also loved the base management, particularly in the original game (or the fan-made Xenonauts (2014)). Having to actually buy replacement rockets, bullets, grenades, and med packs may have been too heavy on the micromanagement side, but then again, a shortage of finances really affected your tactical options when you went into battle. You might fire a rocket to keep your troops safe from an ambush, but you wince as you see thousands of credits go up in smoke! Also in those games I loved that your home base could be attacked, but may not be. 2012’s XCOM and its expansion Enemy Within didn’t have this. EW had one mandatory base attack mission. In the other games you could attack enemy bases or leave them be, and they could do the same to you. Each side could have more than one base, but they were expensive to run. The decision was up to you!

I haven’t decided how many of these design influences will appear in the strategy layer of Crow’s Nest, but some of them definitely will.

Star Wars: X-Wing series (1993-1999)

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Now we get to the combat influences! I’ve said before on this blog that 1993’s X-Wing was my first ever game. I played the hell out of it! Its sequels TIE Fighter, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance were also hugely influential for me.

I must acknowledge that, like many of the Star Wars games, these were cashing in on the popularity of other games. Wing Commander (1990) paved the way for X-Wing. Lucasarts said “we could do that, but with iconic Star Wars ships, music, and sound. People will go insane for it!” So my influence’s influence was really Wing Commander, but I never actually played any of them until I backed Star Citizen and started looking up Chris Roberts’ older games.

Tragically, X-Wing Alliance (1999) remains the last game in this series, but it’s one of my favourite games of all time. The series centred around dogfighting in the Star Wars ships, exclusively in space. Alliance was the first one where you could fly bigger ships like the Millennium Falcon, jump sectors in hyperspace during a mission, or dock with craft to rearm or “board” them (you just sat in the turret while other people on your ship supposedly did the boarding, but it was still cool).

X-Wing Alliance (1999). Fly the Millennium Falcon against the second Death Star !

It had over 50 missions and (what I thought) was a great story set alongside the events of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, culminating in you (changing characters to Lando) flying the Millennium Falcon in the Battle of Endor, all the way inside the second Death Star!

Wing mates would take your orders, get chatty with you, call for help, and taunt the enemy! That’s not unique to this game, or anything, but it adds greatly to the atmosphere and it’s in Crow’s Nest too!

The briefings, the mission types, the dramatic set-pieces, the in-game reinforcements and dramatic turnings of the tide of battle are all fresh in my memory and are heavily influencing the way I’m designing the combat missions of Crow’s Nest. While Alliance was a linear game, and mine is more dynamic, I feel I can still deliver a lot of the same drama, action and intensity but with the added benefits of the tension gained from the possibility of loss.

The one major thing I wanted to change is that in 3D space you see very little of the battle. When an enemy goes past you you lose sight of them. When a big ship explodes spectacularly, you may not be looking in the right direction at the right time to see it. I wanted to take 3D space combat games and put them in 2D so you have greater situational awareness and can see more of the action! That’s my big departure, but otherwise, the combat in Crow’s Nest is heavily influenced by the X-Wing games; far more so than it is by your average top-down space shooter.

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (1998)

The original was out on the N64, and later the PC. Two sequels came out on the Gamecube too. These were also 3D Star Wars ship combat games, but now mostly focussed on planetary combat, against TIE Fighters & ground units, instead of TIE Fighters & Star Destroyers.

If you played these games and the current Crow’s Nest demo, my big take-away from Rogue Squadron should be obvious: The orders system.

You have two wing mates with you most of the time and they can largely take care of themselves, but you can give them a few orders on the D-pad. D-up is to “Form Up” and they increase your overall fire power by flying on your wing and shooting when you shoot. I’ve used this order directly (it’s not stealing if you declare the influence, right?) as well as the ability to keep your wing mates safe by telling them to retreat. Beyond that, the orders system starts to differ, but feeling like you’re not alone is important to a game where you play a fighter squadron, and Rogue Squadron handled it well!

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (2014)

Can anyone have played this game and not loved the nemesis system? This Lord of the Rings game has you play a human Ranger & elven ghost (sharing the same body) and travel around Mordor… eh, doing things.. revenge, mostly. It played a bit like the Batman Arkham games in the fighting systems and like many open world games otherwise, but the nemesis system stood it apart, and it even won a few Game Of The Year Awards.

In the picture above, you can see one of dozens of enemy commanders. These exist in a ranking hierarchy. You can “ally” with some of them and assist their rise to power in order to get rid of certain other nemeses in the game.

Each nemesis (as long as they’re alive, anyway) will remember having met and fought you, and they’ll comment on the result of that battle. As seen above, they all have different strengths and weaknesses. At first, these are unknown to you but you can interrogate underlings and rivals (forgive me if I’m not exactly right, there) to learn these traits. For example, a nemesis might have beaten you down the first three times you tried to fight him, then you learn he’s afraid of a ‘caragor’, so you show up riding on the back of one and he’ll flee with his tail between his legs! Another nemesis might hate caragors, and so this same tactic would only enrage him, boosting his stats!

This latter part of the system is something I’m interested in implementing into Crow’s Nest. You will benefit from spying on enemies by learning things about their movements, or what types of ships they favour using. You could just approach the battles blind, but intel gathering will pay off.

I don’t necessarily plan to have you ally with factions or control pirate groups, but I’m at least taking inspiration from the nemesis system insofar as learning about your enemy and having them remember you goes.

Honorable Mentions

Star Wars: Empire At War (2006)

This is one of my favourite strategy games ever, especially the two player competitive campaign, but there’s not so much I’m taking from it that I didn’t already credit Total War for.

Your armies persist across a galaxy map, space map, AND individual planetary maps. It’s very unlike Empire at War, though, because you control fewer units. The loss of the only Star Destroyer you may have in your fleet really hurts, even if you win the battle. You can steamroll the enemy for a while, but you’re taking losses as you go and will run out of steam, thus having less units left to defend your new territories from counter-attack.

The land maps also host buildings like Ion Cannons or Hypervelocity Guns which can be used by the defending team in the space battle above that planet. If you are wise, you might raid the planet with a small force (small raid forces can bypass the space battle) with the sole aim of destroying that one building before launching your space battle. If you hold the space above the planet, you can hit the land battle with bombing runs and orbital strikes. This interplay of systems is another great example of what multi-layered games can achieve.

X-COM: Interceptor (1998)

I only played this for the first time in 2015, and development on Crow’s Nest was already well underway. It’s not far off what I’m doing, as it turns out, but nobody thought this game was all that it could be either.

You command a base on a strategy map and manage its resources, as with other XCOM games, but instead of the turn-based battles you have a fighter ship battle. The problem is that these battles were nearly all the same and they got very repetitive.

The only influence I’m taking from this game is in what not to do. I need to ensure missions in Crow’s Nest are varied enough, and that there are real characters and stories playing out during the campaign. To what extent, I don’t yet know, but this is a good example of a game relying 100% on its systems producing all the gameplay.

Star Citizen (20??)

How can I make a space game in 2015 and not be influenced by Star Citizen/Squadron 42? That said, my game is a single-player war game, not a multiplayer space-everything game. I’m very excited for Star Citizen, but even moreso for the single-player side, ‘Squadron 42’. If we get to play S42 early next year I imagine it might influence Crow’s Nest somewhat, but probably not in many ways that X-Wing and Wing Commander haven’t already. If the game takes longer than that to come out, Crow’s Nest may already have been released. Time will tell.

So!

I could also mention FTL for its art style, actually, but the art in Crow’s Nest so far is just my placeholder stuff and I don’t believe that I can draw. I certainly won’t be the final artist, so it’s not worth mentioning visual influences at this stage, really.

I’ve found that when making a game, a lot of people will come and say “oh, you must have been influenced by this” or “have you played that”? There are so many games out there that chances are the answer will be “no, actually. I haven’t heard of that one”. I’ve listed my main influences here, and very few of them are actually 2D space games.

If there’s anything you think I should check out, either because it’s similar to what I’m doing or just because it rocks, please let me know!

Next week I’ll be focussing on a design challenge posed by trying to do some of what XCOM does in a real-time action game. If that sounds interesting to you, please subscribe to the RetroNeo Games Facebook or Twitter accounts (link icons at the top and bottom of this page).

Until next time..