Opinions on a space battle

[AnasAbdin]

Hello fellow AGSers!
I wanted to show you a space battle I've been working on last weekend. Would love to hear opinions, suggestions, thoughts... in order to improve it.

This is a video showing an in-game footage:
Space Battle Video Demo
Space Battle Video Demo v.2
Space Battle Video Demo v.3

The player ship moves sideways by hovering on the left or right regions of the screen. Once the enemy ship is located in the center area, player must move the cursor on the enemy to 'lock' the target (only by having the cursor over the enemy). Then left-click to fire. A hit will reduce the stamina by a random factor (simulating different damages...) until it reaches zero then kaboom.

There's an 'enemy ships' counter, player stamina level, and a little radar showing the position of an enemy ship (red dot) relative to your ship (green).

Specs:
Game is 640x480 32bit, video quality is reduced for size, also YouTube ruined it...
Music: Midi

Thanks for your time!

[Andail]

Looks pretty nice, although the movements of the ship could use some ease-in/ease-out to make it look more like, well, a spacehip in space. You know, inertia and all that.

Also, is it because you're thinking future touch-screen release that you aren't using keyboard commands? The intuitive controlling would be arrow keys (or asdw) to move the ship, while the mouse would be free for aiming.

All in all, graphics and sound effects are really cute.

[AnasAbdin]

Thanks Andail for your kind words! I'll look into the ease-in/ease-out movement thoroughly. About the keyboard movement, I have omitted keyboard controls. I did try it on my phone and found the best way for a 2-handed control as follows:





Using thumbs to move left and right. Then one of them to track the ship in the middle to shoot it... Kinda tricky but challenging in a fun way! It IS intuitive to use keyboard for movement and mouse for aiming, but the distance between the three regions is short and wouldn't require super skills to trap the ship in the middle and fire on it... (at least for me, And I AM slow!)

[StillInThe90s]

Looks nicely X-wing-esque to me.
If the idea is to have the ship rocketing through space, then something like little particles swooshing past the sides could be a nice addition. There is really no sense of first person movement in there atm.
Moving the enemy ships a little back and forth inside the aiming area could also put some more life in there. I guess it depends on the context.
Happy space blasting.

[AnasAbdin]

Thanks StillInThe90s
The fact that my humble room is compared to X-wing and Wing Commander is great!
The visible movement of the enemy ship is in fact two different movements:
1. Enemy ship moves by itself.
2. And when player moves sideways (You can also notice the angle of the enemy ship changing, depending on its location on the screen.)

So if you meant using particles for the enemy ship's movement, it would actually be very interesting to differentiate between the two movements 
add to (to do list): move enemy ships back and forth.

[Matti]

It IS intuitive to use keyboard for movement and mouse for aiming, but the distance between the three regions is short and wouldn't require super skills to trap the ship in the middle and fire on it... (at least for me, And I AM slow!)

Still, I'm sure I would be annoyed by constantly moving the mouse to the left and right instead of just aiming. You should really reconsider keyboard movement.

Also, I second what Andail said about the movement, ease-in and -out would make the movement feel and look a lot better.

Other than that it looks quite nice.

[Darth Mandarb]

I've always found these kind of space sims a little... I don't know, "wrong" feeling.  Even back to early ones like Wing Commander and X-Wing.

I mean now-a-days our state of the art fighter craft do not have to see the bad guy to take 'em out.  They just point and click on the radar screen (or HUD).  So it seems to me that futuristic space-sims should have similar (or more futuristic) tech.  Less cockpit view and more tactical view (like a command center).  This, however, doesn't lend itself to traditional (fun) game-play mechanics for a space sim!

I think what you've demoed here is off to a great start but I think it needs some tweaking.  I agree with Andail (and others) about the easing... that's essential (though I would argue that, given the physics of space flight, it's not really necessary it's just ... traditional)

My suggestions:
1) do not use the mouse to 'aim' while hovering left/right to adjust trajectory.  Put cross-hairs (some kind of retical) in the middle of the viewport.  Then use the keyboard or mouse to control the motion of the ship to line up the crosshairs on the target and then click to fire (maybe right clicking could switch weapons or something).
2) unless there's a specific reason (in game) to not have vertical movement I'd add that in.  A space ship that can only move left to right (horizontal) seems odd and not very effective as a fighter craft!

I look forward to seeing where you take this!  I've wanted (for years) to make an AGS space sim!

[Andail]

I think what you've demoed here is off to a great start but I think it needs some tweaking.  I agree with Andail (and others) about the easing... that's essential (though I would argue that, given the physics of space flight, it's not really necessary it's just ... traditional)

àâ,¬ bit OT, but what part of easing is not necessary in space physics? Inertia is very real in space...

[Darth Mandarb]

Yeah... that was a bit vague!

Inertia, in space, is much easier to arrest than it is on Earth (where gravity is boss).  So by firing retro/reverse thrust on a craft in space you could, technically, just halt it's movement nearly instantaneously.  Technically there'd still be "easing" but it would be so fast as to be, essentially, non-existent.  That's all I meant by "not necessary".  I saw a documentary on this a few years ago (tried to find it on youTube but couldn't) where it explained this better than I can!

Hollywood/Video Games have a long history of ignoring science/physics in the name of making their product more fun and/or easy to relate to for humans.  So movie/game space craft tend to mimic terrestrial flight characteristics because that's what we humans expect to see (and are used to seeing).  The reality of space "combat" would, most likely, be a vastly different experience!

[Andail]

Yeah... with the most striking inaccuracy being the sounds, I would say.
I can imagine that watching the entire opening of Star Wars 3 in complete silence would be a bit confusing for a mainstream cinema audience.

[AnasAbdin]

My suggestions:
1) do not use the mouse to 'aim' while hovering left/right to adjust trajectory.  Put cross-hairs (some kind of retical) in the middle of the viewport.  Then use the keyboard or mouse to control the motion of the ship to line up the crosshairs on the target and then click to fire (maybe right clicking could switch weapons or something).
2) unless there's a specific reason (in game) to not have vertical movement I'd add that in.  A space ship that can only move left to right (horizontal) seems odd and not very effective as a fighter craft!

I think there's a little misunderstanding here. In the demo, the player does not aim while hovering. He should hover until the enemy ship is inside the middle (HUD) limits. The enemy moves and pauses (to fire) randomly. The pause takes time, that's where the player has both chances to center the ship and fire at it. It is a very fluent task, tricky at first (it's a game...) Maybe I'll have to upload a game demo instead of a video...
Fixed crosshairs would be distracting since the before-firing tracing is done manually by the player. and of course, I will add vertical movement as well.
I agree future-tech should take care of all this automatically, but then it would be a boring game for players. Let them work a little, hit and get hit. The player's ship is the same model as the others (it's stolen from a planetary base) so they are all using the same technology and all.

I thought more about the particles issue... I feel it wouldn't be very necessary. I'll make the back engines glow while moving instead. I 100% agree with the omitting of physics for the sake of entertainment. If physics was applied accurately, all deep space cruising sounds must be mute.

Edit: misspell

[AnasAbdin]

Ok, player can move 360° to any direction.
Still not eager to do the 'ease' effect... 

Space Battle Demo 2

[FrankT]

Certainly looks credible! I like the Wing Commander flavour you give it.

[AnasAbdin]

Certainly looks credible! I like the Wing Commander flavour you give it.

Thanks FrankT Do you think it needs more tweaking?
And.. now I want to play Wing Commander all over again!

[dactylopus]

This looks really cool!

It doesn't look like it needs too much tweaking, it looks great.

[Monsieur OUXX]

the movements of the ship could use some ease-in/ease-out

I had that exact same thought.
The good news is : if you use the Tween module in a clever way, you might be able to achieve that without too much trouble (instead of just increasing or decreasing X and Y by, let's say, 10 pixels, increase or decrease them by delta pixels, where delta is given by the tween module)

[AnasAbdin]

Thanks dactylopus for the kind words :
Monsieur OUXX I hope this version is better:

Space Battle Ease-in/Ease-out trial

[Monsieur OUXX]

I hope this version is better:

There's still something unnatural-looking. But it's hard to tell because you never move horizontally AND vertically at the same time, so the demo looks very artificial anyway.

I'd recommend :
1. Making the player's ship's moves faster. Like he's piloting a real dogfighter. At the moment it looks like moving the yoke has very little impact.
2. Making the enemy's moves relative to the actual universe, not relative to the screen. What do I mean? At the moment it looks like whatever way the player's ship is going to move, it's going to move the planets and the stars accordingly (that's good) but the enemies have their own movements like they're just moving around the 320x200 screen rectangle (that's bad).

[AnasAbdin]

2. Making the enemy's moves relative to the actual universe, not relative to the screen.

The enemy pauses every once in a while to give the player a chance to center him and fire. Enemy already moves to a random position that can be outside the screen resolution. Good point though, I'll keep enhancing