Category: Game Development

Only took me 5 years but I think I finally have the flow control problem in RakNet beat. It maintains a record of average low ping, and if your ping starts going up, it increases the amount of time between each datagram send. In testing it was as fast or slightly faster than TCP and maintains 0% packetloss.

I am also using Windows WaitForMultipleObjects by default. Previously, this gave very bad performance, adding 30-50 ms ping times. But apparently Windows XP does a better job with this, so my throughout is roughly equal. This should resolve the long standing problem of people bitching about reported 100% CPU utilization.

Getting and keeping new players is turning out to be much harder than I originally thought.

The first problem is that the original zone designs called for a minimum of 20 players to be fun. I don’t usually have 20 players simultaneous though, which is a self-defeating prophecy. Plus the zones that I spent the most work on was the larger ones for hundreds of people, so most of my effort isn’t yet visible.

The second problem is that some people still can’t run, or those that used to run no longer can. Part of the problem is Ogre 3D does a full file scan, so older deleted files are still used, and cause errors. Usually the autopatcher deletes these but sometimes I have to reset the autopatcher database so it doesn’t happen.

The third problem is that when there are only a few players online no amount of ship designing is going to make it so that the newbie can sometimes kill the expert. With less than 15 or so people the newbies don’t get those lucky kills and don’t have fun.

The fourth problem is not enough newbies come online at once to play each other. So they sit in the newbie zone for 10 minutes, go to the regular zone, and get wasted as above.

What I might need to do is put Armada (500 players) on hold for a while and work on a zone very friendly to new players, that works well with very low populations. I’ll think for a while on this. Throwing out some possibilities:

1. Speed kill competition in a very small zone with at most 5 players, no spectators allowed. Most kills in time X wins. Since dying doesn’t matter, newbies have more fun.
2. Racing mode, just race around a track
3. ???

*** EDIT ***

Got a good idea for target drones. Adding that now. I will have them rotate to shoot at you. Shouldn’t be too hard.

I saw some newbies play for 10 minutes, fly right into a hail of bullets, say “I can’t play against ships this powerful” and quit. The real reason they were quitting is not the power of the enemy ships, because all weapons and ships are equal. It is because of a perceived unbalance, where other players of higher level would have a wider range of weapons available and this was assumed to mean more powerful. As it is a convenient excuse for poor play, it was considered as a game inbalance, and they quit.

On my part, there were three problems here.

1. The skill balance difference is still too high, with a 4:1 ratio between the best and worst players. This is far better than before, and I’m running out of ideas on how to balance it. It would be good if I can get it down to 3:1 though.

2. The initial weapon I was giving newbies (standard momentum based gun) still took too much skill to use, as in you’d have to play for a while to get the feel of how fast your bullet moves, how much to lead, how fast your ship rotates, in order to hit anything. It’s sort of like the first time you use the grenade launcher in quake, where everyone else has chain guns. It wouldn’t be very fun unless you were unusually patient or skilled. In response, I increased the Guided part of guided rockets, and make this a level 0 item, so you get it for free right away. Guided rockets take little skill, mostly strategy, and from what I’ve seen newbies like having it.

3. Even with the first two points, newbies are willing to tolerate this if they feel the challenge is temporary and surmountable. I took my queue from Planetside here, and made it so you can unlock all the weapons and items in a few weeks with dedicated play. This is much different from my original play of taking 6-9 months. Planetside is also a skill-based game, and I can see how having unusable weapons can feel unfair. What’s funny is people actually complain now it’s too easy to level, but I think that’s just because they were used to the old system. It actually takes about a year to reach max level if you were to play religiously, but right now you don’t get anything past level 20 or so.

Every time I ask people how they like it I get positive feedback. It feels good, but I’m only hearing from the people that stuck around in the first place. I’m more concerned about the guys that jump in and leave in 10 minutes. It happens less, but it still happens, and I hope to discover and address why.

I was a day late in submitting but they don’t seem to mind since I was talking to someone there about the upload. Or at least I hope they don’t mind. I will check for my game in a few days.
Indy Game Showcase

I hope everyone will vote for my game 🙂

A guy logged into the game when I was there to help him out – give him some free kills against me, show him what to do, etc.

He got to level 3, bought an energy mine, and killed himself with it trying to use it against me, even though I was letting him hit me. It was because he didn’t know that it damaged yourself first.

Right after that he quit – a grand total of 5 minutes playing under the best conditions.

So I changed it so you can’t kill yourself, and energy mines, being newbie weapons, don’t damage yourself. But this is indicative of a problem I’m consistently having, which is retention. A lot of guys quit within 10-15 minutes of playing. Even the guys that compliment the game, and I do get a lot of compliments, might only play 20 minutes and say they’ll come back later.

What’s funny is this is all true with the zone I setup right now, which is specifically easier for newbies. It’s easier to kill, slower, is team based, and has a simple objective.

I’m going to have to get some inspiration here in a hurry on some way to make the game super accessible so even the most impatient guy will stick around.

Galactic Melee has been getting more beta signups recently and with the improvements to the installation process more people have been able to play. The most players so far has been about 8. It makes me feel good to know people are enjoying the game and reduces my worry and stress slightly when I see growing interest. But this is just a faint glimmer of hope at the start of a long road. I need to increase the number of players by about 100X before I can even really finish alpha. Otherwise there is no proof that Armada, my most fun and important game mode with 500 players, will work.

In my own opinion, admittedly not worth anything, the game is pretty damn fun. As far as that goes, I feel like it’s worth marketing, and there is something here people will want to play. I just need to get those eyeballs looking at the game, and more importantly, everyone who wants to play is able to successfully install and do so.

The player base is growing, just not fast enough. It’s time for some serious marketing.

On the bright side, a few of the players have been helping me out, especially with marketing. I’m meeting some really cool guys in the community. I just hope this all works out to reward their efforts as well as my own. I think we all want a return of the old days back when this style of gameplay had a compelling and fun offering.

We found that many players would come in and half no idea what to do, although the download instructions pointed them to the key settings.

So we added help tips that pop up when you start the game. If you were to read them for 30 seconds, you’d know how to play. However, many users still didn’t do this.

So we then added big red messages such as “Arrow Keys to move, Ctrl to shoot” the first time the game ran. Despite this, some users STILL asked how to move and shoot.

On top of this, many new users are blown up instantly. After 10 or so deaths in 10 minutes they quit and I never see them again.

So we’re adding a tutorial which will automatically run the first time you start the game. The plan is that we lead them through the basics of moving and shooting, not allowing them to progress in the tutorial until the do the prior step. There is very little time left but this seems to be one of those things that is important enough to cause us to lose or gain players, so it’s even more expensive not to do it.

Originally, I thought this would be a week-long headache, but actually with some thought I was able to setup the fundamentals in only a few hours.

There have been too many failure points for getting new users to sign up and play
1. They go to the website but don’t sign up for alpha
2. They sign up for alpha, but a spam filter blocks the email
3. They download the game, but don’t understand how to unzip the zip file
4. They install the game, but when prompted to install dependencies, they uncheck them, and later crash
5. They try to run the game, but don’t have an account, and don’t create one
6. They create an account, but don’t understand how to type it in (stupid but it happens!)
7. They try to connect, but fail, because the server is not online
8. They try to run the game, but crash, either because a dependency was not installed, or their video card is too old.

A significant chunk of my last week has been spent trying to address these issues

1. They go to the website but don’t sign up for alpha

I added a better screenshot and a little bit more information about the game. So the alpha signup rate went much higher.

2. They sign up for alpha, but a spam filter blocks the email

Gmail was doing this a lot. After experimenting we found GMail won’t block itself. So now I sent the alpha signup replies through GMail, although it is a hassle.

3. They download the game, but don’t understand how to unzip the zip file

During alpha there’s no way around this, since I password protect the file. In beta this will go away.

4. They install the game, but when prompted to install dependencies, they uncheck them, and later crash

I just changed the installer to be completely non-interactive.

5. They try to run the game, but don’t have an account, and don’t create one

I added an account creation link to the start menu. The autopatcher will also be changed to let you create an account through it. The game itself already had a button to create an account if the username and password are blank.

6. They create an account, but don’t understand how to type it in (stupid but it happens!)

I don’t know what to do about this. We already provide tooltips.

7. They try to connect, but fail, because the server is not online

I’m going to keep the server online more from now on. A lot of users are complaining about this. It’s alpha so they should expect the server to be offline in my opinion, but I understand it’s better retention rate to keep it online.

8. They try to run the game, but crash, either because a dependency was not installed, or their video card is too old.

I added a message prompt if you didn’t install PhysX, and fallback techniques so even though the game may look worse and some stuff is invisible, at least it should run.

Blues News was awesome enough to post a news link to my alpha, and I got 30 new testers signed up today. I owe them a big thank you because like 10 other sites I sent the news to ignored me. I need to reach a critical mass of about 500 testers at which point I think word of mouth will take care of the rest.

I think tomorrow I can let everyone in at once so there will be players online throughout the day.

I’m trying to find more testers for Galactic Melee. Originally, I was going to go with a small team of like 10 guys. But what happens is someone will check in once a day or so to see if someone else is online. Since this kind of game is totally multiplayer, there’s nothing to do with nobody else around, so a few minutes later they leave. As a ball-park estimate I need about 100 testers such that at any given time someone is likely enough to find enough players to stick around. Since my map is so large it’s not worthwhile unless there’s really 8 or more guys online.

Right now I have maybe 10-20 testers actively looking to play. So today I did a bit of marketing and tried to hit some game review sites for a news link. If I can just get one good link that will solve the problem.

I need to reach a critical threshold of playerbase and awareness to launch. After that point word of mouth will take care of the rest of my marketing.