Re: News from Valiant galaxy associates
Thanks for the words of encouragement. As to the self-voicing and the GDG usage, that's been covered in other places, and I don't think addressing it here will really add a lot.
As to making the games more difficult. Interceptor was a first game, and was, essentially, a port of a game I designed in high school. As it stood, it had major flaws, but it was enough different from other offerings that we went ahead with it on the understanding that at some point we'd revisit it and change how it works. Right now, the idea with it is to do something more in terms of missions, multiple fighter engagements at one time, and more tactical use of space.
TKS was never meant to be a huge or complex game either. It was a free release meant to give a different view of the VGA universe. It got a lot more feedback in that respect than either of us really expected. Hence, why we're looking at expanding it.
Yellowbonnet was always meant as a mini game and thus fairly small scale.
Expanding Known Space is a much larger project. We've been working on it off and on for 5 years, and it has a lot of customizable variables that make it less predictable. It's not where I would like it in terms of the computer player's abilities on normal settings, but I like strategy games and play them often. We're not going to strengthen this mode much more than it is now, as I find it fairly easy, but some of our beta test team had a lot of trouble with it. I think it's a good balance currently.
However, that said, options are being added to give the computer a distinct advantage and make it a more difficult game in a number of ways.
I don't want to project too much because ideas get changed as design notes come into contact with coding issues, but I am wanting to have several victory conditions or mission states that are more difficult. Things such as games that last only a certain number of turns and require you to accomplish certain goals in that amount of time, or giving the computer a numerical and economic edge over the player. I don't know how much of that will make it into the final product.
When we do interceptor's expansion, I might come back to tapping the audio games.net community for voice acting abilities. One thing I always wanted to add to the original game was radio chatter from other interceptors in the squadron as well as messages from the mother ship, as well as interception of alien messages.
Rerecording the entire voice over script would be a time consuming project. I believe that it is currently close to 600 files at the moment if you include all games, and that could be fairly tedious.
One last comment in response to Defender about GDG. I don't think saying that GDG is dead in the water is necessarily true. First and foremost, we are still helping Dennis to develop the client and make the platform better. It is a work in progress, and since Dennis is working full time, programming for Stellar Aeon and Alter Aeon, and then occasionally working on GDG, it isn't a fast fix for issues. However, that said, the system works well for what we wanted, and what he originally envisioned. I think it's sad more developers haven't taken it on as a possibility, but I understand the reasons. The big advantage to GDG over some other developer's systems of distributing games and keys though, and Dark touched on this, is that Dennis keeps executables of the games we make so that they will still be available even if we go bye bye. In that way, he's doing something similar to what John has done with the audio games archive. However, since GDG is a living system, I think that does provide one advantage that developers might reconsider. If a game might earn a little residual income years down the road, that might be another inducement. I don't know how many times I've seen people ask here, or on Audyssey, for contact information or where to download a game, or access a commercial game that used keys, once the developers have disappeared.
Thanks again for all the interest and the critiques. Games do not develop without good feedback systems. We appreciate it.
Jeremy
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