I want one.

I took a little extra time this week to work on Captain Jameson, knocking out some of the auxillary features required for other people to enjoy it. Right now all the game mechanics are in and I can wander among them for hours, but I fear anyone not familiar with the game won’t find their way through its morass of vestigial features and undocumented systems. I need to prune back the weeds and lay some paving stones. A December release is looking plausible but I can’t honestly guarantee it, unfortunately.

In other Captain Forever news, I spoke at length about Captain Jameson and other things with Travis Boisvenue who then transcribed the conversation and published it here. You’ll find the page peppered with new Jameson screenshots, and marked by my apparent need to say “kind of”, “sort of”, and “just” in almost every sentence.

Captain Forever is also enjoying a little gallery time at InnerSpace, an exhibition in Melbourne curated by Christian McCrea. If you’re nearby please pop in, then let me know if the setup is as amazing as it looks in the photo.

Right. Now I’m off to code a cloud-based savegame system so you lot can log in to Captain Jameson from any browser.

<3 Farbs

Clicken for Biggen

Having ranted about Nu-Lo-Fi I feel kinda guilty for never exploring it. I occasionally devise unusual yet simple display systems, but so far I’ve not been able to use one in a finished project. Today however I caught myself doodling ideas for a lozenge-based renderer, and realized I could easily integrate it into Ticky Tacky. With a few minor changes its shamefully retro box renderer began churning out lovely drop-shadowed lozenges, bringing a new feel to the game and allowing slightly different forms of expression through radius of curvature and shadow ordering. I’m not sure it’ll go anywhere, but it was fun to do.

Another fun experiment I tried this week was removing friction from Captain Jameson. Inspired by Chris K’s comment I replaced the game’s fast travel time scaling system with the option to remove friction (and therefore travel at insane speeds with terrifyingly bad handling). It was an interesting experiment, it gave me ideas for new booster types, and it allowed me to modify friction per-cluster and thus make debris float like proper space junk, but for the purpose of quickly travelling across empty space it was utterly pants. It was the exact opposite of fun. I’ve since rerouted the shift key back to time dilation.

I’m now working on another player feedback system, to replace the email and “Captain Clippy” message systems discussed earlier. Email is a better metaphor for receipt of in-game messages, but the interface requirements are utterly horrid. Instead I’m letting NPC’s upload to your command module’s file system. All the player need do is LIST (or LS or DIR) to view a list of available files and LOAD (or OPEN, CAT, MORE, or LESS) a file to view its contents. I think it’s a good approach, especially as it means I can play some lovely old modem sounds.

<3 Farbs

Nothing to see here

I am not making a 3D episode of Captain Forever. I have not modelled any of the modules using SketchUp, designed a super nerdy 6 DOF control system, planned the technology base, or even given a thought to multiplayer. I couldn’t possibly have time for this given Captain Jameson’s frighteningly proximous deadline.

Perhaps I’ll think about it later.

<3 Farbs

Retractable!

My Jameson pre-launch tasklist continues to shrink, but at a slower rate than the growth of my “done” list. The problem, I’m sure you’ve guessed, is that I keep finding new things to do. These things aren’t bugs or big sweeping changes. They aren’t new features that add depth and complexity to the gameplay. No, they’re details.

It’s weird, given the game’s abstract graphics and sparce audioscape, that I can keep finding little things to add. The running lights, first appearing in Successor, flash the correct colours to distinguish port from starboard. All 700 possible ship names have been manually translated into phonemes so they can be spoken aloud by the game’s speech synthesizer. And now this week, while fixing a bug with the docking stations and changing how they’re distributed throughout the sector, I couldn’t help but add a little detail. Every time you launch a little retractable aerobridge snakes away from your ship.

The effect lasts roughly one second, took me two hours to implement, and was totally worth it.

<3 Farbs

You’re jamming my COM!

Hail fellow spacethuseasts! If you watched my last development video you’d have seen me fail to hail a nearby space station as my signal was mysteriously jammed. Who was jamming my signal? It wasn’t obvious. I reckon the giant parabolic dish I mounted to the top of this oversized command module will give future players a pretty good clue. What do you think – will they figure it out?

<3 Farbs