Chaos + logic = net

Happy new year everybody. With the advent of 2010 brings the beginning of actual development in PISS. Finally.

I've spent many hours over the last year hashing and rehashing various gameplay elements and writing down ideas. I won't promise what I've written down thus far will be excellent or fun, and in fact I know there are some older areas of gameplay that need to be rethought in light of other changes I've made in the last couple months. Currently, I figure I can do this in parallel since I believe I have most of the important ideas nailed down. We'll see about that.

As I stated a long time ago, the majority of development both on the server side and client side will be done in Python. My choice of Python is mostly due to the fact that I find the language interesting and I want to play with it more, its fairly cross-platform by nature, and because it should be plenty powerful to handle what I have in mind. Having never used the language in a serious project before, I'm sure I'll find out all kinds of crazy things and probably lose much hair. What a strange hobby I have.

I'd like to say that updates will be more forthcoming now that development has started but that would be an obvious lie. Besides, it's not like many people find that kind of stuff interesting around these parts.

Despite the ongoing insanity mentioned a couple posts ago, development is still ongoing, albeit slower. While the slowness can partially be attributed to moving, the fact that I'm working on the combat AI mechanics is probably the bigger problem.

Since this is a simultaneous turn-based game, computer controlled battles are the only feasible way of resolving battles. Not wanting to just base the fights on "all ships attack the nearest ship until it dies," I've tried to give players control of what their ships do; however, there are still a lot of unknown factors. If you set a large, powerful ship with massive guns to attack the nearest target, and that target happens to be a fast-moving agile fighter, what happens? I wouldn't want the large ship attempting to chase down the smaller ship; it would be like a eagle attempting to catch a housefly- unlikely and pointless even if it happened. However, I feel that having ships be omniscient and automatically knowing what ships they should attack is the wrong direction as well.

I get the feeling that battle AI is a problem I'll be tweaking for a long time to come, even after release.

It's been awhile since I last updated this space, but that doesn't mean I've been sitting on my haunches. While development has slowed down somewhat since I started getting into the hard areas of how the game will function, I've been making some progress.

The fact I've been working on this for months fairly consistently gives me confidence that I'll see it through to the end. I just hope my ideas are actually worth a damn. They say that your first few games will suck no matter what- which is why you're supposed to start small and work your way up from there. I honestly think I would be a little devastated if this game sucks, since I've been working so hard on it.

Development is still ongoing, although actually using the word "development" might be strong since all I'm doing right now is just writing down how the game will work. This process was going pretty quick at first, but once I started getting deep into the mechanics, it got a hell of a lot tougher.

I have the sneaking suspicion that I'm making this game far too realistic.

I've decided that the name should be Pews In Sub-Space. Partly because of the acronym, partly because I find the name hilarious, but mostly because I'm curious what kind of search terms my site will record having a link to "PISS Wiki" on the front page. Also, because as far as I know, it's not taken.

So, yay.