It’s always nice to get your hands on new software, and I’ve discovered that new versions of old software can be just as satisfying.   When I got our new mapeditor a couple weeks ago I was really excited about working with it.  While much of the mapediting is boring and tedious there are some aspects that are really interesting.  In particular this mapeditor version supports our new system of facilities as components within a hex.   We’re still looking for the proper terminology but for now we’re calling the two elements components and containers.

The system works by classifying elements in a hex into containers.  There are three types of containers; cities, industrial sectors and military installations.  Elements on map are built inside one of these containers which have room for up to six components.  The concept is to centralize map elements so that common elements are more closely associated creating less hexes to keep track of when managing your country.  The design is also intended to create less map clutter than the old system of one hex, one facility.

Most of the components that are built in the containers will be familiar to any Supreme Ruler players.  We still have airstrips, research centers, power plants and other such elements although the military installations work differently than our old “bases” system.  A small base previously capable of storing reserves and building three units at a time would now be a military installation container with a barracks component for storing reserves and three Land Fabrication components, each one capable of building one unit.  All fabrication plants are one component, one build slot, and provide no reserves storage capacity.   Barracks store land reserves, Airstrips now store air reserves and Piers store your naval reserves.  To upgrade an installation, you would simply build an additional component (assuming there are unused positions).  The fabrication components cannot be built without a reserve component preplaced but we avoid micromanaging this by queuing elements for the player.  If you attempted to place a new Aircraft Fabrication component in an undeveloped hex, a new military container would begin construction and inside would be queued first an Airstrip component, then the Air Fabrication component.  Each would build in sequence.  When completed, a second Aircraft Fabrication component could be added without having to pay the cost or wait the time for the Military Installation and Airstrip to be built.  The foundation cost of the containers also encourages strategic placement of components on the part of the player and reduces the “base farming” effect possible in the previous game.

There are other advantages to this new system, most notably that barracks, piers and airports can be added to cities.  This allows for reserves to be stored in key areas without requiring a full military base with unit production.   A limitation in the previous system was that if a region should not have the production capacity for more one military unit at a time, we could give them no more than one base.  With the new system we can also create a sequence of buildings such as requiring a player to have a Security Perimeter component before then can build a Missile Silo somponent.  Another notable addition is a Missile Fabrication component, allowing us to give regions missile production capacity without needing an airbase.

There are of course limits applied to this new system, you won’t find a barracks in an industrial sector or a farm in a city.  There are certain restrictions on what containers each component can exist in and even a few special components that actually exist without a container, but some of these details are still being fine tuned.  For the moment at least I have clear rules and information on military components and have already placed unit storage and fabrication components in Europe, Africa and the Middle East on the new map.

Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

For the past several months my primary role has been to work on our new GUI. Photoshop and I are getting very acquainted. With some key objectives in mind, trying to fit everything that our game allows into the new design has been interesting. At times I’ve been met with a challenge and at other times it seems to fit into place so well I’ve sat back and wondered if I’ve missed anything. A rough list of our ‘unofficial’ goals for the new SR2020 GUI is as follows:

- make it look better, by using new graphical elements, a new overall design, frame sizes, fonts, shapes, layout, etc.;

- provide easier access to areas of the GUI (less mouse clicks for example);

- fitting in new game elements (our new map … container… system for map elements such as industries types and military buildings presents a new area to display information to the player);

- provide easier management of the many lists and data sets (offer more control, filtering, sorting);

- more game emersion (removing as many popups as possible compared to the SR2010 design - will keep the map visible during gameplay)

- make the game more approachable while keeping the level of detail found in SR2010.

No Limits?

I’ve determined making the GUI would be much easier if we did impose some artificial limits. If we only allowed 100 units per country, we wouldn’t really need unit lists, the map would handle it just fine. If each country could research only one or two units, designs would be few and easy to manage. Looking at countries, if we only allowed someone to play against two, three or four opponents it would be much easier to design methods to manage and work with a select few regions. Also, if we only allowed a player to manage their military and a small fraction of their economy, as is the case for RTS style games, the GUI would be a minor design element of the game. But, since we will allow much more in SR2020 than other games, designing the GUI is a larger challenge than someone might expect. While we model the world (as we see it in the near future) the limitations come mainly from the player’s economy and relationships they make around them.

Taking a trip down memory lane for BattleGoat studio leads me to think about the four (4) entirely different GUI designs for SR2010. I’m greatly surprised that the one I’m working on seems to be coming together in one try for SR2020. Not long from now we’ll be able to start play testing. I hope the GUI plays out in the game as well as it did in Photoshop.

– Daxon Flynn, Game Designer, BattleGoat Studios

With the rest of the team working on new design elements or updates to code, I continue to progress steadily towards a playable map of the world. Last Friday I completed the roads and rails and am now awaiting changes to the mapeditor that will allow for the placement of facilities. George tells me that he will have that element up and running by the end of the week but for now I’ve turned to researching the industry balance for the regions. Currently it is one giant spreadsheet that has data on who imports and exports which products and how much they over or under produce. However, with 255 regions, 11 commodities and all the accompanying data, this is one massive spreadsheet.

Some of the data is relatively easy to find. Uranium mining as an example is only done in a few countries and the total annual outputs are available from a few sources. Other elements are more of a challenge. After all, a “consumer good” is a description we give to everything from a house to a fridge to a kids coloring book. And exactly how many tons per year are made in, say, Tajikistan? Further complicating this fact is the demand and cost relationships. Since we are making a world of 2020 prices, demand and production can be expected to change (see the previous blog for reasons why) so in some cases we need to make decisions on if a country has increased its production to continue to be an exporter of a product or if their new demand now causes them to import.

This stage, while less than glamorous, will be an important step towards the finished product. Once we have determined the target production values for all industries per region, I can use the mapeditor to begin placing each type of industry into regions of the map until the total of a region matches our target. The placing of industries is what I’m really looking forward to right now as we are using a new system of component elements within a hex allowing multiple industries to coexist. This should reduce map clutter and make country management easier. We’re still working out many of the details and standards for how it will be done but I hope to discuss this as the focus of my next blog.

Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

One of the things about the Supreme Ruler storyline is that we are not out to make an ‘alternate history’, as some recent games have done. Our view of the world of Supreme Ruler is that we start from today, add some financial and political crisis, mix well, and we come up with the fractured and combative world of the near future.

Though some reviewers considered our storyline to be unrealistic, one has only to go back 75 years to encounter a similar mix of financial and political events that caused the world to be turned upside down. Given all the instability in the world today, it is not at all difficult to imagine many of the events that our storyline predicts.

Yet as we develop the world of the year 2020, we are left with some interesting decisions. One of the things we did with Supreme Ruler 2010 was to model the world very closely after the world of today (or, more precisely, the world of 2005). We adjusted some things, but for the most part we maintained the population, GDP, armed forces, industrial production, and general statistics of the world of 2005. The problem is that this ’status quo’ doesn’t really account for the turmoil of our storyline - financial market meltdown, increased commodity prices, centralization of markets and production under state ownership, and so on.

Given the fact that we are one of the few detailed strategy games based in modern times, it is very tempting to try to model the world as realistically as possible. Our game engine allows simulating the world economy at a level that very few other games have ever attempted, so there is a desire to use that and make everything ‘real world’. But there’s a problem here - Supreme Ruler 2020 is not meant to be the world of today, it is meant to be the fractured world of the near future.

So how much should we change?

World crisis always affects the price of oil - should we double it? Quadruple it? What about consumer demand for goods? Population growth and migration? Shifting of wealth and income levels? What about initiatives such as carbon reduction to fight climate change - should we model a shift to green power? Conservation of resources? Should we make the world more reliant on trade, or less so? Should we assume that trade is more free with less subsidies, or the opposite?

It’s quite likely that most players will not care a lot about the decisions we make in these areas. Yet given the fact that Supreme Ruler 2020 is putting much more emphasis on the ‘whole world’ picture, a lot of players will end up playing ‘what if’ scenarios and long term ‘running the world’ types of games. For that sort of gameplay, the more in line the game is with modern stats, the more realistic it will feel.

Designing this game would be much easier if we simply shifted the world economy over to Tiberium instead…

- George Geczy, Lead Programmer, BattleGoat Studios.

While some of the team got away for a nice vacation during GDC, others had to stay behind to keep things moving forward on the development front.  I found myself in the later group but at least I managed to complete the placement of cities.  There is still plenty of work to be done on the map and even cities will need a bit more work to account for imagery fixes.  We have started to find some oddities on our imagery, generally of our own creation.

While our new high resolution imagery looks great, it came without most major rivers showing so we had to do some “river painting” to put them back.  We also set a standard for islands below a certain size to be removed, those that did not even fill partial hexes.  We removed those islands solely based on size knowing they could be replaced from the original easily if we painted out anything important.  Rivers where done by consulting a few sources and trying to match up visible river beds.  Even when filling terrain and ownership a few errors were found, but city placement has really forced some close examination of the entire map.  All of these can and will be fixed, though it did create some funny situations such as Bermuda which seems to have sunk into its own triangle and Hong Kong Island was painted over due to its size.  Bermuda may or may not be replaced but for now the city of Hong Kong sits on an ocean hex.  Seems we have found our own little Atlantis.

GDC – Random thoughts from the floor

It’s incredibly nice going to a Computer Gaming Convention and not having the major publishers blasting your eardrums with subwoofers the size of elephants.  GDC (Game Developers Conference) is the antithesis of E3.  Granted it doesn’t have the “flash” (also known as booth babes) of E3, but it’s a show that gets people talking to one another about the business of making games.  The volume of the show floor allows for people to have normal conversations without having to shout in each other’s ears.  And if you really want to have an in-depth conversation with a potential publisher, then there are tables aplenty to just sit and chat or whip out your notebook for a quick demo.

So, why did it take so long for E3 to die if GDC is so much better?  Well GDC didn’t kill E3.  They are shows with an entirely different focus – GDC on the developers while E3 focused on the media.  E3 died because it lacked substance and was entirely about show.  That’s all well and good as long as people want to see the show, but after so many years of essentially the same show, people get bored.  Only the game names changed – and sometimes not even that (Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever, etc)!

It’s now incredibly important that GDC not follow in E3’s footsteps.  While there is a void for the smaller studios to get media attention, trying to add that element to GDC would be a mistake.  Keep GDC as it is – a show about the developer and not about how big your studio is!

Sony scares me…

While at GDC, I attended the keynotes by both Sony and Nintendo.  Seeing lineups stretch entirely around a convention center is quite something!  As has been reported widely, Sony unveiled their “Home” – a virtual world (similar to Second Life) in which their gaming community can interact with streaming video ads, banners everywhere promoting the latest game, etc.  I have to be honest… it scared me!  It seemed very immersive, graphically stunning, etc… but with the wide audience that Sony hopes to establish with our children, I couldn’t help but think throughout their demo; “Shouldn’t we learn to live in the real world first?”  Also, they kept coming back to, “some games will unlock virtual content for Home while users will also be able to purchase premium items, like TV’s and upgraded apartments, and designer clothing.”  Great!  Now we’re creating a class system inside video games of the haves and have nots.  At least with Second Life, it was a choice to move into that environment.  Parents might not realize what they’ve gotten themselves into when they buy a PS3 for their child!

Nintendo on the other hand really didn’t use their keynote to wow the crowd with upcoming titles.  Instead they let the audience pay homage to perhaps the most famous of game developers in this relatively young industry – Shigeru Miyamoto.  Using the President of Nintendo America as nothing more than an interpreter, Miyamoto entertained the huge crowd with anecdotes from his experiences and how his biggest reward is seeing an expression of delight and fun on the players of his games.  With games like Donkey Kong, Animal Crossing, Super Mario, Zelda all on his resume, it’s easy to understand why he is looked on with reverence by the gaming community.

-David Thompson, Lead Designer / Co Founder