I figured it was time to review the current status since I get an occasional email/PM/tweet/FB/comment asking “when” and such. “When”, I can’t say for sure. But I can say what has been done and what I know I want to do… So in that regard:
Current Status
- Game play rules are 95% done. There may be some tweaking, but the major pieces are in place and I’m fairly happy with them. I’ll be really happy with them once they are balanced some more.
- Graphics are mostly done. I may still tweak a few effects here and there and change/add some land textures. But for the most part what you see in the next video or screenshots is what the game will look like. Yes, it is definitely ‘indie’, but it does also use a little bit of your GPU for lighting effects and such. Also my games always tend to err on the side of packing in more ‘information’ on the screen than trying to make pretty box art. That’s just the way it is because that’s what I like.
- Operations (things the software has to do to work, like menus, selection screens, persistence, settings…) is well over 90% done for the critical elements necessary. There are more things I’d like to add, though, so see below for that.
- Scripting, custom images, and other mod support is 60% done. I have PRPL (which is like CRPL) and it works and is being used already. There is also custom image support so you can insert your own graphics into a mission. There is a ship editor for making your own ships (and using them in any mission). There is a map editor, but it needs a few additions. I don’t have scripting on ships yet, or custom character graphics, or custom land texture support. But I will be adding these soon.
- Content is hard to assess. For the story missions I have just begun, but I do have a story draft. There is the simulacrum random mission generator and it is over 90% done. Custom mission support is also over 90% done and there is an editor, a way to play and post scores, and upload missions for sharing. The game also has a “Mission Heap” (like Colonial Space in CW3) for browsing and downloading maps (that can be rated). I still need to add the majority of the story missions, plus some other missions created during development from me and others.
Things TODO
- I’m currently working on PRPL (scripting) and enhancing it a tad. I’ve been making a tutorial mission so cleaning up and improving PRPL is a current work item.
- Story missions. Working on the tutorial currently (which takes like 2 weeks… but I’m 90% done with it).
- Better story mission selection screen. (Currently better than it was, but needs a final adjustment)
- New main menu section for viewing missions created during development for testing and game play.
- The ship editor exists but there is no online sharing of ships at KnuckleCracker.com yet. I want to add a way to share and browse ships.
- Scripting on ships. Need to add a handful of ship specific APIs.
- Corporate “logo” (a small icon) support in high score tables (the ability for players to have a custom icon next to their name). More on this later…
- Review tech upgrades and adjust/add/remove as necessary. This has a lot to do with balance and some things only reveal themselves after considerable game testing.
- Small graphical updates here and there. (I got some grief on the emergent trails for instance… guess Darwinia isn’t fresh enough on people’s minds 🙂
- Generate videos based on final gameplay/graphics to include in the game’s menus.
- Tweaks and game play balance as necessary.
- Steam achievements. I have steam integration, just have not added achievements yet.
- Other Steam stuff like trading cards I suppose…
- Tutorial video on how to play. Nothing fancy, just a few minutes of me playing and showing how to move and interact with the game.
- Game help menu with description of game objects and items.
- Probably 10 more things I’m not thinking about right now.
And here is a screenshot of me working on the Prelude/Tutorial mission. I’ve included a view of notepad++ open on a PRPL script that is driving the tutorial.
3minute before, i clear creeper world 1 The Loki without Thor lol
I Love creeper world 4!
i can’t wait Creeper world 4
This is NOT Creeper world 4. This is particle fleet.
This is not particle fleet.
THIS… IS… MADNESS!
Madness?
THIS. IS. SPARTA!!!!!!
Sounds good. Keep at it. I’d rather the game be well balanced than out quick so take your time testing it.
BTW, I LOVE DARWINIA!!! lol.
Please have main menu use up more screen space! CW3 had an INCREDIBLY small menu when you hit escape. I paid good money for my monitor. Use it!!!! Remember, scroll bars are the spawn of the devil. If you can’t fit it in one page then use tabs/sub menus.
Edit: the ability to resize in game status bars would be nice. I have pretty good vision and still had a hard time reading some of the info in CW3.
Yes…. I do plan to add an options to increase the size of the UI elements. 4k monitors at anything less than about 46″ are basically unusable with my eyes. A 2560×1440 monitor that is 32″ is the best dpi my eyes can handle. So yes, I’m well aware of the squint issue 🙂
I wish there was a universal scale setting in Unity so I could easily emulate 1920×1080 resolution in a window on a 4k display. But, there isn’t…. so I have to manually handle it all over the place.
At the very least a UI scaler can be added so the command bars and menus and such are larger. The game itself already sort of has a work around since the game space is zoomable as part of normal game play.
some people like scrollbars
So the scripting this time is called purple? ;P
Love these games. I have Steam wallet cash already designated to spend on this. Day 1 purchase! You’re a gameplay genius.
So, the game is almost ready. Cool!
Thanks for CW 1,2,3 and for keeping making this kind of games! Can’t wait for Particle Fleet.
i aswell do love darwinia and liked the reference 😀
keep the good news coming
You know what they say about the remaining 10% of the work 🙂
Can’t wait for the game.
A nice little summary.
Good job so far.
This game will be epic. Man maybe you are not best storyliner but you gave us great tool to make great gameplays. Custom maps were THE feature. It makes me play CW3 for hours.
I did enjoy the Story of CW 1 – 3, there a dev’s out there who are making much worse storys than this one. CW ist just a perfect game in all belongings.
I’m sorry but I thouroughly enjoyed the story, and more importantly the dialogs, in CW3. With only 2 characters most of the time and so little to the story when you really look at it, the job done was great.
With that being said, I hope there’s more characters in PF, more interactions between them and more well written dialogs.
I know that you probably get asked this all the time, but I haven’t asked, sooooo… Are you ever planning on returning to Chopraider? Also, PF is looking good so far, V.
I’d like to…
Can you give me an estimate about how long will it take to complete all story missions? It didn’t last very long in cw3…
I can’t tell you how long it will take to make them, much less play them 🙂
Could you at least put more levels in the Story this time? Or maybe a prologue/epilogue story mode that you could also play?
Will the loose individual blocks of land around the edge of the main landmass be kept or you just seeing how you feel?
I’m wondering how niggly it could become if you wanted to be clean of enemy emergent (EE) as you go through a map, or at the end once you’ve won and want to clear everything before moving on. If EE has landed on those wee individual blocks it could be tedious to have to manually remove some because emergent, from an omni say, can’t reach.
Or…
Is emergent able to jump over a pixel or two of open space to clean up the edges?
Also this is my first comment so I should say the game’s looking great! Been a silent admirer since CW1.
I scatter little pieces of land like that to give a feel of a broken asteroid or something like that. It’s more visual than anything. But, if it does get mired you can clean it off with any nearby ship that has cannons. Cannons will shoot at mired land…
I see i’m not alone with my strange urge not to move on before everything is 100% clean. (Yes, i even terraform the biggest maps in game. It’s some kind of madness, but i like it. Doh!
The madness was unleashing the power of the Terps onto us, lowly players. I too, tend to overuse them…
I only use Terps when I need to, such as when I need to shoot at something higher than my blasters, or I get a larger amount of time from impact to breach.
I’ve been wondering… is there any reason why you invent your own scripting languages (CRPL / PRPL) instead of just exposing an API to Lua or Python? In the very least, I imagine it’d be much less work.
CRPL/PRPL are tightly integrated into the game and the processing loop. With any language there are three main things of concern (for the scope of this game).
– The syntax
– The core language elements (things like logic, loops, and data types)
– The APIs (the things you can do with the language).
The syntax, logic, loops, and data types are things that most people pick up quickly. They are usually tightly defined (at least for most cases). It’s the API’s that are large and require experience and knowledge to use.
So if I hypothetically switched from PRPL to javascript, that would change the first two items but not the third. 90% of my development effort was actually the APIs. Making a simple token based parser, providing a stack, and an dictionary were 10% of the work. Integrating that with each “core” in the game, which are essentially separately executing scripts within a given game frame was actually easier doing my own thing than using something else.
In the end I have more and more efficient control over how to expose the APIs and marshal and persist the state and data with my own thing than with a javascript interpreter for instance. As a thought exercise, when you think about about a prpl script executing it can have things on the stack and variables in the dictionary (the heap). Someone can pause the game, save it, then load it. It has to come back in that exact state with the vars and everything just like they were left. This can be done with other language engines, it just isn’t ‘easy’ or compact, etc.
I’d like to go into a rant about how much I can’t wait, but at the same time want a quality product. However, that has already been said. Instead, it is interesting to see that the tutorial mission is more like CW 1/2, rather than 3 which had a huge map. Also, a while back, I remember a comment mentioning that ramming might be an “exploit”, to sacrifice a ship to progress much faster. Any ideas for that such as Story mission structure, or some nerf to it, say your ship’s hulls colliding with enemy ship’s hulls take much more damage than the enemy? Or will you just accept or even embrace this fact? Really excited to know the game is coming along, so good luck and hope those 10% don’t turn into 1000% ; )
Hey there again! Literally just had an idea. In the end of CW3 Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert! It said that there were two ways to uncover the Arc. One way was to pack unfathomable amounts of information into one place. It never said what the other one is. Will that be a part of Particle Fleet? If not, is it something you plan on expanding on at one point, or is it supposed to remain a mystery?
Maybe, maybe not 🙂
That would be super interesting if that happens. But, the only way to do that is if they were the one’s who built it, or learned about it from the Creator. Because CW3 is supposedly after PF, those would be the only likely answers to this question.
will there be an option to disable the leaning inwards effect you have on the editor and ship bars? something about it is bothering me, it seems to blur a bit making it harder to read
So when are we getting the ChopRaider sequel? :3
Do you have an estimated cost for when the game comes out, please let me know I would like to be able to save up money and make sure that I have the money for it so I can buy it asap. Please let me know.
FYI I will check this and try to re-post this comment on the latest update or video for the game.
Take my money already!
Looking forward to the game, have supported you through CW1,2&3 after playing your initial version on Kongregate many years back.
This is _very_ off-topic, but when you attach images can you reference them without an explicit preceeding “http:” ? Viewing the site over https with mixed-content disabled (good for security) results in broken images. In this posts example it can instead be “//knucklecracker.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ParticleTest73.jpg”, which will then work when viewing over http or https. Might be a wordpress bug of course…
Why not releasing an early access?
Because finishing and releasing a full game would be so much better.
Despite this not being an official continuation of CW, I think it would be worthwhile to include a couple of soft easter eggs that suggest a bridge of sorts.
Take the easter eggs in nearly all games made by blizzard entertainment or the inter-game references in the free-to-play online franchises “Being One” and “Killer Escape”, both by Psionic Games.
If those won’t turn on long time CW fans who connect to PF, I don’t know what will.
Virgil has mentioned in other posts that it’s within the same universe. I believe there was some allusion to it being a prequel.
I don’t mind how long it takes.
If the last three games are anything to go on it’ll be great.
You know, I’ve really been far, far too productive at work lately. Part of me needs Particle Fleet to come out. The other part of me dreads it… I mean, not that I’ve ever played games when I’m supposed to be working, or anything.
Rewatching an older video, I had a question occur to me, yet again. (I’m usually too lazy to type it.) What happens if you Amp Gem the HQ? CAN you Amp Gem the HQ?
On another note…. I *NEED* a new video. Please V? I don’t care if it’s dead silent, I just want to see more gameplay.
Can I be an aid for the development? If you can configure something that I can work with, (like a map editor for configuring story levels) and the development process will go much faster. Heck, ask a few people from around the entire blog to help you with the development, and it will go 10 times faster (yes, you are expected to reward them with something, like early access to the game).
All in favor, reply with “Particles for life!”
All opposing, say nothing.
Particles for Life!
but how do you tell how many people read this comment?
Hey virgilw, I got 2 questions.
1. Are you gonna release pictures of the campaign like with CW3
2. Is the w an initial, or is that not even your real name?
pretty sure his name is virgil wall
its been a month you are killing me!!!!!! Videos or game! 😛
It’s been over a month virgil. When can we hear that silky smooth voice of yours again? We didn’t get any this update. Don’t leave us hanging!
Everyday goes like this:
7 am: tipying knucklecracker.com/blog into browser … seeing same number of responses as yesterday … damn
8 am: see 7 am
9 am: see 7am
10 am: what a new number? … OMG … OMG … OM damn … another sucker like me waiting … damn
11 am: see 7 am
12 am: see 7 am
…
10 pm: quick prayer … dear allmighty virgilw give me peace! … please. Thanks
I do exactly these check-ups you do…
(I have this page and the forum as homepages)
Hey, that’s my schedule! Well, maybe not as often, but pretty much, yeah!
So true!
I’ve gotten into the habit of just rolling my hand across the k and n keys and letting it do the rest for me.
One day I’m going to go somewhere I don’t want to.
I’ve made a bunch of menu and beauty changes over the last few weeks, and even added a few story missions. Things are at last coming together, but I’ll need some time yet before I roll a new build and do a blog post.
Don’t worry about it like that. It is actually surprisingly easy to do a blog video. You take something that isn’t going to give anything away in the end of the Story, make a simulation with the object/unit, and start taping.
I pretend to make videos on making my CW3 Third Voice series in Colonial Space, and leave out me typing in the text, and getting the shield key (in some cases).
It’s not too difficult. Just don’t leave everyone hanging!
i’ll gladly wait until you are happy with what you want to show us 🙂
Thanks for the update. Even something as tiny as that helps us all so much. Take all the time you need, just don’t forget to remind us how things are going every now and then 😀
I can’t wait. I mean it! Do it now!!!!
Please?
In my opinion it would be better if you could write more often. It doesn’t need to be a big post with a video or something like that, just a small “I’m still alive and work on XY”. 🙂
I can’t wait to see the next video. I’m excited to see how far the game is at that point.
Thanks for the update Virgil
Do you have an aim for how many story missions you will put in?
Oh boy, so many red flags. All I see is 90% done for most things; everyone knows that 90% is a dangerous number in programming. After all, we know about the ninety-ninety rule which states clearly: “The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”.
I’ve come to test that rule, and found it to be just as true as it is disheartening; hope that rule doesn’t hold true for you here, Virgil 🙂
Amazing to see how far your new game has progressed, although I didn’t have the time to stay up to date with your progress. Was nice reading through your blogs and see things evolve. You’re as talented as dedicated it seems!
I wonder, as I’m just a boring business-related-programmer-guy myself, will you ever do blogs that are a bit more technical, shedding some light on your secrets as to how you make your games happen? I’m intrigued by the sheer amount of particles and how you managed to pull that one off; as a mere hobby gamemaker (if one can call them games :D) my first thought were gameobjects, but if all those particles were gameobjects the game would slow down to a crawl I believe… So I’m imagining that they are actually not objects with collision boxes at all, but rather that you have all particles as mere data calculated independently from the graphical aspect, just the base data in some datastructure on which you do the calculations and collision checks – still a lot of computing! Am I completely wrong? Probably 🙂 Very intriguing nonetheless!
Good luck to you with your new game! I hope it gets the attention (and sales) it deserves! 🙂
I strongly second the technical-side videos and/or text posts. That sort of stuff is fascinating for many (myself included) and educational for quite a few (myself also perhaps included). You don’t have to give up any magic you perform in the process, but a simple little low-down would be great to see. Heck, even if it only showed up after the full game were already done and out, if that were the way you needed/wanted to do handle it.
Yeah, I’d love to do some tech posts. The issue is of course the time it takes to do them. But my hope is I’ll have some time after the general release of Particle Fleet to do some tech posts on how it works.
I literally got bored today and decided to check up on here, to see this game has been in production for quite a while now.
I am excited to make another purchase.
Thank you.
Can we get an update on what is in the game, please? Most of us here have been waiting for something new to come up, and we want to know what’s in the game.
Can you just find something to show us Knuckle Crackers?
I know… and I apologize. After this next build I am going to start blogging at least one a week if not more frequently. A lot more information will start to become available over the next month…
Thanks for that.
are you planning on releasing a beta test build before the game is complete? I would love to test out the game.
Yes…
But my definition of “beta” is the old school definition not the more recent definition of “it runs”. So when I’m happy the pillars of the game are all in place and am working on basically just final mission content, I’ll open to doors to some beta testers. They can help adjust the final tweaks and find bugs and such that will make the general release the best quality it can be.
when do you think you’ll release a beta build to people?
I would like to know that as well.
Hey virgilw, once again, I got exactly 2 questions for you.
1. You’ll be releasing Particle Fleet on Steam, right?
2. Was this in any way influenced by Reassembly? If not, check it out, it is sorta similar, and might give you some ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf-kfHBeMgc
1: Yep
2: Somebody else pointed out Reassembly to me about 6 months ago or so. I was not familiar with it till then. Looks very cool. PF focuses less on ships and a lot more on the ‘particles’ and the way you engage that as an enemy in a more ‘strategic’ way as opposed to a tactical ship combat game. But both game styles can be very fun…
To me, “tactical” and “strategic” mean the same thing. Try to think a little more closely to the words you use.
I’m getting close to a new build and will try to get a new video and blog post up within the next few days (week at most). I never like to commit to any time frame for anything… but a new blog post soon is definitely my goal. It will focus on a number of visual changes, menu’s, organization of game features, and all that stuff necessary to make a cool game.
I’m so hyped for the actual release/beta release, mostly for the gameplay, but the prelude message at the end is making me jump in my seat.
I can’t wait!