A big question I get from folks as they’re signing up — “what’s to stop someone who has been playing for a while from coming in and stomping me as soon as I sign up?” — and it’s a very valid question. A 4X game, by it’s nature, involves a bit of exponential growth, population being one obvious example in Galactic Impact, but also sheer access to resources: finding a second planet, then another, then all those planets funding your fleet, to find more planets, there’s an intrinsic exponential growth. 2^x.

Of course, if you join today, and I join tomorrow, and we’re on the same exponential growth trajectory in a game, I can literally never catch you, it’s mathematically impossible, which diminishes the fun for both of us. For me, I can’t ever “overtake” you, so why try? But also for you, because you have no meaningful peer competition.

Rubber BandingRead More »

So today was like the first frustrating day of this for sure. I ran into some shit with Rails associations that were really really tedious, and I’m a little angry about it, but I think I got to a good solution.

Some background basics of a 4X (at least ones set in Space), you send ships to star systems, where they either fight other ships, or land folks on the planet to grow a new Outpost, but at the same time, ships belonging to other players are also going about their business, and how do you know if you can see them or not? Star ships ostensibly all have sensors baked in, on the lookout for hostiles (or even allies…?) and new stars to expand our starcharts as we explore outward.

FrustratedRead More »

One challenge with the old build of the game was instantiating ‘new stars’ for a new player to call home when joining the game. As a designer, you want them to have a little bit of a platform from which they can step up and take on the other players who have been playing a while, and have expanded out among the stars. But how to do that in a way that seems even remotely fair? The first time around, I used an algorithm to choose where the new player’s star would be placed, called the Archimedes Spiral. It took as input the number of previously-registered players, and made a somewhat galaxy-shaped spiral, expanding outward from a ‘galactic center’. But issues arose when it became more and more apparent that the stars were too close together, and there weren’t a lot of “other places” for a player to check out that weren’t already someone else’s homeworld. I could have tuned parameters of the spiral, but ultimately, the new stars were always appearing in a predictable pattern, so an experienced player could camp the end of the spiral arm with a Shipyard or a few heavy warships and make a quick PK on a new player as soon as they joined.

Mostly, I’m attempting to make the first pass at development a 1:1 replacement Ruby for Python and Rails for Django, but this was one area that I knew would be a problem as soon as beta testing began, so I chose to take on the challenge of re-imagining this as I rebuilt the new onboarding path.

This is an issue that has been gnawing at me ever since I put this game away 10 years ago (probably second-only to concocting ways of ‘rubber banding’ the exponential growth advantage of players who joined before you), so I had some ideas on how I might approach it.

Starting LocationsRead More »

Between working on Galactic Impact the first time in the late 20-aughts and today, I’ve done a lot more board gaming than video gaming, and that’s also where the bulk of my ‘game design’ brain has been. Comparing that world with video games is an interesting exercise, especially because there’s a lot of conversation about “app integrations” on the board game front these days.

This all came to mind as I was dove in to rebuilding “population growth” for Player’s “Worlds” in Galactic Impact. In the old version I did a blanket percentage growth calculation — for example, if the target was 1% growth, multiply the population by 1.01, save that as a the new population and call it a day. Got the job done, but was completely deterministic, which is somewhat unrealistic for population growth. (Also unrealistic when using that same calculation to determine the numbrer of deaths on account of hostile atmospheres).

Rolling DiceRead More »

It’s a core belief of mine that language is important — after all, if you and a listener don’t have a common language of some kind, you can’t communicate — so as I’ve been rebuilding Galactic Impact, I keep being struck by the word “Colony” everywhere in this type of game (Sending Colonists to another world… to Colonize that world when they arrive…).

Without doubt, the term is common parlance when we talk about setting up permanent human habitation on worlds in outer space, “a Moon colony”, “a Mars colony”, and beyond. In fact, NASA has entire articles about it. But in reality it’s a term rooted in a really horrific period of human history. It doesn’t often get this framing in History classes in the U.S., but Colonialism was a seriously fucked up era when entitled European empires showed up on foreign shores to kill, loot, and occupy as they saw fit. These actions redrew the map and world affairs in ways that are still visible four hundred years later, and lots of people around the world are still experiencing the negative downstream effects.

Evolving 4X TerminologyRead More »