Category Archives: Game Design

Why This Game Is Taking So Long

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Why is this wargame taking so long? The short answer is that I made a series of bad decisions. The longer answer involves explaining the bad decisions.

Before I began work on General Staff: Black Powder I had done a project for the US Army called MARS (Military Advanced Real-Time Simulator).

Image from the MARS: Military Advanced Real-Time Simulator feasibility report to the US Army. Screen shot of MARS.

I had used a Microsoft IDE (Integrated Development Environment) called XNA to write MARS in C# and I thought it would be a good environment in which to develop General Staff. XNA, on top of being fairly easy to implement a 3D or 2D game environment, had another interesting advantage: any program created with it was immediately portable to the XBox game console. This dovetailed nicely with my dream of someday bringing wargaming to a larger (and younger) audience.

Consequently, the first version of General Staff – including the Army Editor, Map Editor and Scenario Editor – was written using XNA. I had just begun working on the actual game itself when Microsoft suddenly announced that it was no longer supporting XNA. This, of course, sent shock waves through the XNA game development community.

Since I had already written a great deal of the necessary code in C#, and Windows remained my target audience (Windows makes up >90% of the gaming market) I decided to port (that’s a game development word for rewrite for another environment, but hopefully not rewrite everything) to Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

I wasn’t thrilled about porting to WPF. First of all, I wasn’t that familiar with it and, secondly, it wasn’t easy (at least for me) to do a lot of the things that needed to be done. The Army Editor was a pretty easy port, but the Map Editor had some very specific, difficult problems having to do with drawing on the screen. Luckily, I found Andy O’Neill, who is a certified expert on WPF. Andy took over and decided to rewrite my code (properly for WPF) and, eventually, the Army Editor, Map Editor and Scenario Editors were completed. If you are an early backer of General Staff: Black Powder you should have these. They are also available for download on Steam.

By this point the General Staff: Black Powder suite of editors had now been rewritten three times for two different environments, but, it was finally completed and in a stable version. I have been using these programs to create numerous scenarios (some of which are already uploaded to Steam).

The Quatre Bras scenario in the General Staff: Black Powder Scenario Editor. Screen shot. Click to enlarge.

The last thing to do to complete General Staff: Black Powder was the actual game, or game engine. Usually, this isn’t too hard because about 80% of the code is recycled from the Army, Map and Scenario editors. Unfortunately, I just wasn’t happy with the how the game looked in WPF. WPF is great for creating business apps but it just wasn’t giving me the 19th century Victorian look and feel that I wanted. About this time I discovered that a number of former XNA users had banded together to maintain and expand the original IDE; it was now called MonoGame. I decided to write the General Staff: Black Powder game engine in MonoGame.

I was making pretty good progress, but ran into some problems and asked the MonoGame community for help (by the way, I’ve found the MonoGame community to be a great group for answering newbie questions and generously providing time and solutions). It was on the MonoGame community forum that I met Matthew T. who is an experienced XNA/MonoGame game developer (he has a game on Steam that has sold over 100,000 copies). Matthew, eventually, decided to rewrite large hunks of my MonoGame code (vastly improving it) and then began to add some wonderful debugging features.

Screen shot of Ligny scenario in General Staff: Black Powder debugger mode. Click to enlarge.

Matthew and Darin Jones also implemented Steam player versus player (PvP) and we’ve done some early playtesting with Matthew in the UK and me in the US playing against each other in real-time (this was an amazing experience and something that I never envisioned that we could pull off).

So, that’s where we are now. We’ve made great progress and we’ve taken far longer to do it than I had hoped or anticipated. A lot of the same code has been written and rewritten for different environments. With 20/20 hindsight I certainly could have managed this a lot better. I think we’re about two months away from a pre-release beta starting with PvP playtesting. This would involve all the early backers who would get new Steam keys.

As always, please feel free to contact me directly with any questions or comments

 

Fixing a Major Mistake

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This screen shot is an example of the design flaw that has now been corrected. Units don’t instantly change from line to column formation. Note that the red infantry unit is first in line formation (facing northwest), it receives orders from the HQ to switch to column formation advance to a position, switch to line formation, travel in line formation, then switch to column formation and travel in that formation. If you observe closely, the unit one instant is in column formation and the next it is in line formation occupying a different portion of the terrain.

The first lecture I would give at the beginning of every semester started: “The greatest asset you can have as a programmer – or as a human being – is the ability to admit that ‘I screwed1)Full disclosure: I wouldn’t say ‘screwed up’. If you want to get an undergraduate’s attention use the ‘f word’. up’ fifty times a day if necessary. Because, until you admit you made a mistake, you can’t find you mistake. And until you find you mistake you can’t fix your mistake. The first step to fixing a mistake is to first admit you made it.”

In the above screen shot there is a glaring error and I didn’t see it for years. In my defense, nobody else saw it, either. The screen shot, below, shows the correct movement and unit formations:

In this screen shot you can see that the unit is switching formations correctly. Note how the unit first changes from line to column formation by ‘a left face’ command, then moves in column formation, avoiding the artillery battery, moving on to the road and advancing to the assigned location where the unit stops, changes into line formation via another ‘left face’, advances in line formation as ordered until it reaches its destination, stops, forms column by another ‘left face’ and then advances to its destination.

Without getting into details, this was a pretty complicated fix. Looking for help with this, and some MonoGame2)MonoGame is a community supported version of Microsoft’s XNA which was created specifically for making cross-platform games. Microsoft stopped all support for XNA in April 2014. Previously, I had used XNA for some work that I had done for the US Army and the Department of Defense and thought it had great potential for creating computer wargames and simulations. specific problems, I encountered Matthew T. from the MonoGame forum who very kindly volunteered to help. Not only did Matthew fix the line / column formation problems but he identified and fixed a bug with the typography for the game, too:

These two screen shots show the difference in the clarity and spacing (called kerning) of the letters. In the left screen shot notice the lowercase ‘g’ in Debug and the spacing of the letters in the word ‘positions’. In the right screen capture, after applying Matthew’s typographical fixes, the letters are clear and properly spaced.

Matthew is also cleaning up the codebase. I have a tendency to write code ‘fast and furious’ and then hope to go back and optimize and clean it up later. Matthew has already begun cleaning it up and has reduced the codebase by something like 7,000 lines of code! Furthermore, Matthew has also sped up the load time and the time between game turns from about a minute to about 10 seconds (obviously, time varies based on scenario).

Steam Update

Darin Jones has been working on the Steam side. He created the Installer and is working on setting up Player versus Player (PvP) leveraging Steam’s built-in features. While this has been a steep learning curve, Darin has made some significant progress:

Screen shot of Steam Player vs. Player invitation for General Staff: Black Powder. This is not a Play by Email (PBEM) system, rather it uses Steam’s internal messaging system

Darin is also setting up a ‘Workshop’ area where you can upload scenarios, armies and maps that you create and want to use in a PvP game.

What’s Next

Our goal remains to get General Staff: Black Powder into beta-testing (that’s you guys playing with it) as soon as possible. We want to use the Steam PvP method, above, as the vehicle for testing. I’m grateful for the emails that I’ve received that are encouraging me to not rush General Staff: Black Powder out before it’s ready and to deliver a solid game (see also, Gabe Newall on why game delays are OK: ‘Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.’).

As always, please feel free to contact me directly at Ezra[at]RiverviewAI.com.

 

References

References
↑1 Full disclosure: I wouldn’t say ‘screwed up’. If you want to get an undergraduate’s attention use the ‘f word’.
↑2 MonoGame is a community supported version of Microsoft’s XNA which was created specifically for making cross-platform games. Microsoft stopped all support for XNA in April 2014. Previously, I had used XNA for some work that I had done for the US Army and the Department of Defense and thought it had great potential for creating computer wargames and simulations.

How to create a scenario tutorial (Brandy Station).

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Click on the image below to see a step by step video tutorial of the Army Editor, Map Editor, and Scenario Editor as the battle of Brandy Station (June 9, 1863) is created using the General Staff: Black Powder Battle Designer Bundle.

Early Backers: If you did not get your Steam key please email [email protected]. Thanks!

Video Walk-through of the Army, Map & Scenario Editors

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I‘ve just uploaded a video of a walk-through of the General Staff: Black Powder Army Editor, Map Editor and Scenario Editor. These applications are completed. We will be using Steam for distribution. While we are registered with Steam, and they have given us ‘our space’, we still have to build it out and make arrangements for download keys for early backers. We (why do I keep using ‘we’, it’s just me here) truly appreciate your patience.

I will be posting a gameplay video of General Staff: Black Powder next. As always, please feel free to contact me directly.