When you think of ‘Creeps’ in a tower defense game, most tend to think of expendable yet loathesome blobs of stats, just waiting to be chipped away at by your mathematically positioned defenses. In the Creeper World games, you’re up against something much more elemental. Something more organic, and much bigger. You’re fighting an ocean. An ocean that hates you.

As mentioned in yesterday’s double preview, Fractal Softworks’ upcoming space combat action/strategy/RPG hybrid Starfarer is quite a looker. It’s also available in public alpha format, if you’re willing to put down $10 for an early preorder, it’s a lot of fun to play and spectacular to look at despite being still relatively early in development.

You wait 8 years (maybe 7 – depending on whether you’re counting from 2003′s Starscape or 2004′s Space Rangers 2) for a new 2D space-combat themed action/strategy/RPG hybrid, and two come along at once! Typical, eh? As of today, the space-war hungry gaming public can put money down and try out both Minmax’s Space Pirates And Zombies and Fractal Softworks’ Starfarer, two shockingly similar games which have developed in parallel with each other, although each looks to scratch its own specific itch.

I stick around the Indie Game scene mostly for the potential. As much as I love to game, I like the prospect of new cool games the most. So, I thought it would be sweet to highlight some potentially awesome games that are currently in production. And what better place to find games made by serious game developers than the newly launched site www.8bitfunding.com? By serious, I certainly don’t mean that the developers themselves are serious, as is plainly demonstrated by Gorilla Tactics who made this weeks featured game Kung Fu Kingdom.

So what’s so cool about Kung Fu Kingdom? Well, it has stuff that I like. That’s a good reason, right?

Kung Fu Kingdom is an RTS. However, unlike most RTS’s that require some serious micro to play well, KFK lets you draw up what needs doing, and all your minions do the nitty-gritty work. This is why I liked Darwinia so much, so it’s cool to see someone else putting a completely different spin on the concept of a Macro-Management RTS. MaMRTS? I guess that’s better than it being a MMOMaMRTS, or rather a Massively-Multiplayer Online Macro Management Real Time Strategy… but I digest.

It’s dynamically generated, so you can play it as many times as you want, and never worry about playing the same level twice. Small package with lots of potential. Add to that that some items from your previous campaign get used again at the beginning of a new campaign, and you have a game with limitless amounts of replayability. Very cool.

It’s coming to Mac and iPad! The iPad’s cool, and the new Mac App Store is cool. It’s giving lots of Indie Devs a really good opportunity to reach tons of people. I believe that Indie Games need exposure more than they need to make money right in the beginning, so it’s nice to see that they have a plan to reach a broad audience.

I can get my name and/or a character modeled to look like me in game as a perk for funding their project. I enjoy pwning noobs, even vicariously through the AI. Lastly, I watched their 8 Bit Funding video, and he said that I was his friend… several times! It’s the little things that count.

With a reasonably requested $3000 in 30 days, I figure I could do my part and help give this game a little bit more polish before it goes out the door to all those hungry gamers.

[8-Bit Funding, Kung-Fu Kingdom]

Professional looking 'box' art for a serious mod.

To this day, Company of Heroes remains one of the most fondly-regarded RTS games on the market, and is still being tuned and balanced actively by the developers. However, plans for a third expansion to add Soviet forces to the game fell through. Fortunately, a brave team of modders stepped up to bat, and have knocked this one right out of the park.

Chris Hazard founder of Hazardous Software, the company that’s in the heat of developing their time travel focused RTS game Achron that I did a piece on last week, took about an hour to sit down and answer any question I threw at him. There was a ton more I wanted to chat about, but just like life doesn’t have a built in reset button it also doesn’t have a built in timeline bar. Until aliens give us time travel, I think we’ll have to be happy with what little nuggets he’s left us while attending to his busy schedule.

While reading the interview, you can head over to their website and snatch the current alpha for Achron on all three major platforms, PC, Mac, and Linux. Like all other community funded alpha releases, this gives you access to all current and upcoming builds as well as the full retail game when it’s released. Personally, I love the game, and I think a lot of people will be wishing they could turn back time to get it when it’s cheaper after the official release date.
To the interview:

DIYGamer: Looking at your website and poking around, you have quite the academic background. That’s uncommon in such a stereotypically young and headstrong industry. Why put your effort into making games?

Chris Hazard: When I was a kid, I had two big interests. The first was studying the world around me, learning how things interacted. I wanted to be a physicist when I grew up. The second interest was being creative and making things, making worlds and unique characters out of Legos, Construx, and similar toys, and even making up games that resembled video games for my younger brother to play.

I learned how to program in high school, and it was quite a revelation. No longer did I have to study the world I lived in, but I could also create it, and that’s my main motivation for game development. I approach subjects very scientifically, and worked on both gaming and academic pursuits simultaneously. A big reason for that is that many of the ideas I have for games are very challenging to code. Achron is the first big one I’ve been able to realize.

Time travel is indeed a challenging subject. Hard to do right, or even think about sometimes. Why tackle time travel first? What are some of the main challenges you ran into?

Time travel seemed to be the right thing at the right time for me. CPUs were getting faster, memory was getting cheaper, but the speed at which you can read and write memory was increasingly becoming a bottleneck. As a game developer, I was thinking about what to do about that. I was also fascinated by the idea of emulation, and the ability to load a save state quickly. That sort of mechanic changes the gameplay considerably. Obstacle courses with deadly pits simply become mazes, and your skill with a controller becomes secondary to the skill of planning.

When I came up with the idea, I knew it would be a few years before CPUs would be fast enough, but I also knew that I’d need to get started perfecting it in the mean time. And you’re right, it was very tricky to code. I’d planned out a lot of the game engine architecture and many of the gameplay mechanics before I even started to code. In doing so, I made some assumptions about how time travel would need to work. It was somewhat close to what we have now in some ways, such as our timewave mechanism, but different in terms of controls, particularly chronoenergy and fastforward, both of which were hugely important for gameplay.

However, some of my initial assumptions were wrong. Particularly about internal engine things, how things needed to be stored and computed. I went through somewhere around 8 or so prototypes when I first started coding that did not work at all. They’d work fine for a short while and then use up so much of the CPU that it’d grind to a halt. I was almost ready to give up, but then decided to throw away some of my initial assumptions about what sorts of things should be stored. And then I had something that started to work!

Through the years, we’ve continually faced engineering challenge after engineering challenge. Our data structures look more like satellite communication protocols than what you normally see in games. And in some ways, our memory limitations with respect to what units can do in the game resemble Dune 2 more than Starcraft 2. So it has been challenging packing advanced gameplay controls into those little slices of memory and CPU.

You’ve hidden that well. In terms of complex gameplay, you’ve opened a door to strategies that commonly make peoples heads hurt. How has balancing such a new field of strategy been a challenge?

Balancing the RTS aspects of the game without time travel are mostly “straightforward” RTS balancing. Now, straightforward doesn’t mean easy, but we’re taking a unique approach to that using empirically validated game theoretic models. This is where my academic side comes in handy. It’s an approach that isn’t widely used at all because you have to have a bit of a math background to pull it off. It’s not a silver bullet for balancing – there really isn’t one given the scope of an RTS – but so far it’s been working well for us.

Balancing the time manipulation aspects is a little easier in general, mostly because it’s symmetric across players. All players can have the same amount of causality on the timeline, as determined by chronoenergy, and the same controls are available.

The trickiest part about balancing time manipulation and time travel aspects is the edge of the time window. At the distant edge of the time window (timeline), the world state is irrevocably committed. Given our timewave gameplay mechanic, this creates a discontinuity, where paradoxes and changes to the past aren’t always caught. There are a few ways that this can be exploited that make gameplay less fun. The most notable is something we call “permacloning.”

Permacloning is where a unit goes back in time and stands next to it’s earlier self. Once the unit’s arrival back in time falls off the timeline, that is, irrevocably committed, you simply undo the command for the unit to go back in time. Now you have two units with no loss of resources.

There are a number of ways of fixing this issue in gameplay, but most of the obvious ones make the gameplay mechanics far more inconsistent. Instead, we opted to use an economic route, such that permacloning is expensive and difficult to do. We put in an area on the timeline that is too expensive to issue commands, and also added a delay before which units can’t chronoport again. These, coupled with a measured cost for unit time travel, make it more expensive than it’s worth to try to permaclone armies.

With such new and seemingly difficult strategies, what are you doing to ease the gameplay learning curve?

Time manipulation is something that is really new in gaming. Achron is the first to have it, so people aren’t used to it. The same thing happened with Portal; a new gameplay mechanism was introduced that was like nothing else out there and people didn’t have mental models for how it worked.

In Achron, the player starts off without time travel; Humanity is just on the brink of discovering it. So, you learn along with the characters in the game. (This is for the as-of-yet unreleased single-player campaigns.) Once people sit down and play it, many of them tell us that the system is actually very intuitive.

I’ve noticed that myself.

You’ve just played the last 5-10 minutes of the timeline, so you know what happens during that time very well. You click on the timeline and then go change something. Easy.
When you start sending objects through time, then things get a little more complicated. However, players soon learn that it’s better to plan out what you’re doing than to randomly send things around the timeline. It allows you to remember what’s going on.

Independent studios seem to function in similar ways to stay afloat, and a culture has developed around these business models and practices. It would seem that Hazardous Software has adopted a few of these practices, such as Alpha access and an in-depth community forums. However, you’ve called your game a AAA indie, and are using a more traditional business approach than what most indies are doing. What does that mean from a development perspective? It seems like a tough balance, and one that I know a lot of new or struggling game developers would like to know about.

When a lot of people hear “indie”, they often think of a game that two people made in a moderate amount of time. It may be really fun, but usually doesn’t have tons of content. If it does have tons of content, it is usually all procedurally generated.

The heart of Achron was mainly developed by a few people, but our team spans over 30, including all the contractors who did various pieces of it. The scale and scope of Achron actually prevents us from participating in some of the indie game competitions. We have several industry veterans, who have run big projects and won awards.

It is very tough to balance, however. We obviously don’t have the budget of the big studios, so there are some things we can’t do as well. Take pre-rendered cutscenes, for example. Those are expensive, and if you don’t do them well, it’s almost worse than not having them. Instead, we use other forms of storytelling, both in-game and between levels.

We’ve been entirely self-funded, which is hard to do. Many of us have held jobs or saved up money to create Achron. But, we believe in the product and are willing to take the risks.

That right there seems to be the key to making games, and succeeding at life in general. In lieu of time, is there anything else you’d like to say? Any advice? Shameless plugs?

Haha. For budding game developers, my biggest advice is to come up with a neat idea no one else has done before and make it happen.

I think times are changing a bit, now that gamers are growing up and starting to come into positions that have influence. I think sometimes game designers who grew up with games have different ideas and assumptions about what games are and should be than those game designers who grew up before video games existed. And given that, I expect to see games applied in more and newer places, both for entertainment, and for serious purposes.

Thanks a bunch Chris. I really appreciate your time

Thank you for having me.

[Achron]

Pfft… 3D? I’m already playing in 4D!

When sitting down to write a preview, the normal question before collecting my thoughts are something along the lines of “Where to begin”? That just wasn’t the case with Achron. The correct question was something closer to “When to begin”!

Conceptually, Achron isn’t too hard to grasp. It’s an RTS that allows you to travel through the annals of time as easily as physically treading across the battlefield. However, when one stops to actually think about the implications of that concept funny things begin to happen to the integrity of ones head! Brains get mushy, skulls become wobbly, as well as other not-quite-so-pleasant scenarios. As if real time strategies don’t require enough thought as it is in 3 dimensions, how about layering on the generally accepted 4th dimension as well! Before I try and keep you interested in something so deep, watch this explanation video for some visual help. Hit the play button below and join me after the break.

Hopefully that video helped. If you’re anything like me though, it took visiting Hazardous Software’s site and watching every single video they had posted before I really started to ‘get it’. At that point, I felt confident enough that I could actually play Achron without fear of my cranium recurring severe damage. Luckily for all parties involved, and by that I mean me, once you sit down to play Achron yourself, it doesn’t feel too bad. In fact, the time controlling setup feels really solid and almost… natural!

The only other game I’ve played that included time travel as a main mechanic is Braid. Mr. Blow did a fantastic job of introducing one concept at a time so that traveling back to correct mistakes never became too overwhelming. It wasn’t long before you were jumping around confidently with fickle sparkly keys as your companion. You began to look back at the first levels and wonder why they seemed so hard at the time. That’s what happens in Achron.

After playing through some very necessary tutorial levels that cover the basics of the time travel mechanic, you’re thrown in to a nice hand holding level that walks you through a series of attacks in which you’re supposed to defend yourself. From then on, you start to understand the time traveling very well. Time makes traditional strategies, such as blitzing an opponent, almost meaningless because they can easily jump to 30 seconds before you show up and have a counter attack ready. Essentially, it makes the game more about strategizing than about developing “uber micro skillz.” However, Achron still feels frantic as events start to fall off the timeline. It still pays to be quick.

Across the bottom of the screen is the player HUD. In the bottom left is the mini map, and in the bottom right are the unit commands. However, the bottom center is dominated by a fancy looking timeline. The cool thing about it is that it’s not really that confusing. There’s a line that represents when in time all players are issuing commands, how much damage has been dealt or received at any particular time, and waves that carry past events to the present. All of which are really intuitive and easily understood. There are a lot more nuances that are helpful, but not necessary for this review. I’ll go so far as to say that it’s 100% because of how well thought out this timeline control is that the game is playable at all. It makes jumping 30 seconds into the future to send units back 3 minutes in the past to protect themselves from being destroyed (John Conner style), while at the same time launching an attack on the enemies base at 1 minute in the past so you can get there before he has his current defenses… seem normal. Like Braid, manipulating time becomes so second nature that you begin to wonder why every game doesn’t have a similar system.

I’m a sucker for public alpha’s. If it’s stamped with Beta or Alpha, I’m an early adopter. Achron is one of those games. Buy it at a discount to help fund the game while it’s in production. It’s on PC, Mac, and Linux, with the full game included in the deal once it’s released.

[Pre-order to play the Alpha]

Blind Mind Studios has simultaneously released two new updates for their space strategy title Star Ruler, now available automatically for Steam and Impulse users and as manual files through ModDB.

The patches (1.0.2.0 and 1.0.2.2 respectively) add a bunch of new additions, changes and fixes to the large scale 4X/RTS hybrid. From the solid patch notes:

Fixes:

• Civil acts were not affecting labor rate.
• Use tool orders were ignoring the hull’s orbit targets setting.
• Floating point errors were accumulating into the ships damage stat, leading to repair tools continuously firing.
• Victory message is no longer displayed when you start a game with no AIs.
• Explosion effects would sometimes randomly appear in the system when you started a game.
• When selecting a color for your empire the window would sometimes get stuck dragging.
• Fixed crashes on saving/loading dock and retrofit orders.
• Map-specified tags in the new game menu were not being displayed in the scroll box.
• Fleet names are now saved and loaded.
• The Phased Energy Beam was too cheap, and did far too little damage.
• Combat effects were broken in the legacy 1014 mod.
• Fleets could add other fleets as members, causing various issues.
• The camera position is now saved and restored on load.
• Servers/clients could lose connections if they took too long during the loading stage.
• Planet ticks (which handled the economy) were not using a managed tick rate, causing slower production than intended.
• Planets will be correctly lost when population reaches 0.
• Stealth Hulls were applying their effects after armor.
• Homeworlds now hijack the orbits of existing planets if possible, fixing planets orbiting through each other in non-tiny galaxies.
• Minor script exception in multi-rack mounts.
• Autosave was triggering every 15 seconds instead of 15 minutes.
• AIs were not checking systems generated after their home system for expansion, leading to randomly stalled AIs.
• Targeting sensors that were smaller than the connected weapon could actually reduce range.

Changed:

• The windows in the top bar can now be toggled with F1-F6.
• The movement solution has been further optimized.
• Improved system locking to make the game perform more consistently, and faster overall.
• Updated French, Polish and German translations.
• New designs default to not orbiting targets now.
• Saving a design with the same name as an existing one now marks the new design as an updated version of the old one instead of displaying an error.
• Updated the tutorial.
• Beam weapons now also have a random component in their firing delay.
• Pirate raids now become less frequent at lower difficulties.
• Updated Russian translation.

Balance Changes:

• Reduced improvement rate of stealth hulls. Capped their effectiveness at 95%.
• Cargo bays and Ammo storage now scales to a higher storage.
• Fuel Cells now scale in the same way as cargo bays.

Additions:

• Maps can now define options for an advanced window in their xml files, they can control the size and columns of their advanced window.
• Option to turn off galaxy gas display.
• The Options and new game windows can now be localized.
• Ships without engines (i.e. stations) now orbit the planets that created them.
• Added basic interface to choose empire settings when a game starts.
• Added range rings – hold alt to show the range of the selected and/or hovered object.
• Arrrr! Pirates will now periodically raid systems with lots of resources but no defenses.
• The names of the default, AI and pirate ships can now be localized.
• Autosaves and quicksaves are now rotated, you can specify how many saves to keep. The ones with the higher numbers will be older.
• The planet window’s queue tab now displays the total cost of the current queue.
• Added proper ship set support.
• “Defend Position” stance, ships will engage targets but return to their original position afterwards.
• “Update All” button in blueprints list that immediately updates all designs to the latest tech level.
• Remnants now roam uncolonized systems and attack all ships within them. Their amount and frequency depends on the difficulty.
• A basic victory condition (destroy every planet owned by another player).
• Subsystems in the damage report window now display their current level.
• Entry in the right-click menu to select all ships in a system with the same blueprint as the one you clicked on.
• Stations can now be retrofitted at the planet they are orbiting. It will cost 20% more than usual (up to 60% of the cost of building a new one) to represent the cost of moving it down and launching it back up again.
• Added localized versions of various graphical buttons for French and German.

Those interested in trying out the game can download the demo file on ModDB (also available to Steam users.)

[Blind Mind Studios]

God bless the open source community. When those guys aren’t making kickass free software, they’re also remaking some of my childhood favorite games of the past couple decades and re-releasing them for free via the internet. They’ve done it with Civilization, Railroad Tycoon and now Red Alert, the insanely popular Command and Conquer spin off that, to me at least, was ten fold better the C&C.

There’s not much more to say about OpenRA other than what I’ve already noted. If you enjoyed the original Red Alert games made by Westwood in the early 90s then you’ll probably get a kick out of this game. That said, you should take note that this game isn’t complete yet. While OpenRa is certainly free and open source, the unfortunate part of that scenario is that it’s also incomplete and still in alpha.

That said, it is playable via Windows, Mac, or Linux so long as the computers are fairly modern with the supported graphics cards being: Radeon 9500 or later, Nvidia FX (5) series or later, Intel GMA X3000-X4500, GMA 500 or later (the GMA 900-950 are not supported).

Interested? Have at it via the link below.

[OpenRA]

Gameplay video

Reckless Squad, from developer D2P Games, has informed me that their upcoming convoy-based RTS game is now available for pre-order and will launch on GaamersGate on October 11th for $9.99.

For those that remember, I previewed Reckless Squad back in early September and came away generally impressed by the gameplay mechanics and the game’s unique focus on a convoy/escort based RTS game. Also I really enjoyed the game’s unique arena mode which pit you up against never ending wave of enemies. Those are always fun.

Anyway, if you’re interested, check out the game. I just got my review build in so I’ll try to get it up sometime next week.

[Pre-order, Reckless Squad]