Another update with more bug fixes. Longer games should work much better now. As well as fixing some AI problems associated with longer games, I also check and skip a human or AI player’s turn if they have no legal moves, or if their only legal moves self sacrifice for no gain. This eliminates lots of superfluous explosions that would happen towards the end of a long multiplayer game when an AI had no good moves left. As a bonus, I added a requested “game ends after 30 turns” mode.

I just posted a new version that addresses some bugs brought up in some of my reviews.

I apparently messed up my average AI when I was trying to implement the “opponents combine influence” option at the last minute. I didn’t catch it because myself and I think most of my testers now focus more on the smart AI. Ooops. Its fixed now. Hopefully it didn’t cost me too much.

Other fixes in v1.0.2

I embedded all of my fonts because they weren’t showing up correctly on the PC build. Some of the fonts now look a little different.
fixed a bug where if it would be your turn you could still make a move after victory has been declared.
fixed a typo in the tutorial
I turned on a compression setting so the file size is half as large
disabled the drag to resize window controls because it doesn’t resize the image, just adds black.

It sounds like there may still be a few more elusive bugs I need to track down.

I’m also working on the next feature Special Planet types.

Overall, reviews were very positive and helpful. Thank you to all of you.

-Matt

Real nice work, very polished. Good luck in the contest; I really like this game.

I thought about making a full screen mode, but I put it on low priority. I tend to prefer to play this kind of quick casual game in a window rather than full screen. I also wasn’t sure where in my current interface to put the option. I like the look of my main menu screen, but I really hampered myself by only allowing room for 3 buttons on it. I’ll have to change that at some point. Its good to know there is demand for full screen though. I’ll probably add it in the future. Glad you enjoy the game.

Thanks for the feedback,

-Matt

Any chance of your enabling Constellation to be played in full screen mode? It’s certainly attractive enough to want to have it fill the screen!

Whew! Pencils down!

The game is in. I unfortunately didn’t have time to fully debug the “opponents combine influence” rule, so I removed it for now. The good news is, the game is now an intel native universal binary!

There was a lot of controversy over my entry requiring Rosetta over on the idev games board because I was using my employer’s old version of Director to author this. Rules ended up getting changed, but there were still people that strongly preferred an intel native build.

Because of this, I asked for assistance from someone with an up to date version on the Director mailing list I belong to. I got an email back from Allen Partridge, the “Director Evangelist” at Adobe saying he liked my game and that Adobe would be willing to support my entry with my own copy of Director 11. Hooray and thank you Allen! Even if I don’t win any other prizes, I feel like a winner. I still hope to win though! I like my game. ;)

Unfortunately, due to red tape, I didn’t get the license until less than 4 hours ago, and had to scramble to make sure everything worked right. My first build with the new version ran terribly on my wife’s macbook, but I discovered that there was a hotfix update for Director that I needed to download from Adobe. I updated, and everything seems to be working fine now.

That combined with figuring out licensing files, struggling with creating a disk image which got corrupted somehow so the game wouldn’t run, and had to be reposted (fortunately I checked), made things really come down to the wire. Hopefully nothing more got messed up during the last minute crunch.

I did mention that it would be great if Adobe could sponsor the contest with prizes as well. We’ll see.

I hope to breathe a little easier and try everyone else’s games during the next few days. After that, its back to the grind-stone to add a few more features!

Thanks to everyone who helped!

-Matt

Things are coming down to the wire. Fortunately, I think I am in pretty good shape. I’m doing a little gui finessing, animating my logo for the beginning stuff like that.

I’ve started to program the “opponents combine influence” optional rule, but there is a bug in it somewhere. Its working well enough for me to tell that the gameplay isn’t quite as good though. You can end up with a situation where a planet is unclaimable by any player, which means it has to be played under one of the “game ends after X turns” optional rules. If the bug turns out to be easy to find, I’ll keep it, but if it becomes elusive, I may decide to skip it and remove the option for the final build.

Since the last build I have added a preference system so the game will remember your last set of game options the next time you play.

I have also fixed several more bugs.

One where the influence tooltip would get all messed up after visiting a planet where a player has double digit influence.

One that would cause the average robot to occasionally fixate on a planet where its base would be destroyed instantly.

FINALLY (knock on wood) fixed a loophole in my victory logic that would once in a blue moon decide the wrong player as the winner in a close game. It doesn’t seem like this bit of logic would be that hard to code, but for whatever reason I keep having to readdress it. It took having the bug happen to me, taking a screenshot, and stepping through the logic of the code to figure out where it was going wrong.

a few more bug fixes I can’t think of at the moment.

I just uploaded a new build. The update notification should now be working correctly so if you downloaded the last version, it should let you know when you launch it.

New in this version:

The tutorial! – This took longer than I thought… I had to tweek my planet behaviors for a tutorial mode. Trickier was scripting it out. Its tough to write a good tutorial that walks you through step by step, and teaches you everything you need to know without too much setup, and without getting too long winded. Its still a bit wordy. Overall I am fairly pleased with it though.

Since I upgraded the AI in the last version, I have gotten some complaints that it was too hard. I have reintroduced my old Smart Robot as the new Average Robot (minus the bug that caused it to ignore planets with a low identifier number)

Other fixes:

Fixed a bug where you could click on buttons in the game options screen from behind the splash screen.
Fixed (I think, but can’t test) a font wrapping issue on the PC build of the game. Pesky PC people. They’ve given some good feedback though.
Added the function that transfers a click on the nameplate to a click on the appropriate button in the splash screen. A couple people didn’t realize they were supposed to hit the buttons, and kept clicking the text thinking things were broken. It really helps to get feedback like this. What seems obvious to me, isn’t always obvious to anyone else. It

I just published a new version with a major AI overhaul. I was updating my AI algorithm with some new strategies, and discovered that I apparently had introduced a bug into it back when I added the grid map options that caused the AI to tend to ignore certain planets. Its still no human player, but it is now much tougher to beat. Especially vs 4 smart robots. You can download it from the old location, or from my new site at http://www.paperdragongames.com.

The old version should pop up a window prompting you to download the new version, except I apparently had a bug in that code. A lot of the text and buttons don’t appear in the correct place on the screen. That should be fixed in future versions.

One last thing in regards to uDevGame’s rule 8. All along I have had rule 8’s Rosetta restriction hanging over me because I am authoring in an old version of Director (D10) that only publishes PPC applications. I had hoped that I could download the 30 day trial of the new version (D11) and use that to publish my final build. I just installed it this weekend and unfortunately the trial doesn’t let me publish. I have a workaround that involves using a generic D11 stub projector to display it. Unfortunately, the workaround is less than elegant as I can’t have everything wrapped up in one application, but instead have to have an application that links to a bunch of external files in the same directory. Worse, it can’t seem to find the appropriate files automatically if the application path is very long. (So if you try it, place it in your applications folder or somewhere else low down) You can download an example of this workaround here:

http://homepage.mac.com/mattness/constellation/Constellation_0.8.6_D11.zip

I’m going to try to talk my boss into upgrading our software when he gets back from vacation next week. Alternatively, I could try to talk someone on the Director mailing list into publishing a final build for me. If neither of those pan out, I hope my workaround version will keep me from being disqualified.

Whew, getting down to crunch time. I just posted a new build. Lotsa new features and improvements in this one. Among them:

Reorganized the UI some and added improvements.

Implemented an optional influence tooltip. – I’ll use this when I make the tutorial. The Tutorial link still goes to the rules pages.

Implemented a handicap 1st player rule.

Implemented a dialog pop up to tell the user when they make an invalid move what they have done wrong.

Implemented a turn counter and added “Game ends after 10 turns” and “Game ends after 20 turns” options.

Added a dummy credits page. Will fill it later.

Several bug fixes.

Implemented code to check my website for updates on launch. (I finally bought a domain name. I’m not giving it out yet though, cause I have to work on my website too…) Getting the check for updates code down was important to me because I plan to continue development on this after the contest deadline. I’d like people to know when there is a new version.

For now, you still download the new build from:
http://homepage.mac.com/mattness/constellation/Constellation-osx.zip

Hi all, I’ve been busy, and find it hard to find time to update this diary. We had an emergency last weekend when our roof started leaking. We had some large ice dams built up, that caused water to back up under the shingles. We ended up jury rigging some heating cables up there to melt through the dams and let the water out. I’m learning all the joys of home ownership. Anyway, when I have had time rather than update my diary, I’ve been updating my game. Here is a new build:

Changes in version 0.6.5:

Less cutesy cursors.
Different Constellation layout and planet size options.
Choose between the game ending when every planet is owned, or every planet has a base.
A couple bug fixes,
Some graphical and under the hood refinements.

Download it here:
http://homepage.mac.com/mattness/constellation/Constellation-osx.zip

I just posted a new build. Version 0.6.0 contains more sound effects, some new graphical effects including a flash on the selected planet, and a cursor that changes color and shape depending on who’s turn it is. It also contains some bug fixes and code optimization. Next build I expect to have some new gameplay options.

http://homepage.mac.com/mattness/constellation/Constellation-osx.zip

Enjoy,

-Matt

I just uploaded a new version that is mostly just bug fixes. Still working on sound and such…

I have been getting lots of good feedback on the idevgames forum, and on the StarChamber forum (my strategy game peeps)

I still need to write a routine that determines if there are no legal moves and skips that players turn (popping up a message in the process), but the AIs will now make sacrificial moves if there are no other options so it should be much harder to hang it like Justin did.

In response to funkboy’s request on the idevgames here is a new link to the latest version. I will update my old links to point to the latest.

http://homepage.mac.com/mattness/constellation/Constellation-osx.zip

I have AI now! The game is now playable with a single human player. The AI could probably still be improved, but it can already get difficult when playing against several smart robots, especially if you don’t go first.

http://homepage.mac.com/mattness/constellation/Constellation-osx.zip

Its been tough with work and life to find the extra time to work on this, but I’m having fun and am glad I entered.

Now that I have single player gameplay working the next release should focus more on polishing of the interface and sounds with maybe a few optional rules thrown in…

The idea for Constellation has been kicking around in the back of my head for a few years now. Thanks to uDevGames for giving me the incentive to sit down and try to encode it!

My biggest inspiration for Constellation is an obscure strategy game called Fortress (So obscure I can’t even find a screenshot!) that I had on the Apple II when I was a kid. Fortress was played on a rectangular array of squares like a checkerboard. It was a 2 player game where players took turns either placing or upgrading forts. Forts could be upgraded from 1 to 3 influence. Each fort would influence not only itself, but the squares top, bottom, left and right of it. If you could over influence an opponents for it would be destroyed. I liked the simple mechanics yet complex strategy of the game and have missed playing it. Rather than simply remake the game however, I wanted to use its mechanic for something original.

I am a big board games fan, but I have a problem with many of the more traditional strategy board games like chess, or risk. The board is always the same. I really like tile based board games like Settlers of Catan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan and Carcassonne http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcassonne_(board_game) where you have to evaluate the board itself to determine your strategy. I decided I wanted to make a randomly generated board for this game. The problem was, most of the ideas I could think of for creating a random board with different terrain would force me to greatly complexify the simple mechanic that I liked so much about Fortress. The only thing I could think of was making different terrain that would limit the fortress size, but that didn’t seemed varied enough.

Enter my third influence, another computer based strategy board game called Star Chamber. http://starchamber.station.sony.com/ Star Chamber is a weird hybrid of collectible card game, board game, and 4x space exploration game. Star Chamber’s board is a placement of planets connected by jump lanes to neighboring planets. This suddenly solved my random board problems. By breaking free of a regular grid and having each planet connected to a varying number of neighbors, I could retain the simple mechanics yet create extremely varied random boards with different choke points. If you are curious to try Star Chamber, I host the mac client at: http://homepage.mac.com/mattness/starchamber/ It is probably my favorite computer game of all time.

The name Constellation comes from my first build of the map generator. The way my map generator connected the planets looked like constellations to me. The name in turn inspired the antique/nautical look for the game. Imagery comes from NASA and the Library of Congress (two great sources for public domain imagery) and from http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtml a good source for free royalty free photos.

Here is a link to my current build of the game. It has no AI opponents yet, its missing a game configuration screen, and needs some more polish, but it is fully playable as a hot seat multiplayer game.

http://homepage.mac.com/mattness/constellation/Constellation-osx.zip

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Note: I am authoring in Director MX2004 so my current builds are not universal binaries. I plan to either download a trial of Director 11 or convince my boss to upgrade our software so I can build a Universal for the final submission.