Gaming

Lazerbait overdue devblog

Lazerbait is a VR game with the intent of boiling down strategy to a very simple form. The basic premise is that the player has swarms of ships flying around in 3d space and has the goal of capturing as many planets with those ships as possible. Each planet the player captures in turn spawns more ships and allows the player more power to continue to conquer. It has a very similar concept to games like Galcon and Eufloria. Arcade Strategy would be the genre I think?

Check out the video!

 

I have been working on Lazerbait for about 2 months in my spare time, so the development has been a little slow. However, it is really picking up some steam the last couple weeks as it becomes more feature complete so it seems like a good time to try and foster some community support so I can get this onto platform stores someday. Currently my development has been focused on the HTC Vive mostly because that was the first VR headset to reach my doorstep but also because the game lends itself well to spacial controls. I am also making a very concerted effort to leave the game extensible for Oculus so that when Touch comes around, I can port the game quickly. I hope to submit it to the Steam Greenlight process in the next month for early access.

I will try to do more regular blog posts from here on out because I think it is important to involve the community that you will someday ask to support you. A very special thanks to my good friend J.T. Vought who has been helping me with modeling work and with great game ideas.

Current feature set:
 - attacking planets
 - reinforcing planets
 - linking planets
 - crazy performance improvements (moving/drawing 600 ships while hitting 90fps is a miracle of modern science)
 - dark theme
 - start menu with working level options
 - ability to control % of ships selected from planet
 - A.I. that is near impossible to beat. (it doesn't even cheat!)

A computer scientist playing a city builderby Taylor Stapleton

So, I have recently been playing a game entitled "Cities in Motion 2". The entire premise of the game is to take a simulated city (a very well simulated city) and build a mass transportation system for it. I have always been fascinated by transport and I love learning how things like trains work. So this game is perfect for me! I get to try insane mass transit ideas on an awesome engine and with no consequences. Inevitably, in any city you must have a central location where all the different forms of transportation come together to exchange passengers. I never realized how hard it can be to build a transit hub for millions of people to pass through. It's an optimization problem of the highest degree. Almost every design I try ends up having some kind of deadlock when there are too many vehicles passing through. The common city system will usually utilize buses, trolleys, trams, monorails , subways, and ferries. My latest design includes buses, trams, and monorails and after many iterations has yet to deadlock or even slow down. I'm very proud of its design so I thought I would share it here.

So if you are some kind of engineer and you are looking for fun puzzles and problems to solve on the weekends, I would highly recommend this game. I picked it up when it was full price at $30, but it commonly goes on sale on Steam as well. Even at full price I would say that it's really quite delicious.

p.s. -- This game does not include an auto-save feature. So unless you want to spend 6 hours building your first amazing transit system only to have your computer crash and leave you cursing the god who created the people that created this game without an auto-save feature, go ahead and set reminders for yourself to save your game now and then. :-)