Competitive Analysis

I recently purchased Commander: Conquest of the Americas, through Steam, as it looked like it fit into the genre I'm hoping to enter.  My intentions were to evaluate this game and hopefully incorporate the best aspects of it.


Let me begin by saying that this game was not well reviewed.  It wasn't poorly reviewed, just deemed mediocre.  After my first couple hours in it I can see why.  It lacks the intuitive simplicity that Sid Meier's games are famous for.  Though that is a hard standard to compare against.  The team at Firaxis always amaze me with their balance of simplicity and strategy. 

Commander seems to be a trading simulation at its heart and in that respect I compare it to the Patrician III.  In fact, I would say that it is a step closer to my intended game than Patrician is.  You found colonies, bring colonists over from the Old World, and compete with fellow European Nations.  The focus though is on developing the colonies production trees, and setting up automatic trade routes that maximize profits.

I haven't played through a whole game yet so my summary may be premature, but my first impression take aways from this game are as follows:

GOOD

• Resources distributed around map, semi-realistically
• Not based on a grid, ships can move around in any direction similar to Pirates!
• Resource development, you can improve colonies to turn local sugar cane, into sugar, and then rum
• Ships can easily form squadrons and fleets to make protection and resource pooling simpler
• Four advisers that give suggestions and missions to complete
• Very pretty to look at
• Steam achievement system

BAD

• No exploration, the whole map is known from the start
• No randomization, you always play the map of the Caribbean
• Too many resources and colony improvements
• You must keep the advisers happy or the game will end
• UI is bad
• No homeport screen, colony screen hard to access and provides little information
• No good statistics or summary screens, information is hard to find
• Tutorials are just videos with someone speaking about what they are doing
• No end game, the goal is to amass a fortune

 I'd say the game has been worth the $15.  It provides another reference point for me, and there are some aspects I did enjoy and will try to build in.  I don't know if I'll go straight for the 3D rendered ships and oceans, but the original Exploration could do with a more advanced economic model.

Was Java the right choice?

As I started to expand from a single ship navigating a 7x7 map to any number of ships navigating a nxm map I started to add more and more Java classes.  While this in and of itself isn't so scary, the thought occurred to me that in order to eventually do the port to the iPhone, all of these java commands and classes will disappear, leaving me with gaping holes all over my program. 

The past couple months of working in Java has given me a better feel for the strengths and weaknesses of this language.  It is strong because of the documentation and huge community.  It also has implemented a lot of functionality that is simple to import and use but therein lies my discomfort.  Java is meant to be a big black box.  You write code to make one black box work with another and I don't like that. 

The decision I have to make now is do I continue to use these boxes, or do I transition to C++ and leave java behind.  That is the way I'm leaning.  I might start a parallel project to see how long it takes me to recreate the functionality I have now but without all the black boxes as my foundation.

Approaching 0.1

Since my last post I've made good progress.  I found a better ship image, drew an ocean tile that looks better than straight dark blue, and I can move the ship around discretely by squares.  Currently the ship can move around a 7x7 grid.  When he hits one of the poles he can't go any further, and when he goes off the end of the screen, he appears on the other side.

To get to where I hoped to be at 0.1 I need to implement the following:

• Expand the map to a size greater than what I can display in a 7x7 window
• Keep the screen centred on the ship unless he approaches a pole
• Add greyed out unexplored squares that are revealed when the ship is next to them

So that should keep me busy for the next week or two, hopefully I'll also layout the project development milestones so I can break up the project into manageable chunks.  Currently I find myself wanting to work on every feature at once and as a result spend a lot of time finishing very little.

Ship ahoy!

In light of yesterday's realization that I need to spend less time paralyzed by indecision over how to structure my code I went home last night with one goal in mind.  "I will draw a ship on the ocean, dammit".  I was fairly close already, having adapted a lot of the window opening and image loading from the Space Invaders tutorial.  I found a ship image online and focused on displaying it.

It took me a little more than an hour during which my fiancee correctly identified that I was paying less than full attention to any attempts at conversation.  (Sorry!)  But before I went to bed I did indeed prevail.

The following is a screenshot of a ship on the ocean-ish. 

One small step...

Found another great tutorial.  Rather than copying it verbatim I'm using it as an example.  It is a recreation of space invaders and can be found here.  They do some interesting things with resource management and I've learned about learned a fair bit about loading images into Java. 

Also, I found an interesting article about game loops and screen refreshing.  That article is here.  The original exploration had very little animation, and a very blocky refresh rate.  It will be simple enough to recreate, and not much harder to smooth out.

As with most ventures I find I keep hesitating during startup.  I keep falling back to doing more research into Java game programming instead of moving forward with my best guess.  I need to remind myself there is no cost associated with failure and I can always go back and optimize later. 

Currently I'm opening up a window, but not putting anything on the screen.

Taking off the training wheels

This past week I have worked my way though the online Java tutorial and reached a point of diminishing returns reading through Java in a nutshell.  The further into Java I get, the more I've come to second guess my decision.  The embedded programmer in me is appalled by the JVM which is a total black box.  Talking to other engineers in the office it sounds like most software development is just taking a collection of black boxes and stitching them together.  I plan on continuing with Java for the time being, mostly as a learning exercise.  I think that I will likely want to restructure the project at some point and the lessons learned before then will be valuable.  Besides, half of the challenge was to learn object oriented programming, and I should make an honest attempt before I return to the safety of C.  Hardened software developers are probably shaking their heads at that.
In the upcoming week I look forward to getting my teeth into the real project, not just a tutorial example.  I installed the original exploration game to have it for a reference.  It is impressive that software exists to get a DOS based game to run on a 64bit Windows 7 platform.  I tip my hat to the people behind the DOSBOX project. 

 This is a screenshot from the original game 'Exploration'.  It shows the map, currently the ship is in port, the castle looking building, and it's info is listed off to the bottom left.  A screenshot roughly looking like this is what I hope build 0.2 will look like though with much rougher looking graphics for the shape of the land and sea.

Java Crash Course

I am sad to say not much has been developed in the past week though not to say I have not given the project any attention.  I'm still wrapping my head around the object oriented platform, method overloading, inheritance, and other ins and outs of java.  Java in a nutshell has proved to be a handy reference.  I've also found a great tutorial online that supplements it quite nicely.  For anyone curious, it is here. 

This tutorial sets up a GUI, which I'll then morph into build 0.1 of the game.  My goal for 0.1 is to have a ship that the user can move around the ocean.  Should be simple enough.  Looking forward to 0.2, I'd like to incorporate the land and the ice where ships can't sail, discrete turns, expeditions, home port, and the inventory system. 

To put a timeline to my goal, I'd like to draw a blue ocean by next week.  Wish me luck!