Catastrophe X Blog

Getting Back to Business

2012-06-25T11:47:00.000-04:00

I'd like to apologize for my absence on the blog and the game over the past month and a half. A few personal and professional factors came together and took me offline for a bit, but I should have at least made a post letting you guys know.

So, where do things stand now?

In late March and early April I promoted Catastrophe X pretty heavily and we received a substantial inflow of new players. It was a crazy time for me, and I was pulling 15 hour days trying to engage new players, keep return players busy with new maps and crafts, release new features, and fix issues with existing features.

Although the game accumulated a great group of core players, it didn't gain enough traction to start growing by word of mouth. Rather than go broke, I decided to pull the plug on most of the promotion. Fortunately, I feel like have a good sense of what needs to be improved in order to make Catastrophe X appeal to a wider audience. Much has been learned.

1. It takes far too much effort for new visitors to create an account, find an opponent, and figure out how to play by watching or reading the tutorials. I need to make the game much more approachable -- new players should be eased into things in an enjoyable, engaging manner, with as few hurdles as possible.

2. I need to work on making gameplay more engaging and strategic. The root of the problem right now is that I am fairly limited in the functionality that I can assign to crafts, but I have plans to improve this considerably. Moreover, basic actions like moving and attacking feel tedious because you need to command them each tick. Players should be able to, for example, instruct a craft to move across the map in one click, even if it takes multiple ticks to get there.

3. The game needs a broader goal so that battles have a real sense of importance. Player ratings were intended to fill this need, but they are somewhat lacking -- new players don't come back just to improve a rating. If winning a battle yielded territory or resources of some sort then there would be a real reason to fight. Giving each player a personal army of crafts to develop through battle will be a major step in the right direction.

I will be spending the coming weeks and months trying to improve the game on these three broad fronts. In the mean time, I will not be promoting Catastrophe X heavily. It does not make sense to pour resources into publicity when the conversion rate of visitors into repeat players is low.

My first priority is to finish implementing the new framework throughout the rest of the game. I have spent the last couple of weeks working at this, and I plan on completing and releasing these changes within the next couple of days. The game will look and feel mostly the same, but the new setup will be faster and far easier to extend and improve. This will lay the groundwork for significant improvements moving forward.

Now that I am back online, don't hesitate to drop me a line on the forums or private message me with any comments and suggestions for the game. I will regularly make myself available for online chat and battles as well.

More soon!

New Map, Battle User List, and More

2012-04-06T17:50:00.000-04:00

Today's new roll out of Catastrophe X includes the following additions and improvements.

Improved Battle User List

The battle interface has always had a user list, but it was hidden in a tab. Such important information ought to be available at a moment's notice, which is why you will now find a small user list at the bottom-right of your map display, right above the chat console.

New Map: Rotary

This new three-player map has a central battle area, plus energy-rich side routes to each opponent.

Other Improvements

Your login information should now be saved even when I deploy a new version of the game.

There will now be fewer blog timeouts at the Capital. Moreover, new blog posts now show up in real time in the Capital, and highlight the tab to get your attention.

I have reduced the size of the chat console in battles. In my opinion, it was occupying too much playing area.

I have fixed a problem that prevented consoles from staying scrolled down to the newest entry.

New Craft, New Map, and Much More

2012-04-04T15:26:00.000-04:00

Today's Catastrophe X release includes the following additions and improvements.

New Craft: Particle Cannon

The particle cannon costs 15 blue to deploy and is stationary. When straddling a blue tile, the cannon's attack inflicts 7 damage on a single tile in its large range. When not straddling a blue tile, damage is reduced to 1. The attack costs 10 blue to command.

New Map: Subversion

This new two-player map features an energy-rich island that can only be incorporated into your deployment zone if you have made special preparations in your detachment. Green and blue energy tiles are noticeably absent.

Craft Changes

Medicraft: Repair action now does +8 health per tile instead of +2 health per tile, and costs 5 green instead of 2 green, 2 blue, 2 white. The craft now costs 5 green to deploy instead of 5 green and 5 blue. Moving is now free instead of 1 green and 1 blue.

Regenerator: Regenerate action now does +5 health per tile instead of +3 health per tile, and costs 15 green instead of 15 green, 10 white. The craft now costs 10 green to deploy instead of 4 green, 4 blue, 3 white.

Map Changes

Command uplinks in Tetrad have been pushed away from the center to make defense easier.

I also fixed an alignment problem with the top-left command uplink on the Flake map.

Bug Fixes and Minor Changes

Fixed the bug that would execute the deployments by defeated players on 3+ player maps.

Fixed the bug that would freeze portions of the UI when a player was defeated in 3+ player maps.

Players can now view five profiles at once, instead of three.

When an event occurs on a hidden tab, it is now highlighted bright yellow to get your attention.

Looking Forward

There are still some nasty bugs in the game that bring down the server and halt user input. I am doing my best to track these down and eliminate them. Unfortunately, they are difficult to reproduce, and therefore difficult to debug. I'm on it.

I have also started moving the battle functionality to the new framework. I will do this gradually and behind the scenes over the next week or so. Once transitioned, I will be able to add new features to the battles at a much faster pace.

A Plea for Help

2012-04-03T11:06:00.001-04:00

I am very happy to see that Catastrophe X has developed a solid core player base over the past week. There is now a growing group of regulars, and I am impressed by the skill that I see in both battle and detachment design.

I am having a problem though. There is often a lack of upcoming battles, and many new players simply leave as a result. To try and grow the community, I am currently spending the majority of my day engaging newcomers in battle. I do enjoy helping new players, but it prevents me from improving the game as quickly as everyone would like.

I would like to ask for help in the following way:

1. Please host battles. Preferably just leave an upcoming battle hosted all the time and keep an eye on it for activity (ideally unrated with the default settings). New players are usually looking to dive right in to a battle, and when there are none hosted they often leave.

2. Please help newcomers learn the game. Don't just destroy them. I would like Catastrophe X to be a friendly and open community, so let's all put our egos aside and teach people the game.

If we work together, within a week or two we can have significantly more skilled opponents to battle against, and the game will be more fun for everybody. Moreover, I will be freed up to spend more time on development, so we will have more cool new features, crafts, and maps.

For what it is worth, I will need game moderators relatively soon, and I will be looking for players who have contributed positively to the community. I know that's a bit of a a vague, hand-wavy promise for the future, but it's a sincere one.

Thank you, and more soon!

Craft Changes, Tab Highlighting, and More

2012-04-02T10:31:00.002-04:00

I have just released a new version of Catastrophe X with a variety of improvements and fixes.

First off, I have made a number of changes to existing crafts in an attempt to improve balance and make some of the previously useless crafts more viable. Looking forward, I will be focusing more on creating new crafts.

- Arrow damage has been increased from 1 to 3 and deployment cost has been reduced from 5 to 4 red.

- Spitfire deployment cost has been increased from 3 grey to 6 grey.

- Falconcrafts have been reduced from 3 damage to 2, but now hit 3 tiles instead of 1 (see image below).

With today's release, you will also find that the navigation tabs at the top of the game highlight when there is activity on a hidden screen. This will help you monitor a number of screens without constantly switching back and forth.

I have also made a number of other fixes and improvements:

- I believe that I have fixed the "selection bug" (where nothing pops up when clicking on the battle map). If you still experience this problem please PM me.

- I can now deploy a new version of the game without disconnecting players on the old server (which would, for example, discard changes to any detachments being edited).

- There is no more error message when you press Done twice in battle.

- Private messages are now sent when you press the enter key.

- Fixed the host recognition bug in battles so that hosts can now silence players and observers.

More soon!

New Maps, Craft Updates, Password Management

2012-03-31T17:13:00.003-04:00

With today's new version of Catastrophe X I have added two new Maps: Flake (6 players) and Frozen Worlds (2 players). I may revise these maps slightly in the coming days based on player feedback.

I have also made the following craft adjustments in an attempt to make some of the less viable crafts a more important part of game play:

- Regenerators have a much larger healing zone
- Satellites have a much larger moving range
- Drones cost less and have a larger damage area
- Spitfires are less expensive
- Corvettes have a slightly larger attack range

I have also added some password management features, specifically password reset and password change features.

More tomorrow!

Craft Balancing, Luna Overhaul, Bug Fixes

2012-03-29T19:07:00.000-04:00

Today's new deployment comes with a number of changes to help balance battles:

- Command Uplink health increased from 10 to 30 to help against rushing.
- Trident health reduced from 100 to 60, since they were nearly impossible to destroy.
- Wasps have been downgraded, health from 10 to 4, and attack priority from 1 to 4. They were far too powerful.

It was also brought to my attention that the Luna map was not fully symmetric, giving an advantage to one participant. I started working on the map, and ended up pretty much overhauling it since it is tricky to make rectangular maps symmetric. It now has a very different shape and is fully symmetric.

In addition I made some miscellaneous bug fixes and usability improvements:

- Consoles now scroll to the bottom properly when there is a new event.
- Your own chat messages appear in a distinct color to separate them from others'.
- Completed battles are now destroyed after 30 minutes instead of 10, since this was cutting many post-battle chats short. Down the road I may keep battles open until all users leave.
- Fixed a problem with the user list sorting in upcoming battles.

More soon!

Upcoming Battle Overhaul, New Craft, and More

2012-03-28T17:25:00.000-04:00

Upcoming Battle Overhaul

I have spent the past day overhauling the upcoming battle screen. This was mostly a behind-the-scenes update since I needed to re-code upcoming battles using the new client-server framework. As a result of the switch, the user list now shows connected/disconnected indicators and ratings for all players in the upcoming battle. While I was poking around, I also revamped the center console interface to display the battle particulars in a more usable format.

Since this was a total re-code, it's possible that I introduced some bugs. If you notice anything not working properly please drop me a line.

New Craft: Sniper Cluster

Sniper Clusters are stationary crafts with a long-range, top-priority, low-damage, single-tile attack. The attack is relatively expensive, but useful against threats such as remote mines due to its range and high priority.

Larger Tetrad Map

After releasing the Tetrad map a couple days ago, it was found to be too small for enjoyable four-player battles. With today's deployment I have made the map larger.

Bug: Selecting a Map Tile

There is an unresolved bug in battles where the map occasionally stops responding to clicks (i.e. when you click on a craft to select it, nothing pops up). This is obviously a serious issue, but I haven't been able to track down the problem just yet. With today's deployment I have added some logging that will hopefully allow me to correct the problem.

If you run into this problem, you can reload the page to fix it. You will be able to resume your battle with no penalty.

New Map, New Craft

2012-03-26T15:38:00.002-04:00

Over the past few days the promotional push has been going well -- we're starting to see more players online to battle against, which is making the game quite a bit more interesting for everybody. I have been spending most of my time ironing out the bugs that have surfaced, as well as engaging new players in battle.

Today I made two interesting additions to the game.

New Craft: Drain

When deployed, a Drain subtracts two energy (of random color) from random opponents every tick. By placing one or more Drains on the map you can hinder you opponent's ability to battle effectively. Note that you do not collect the energy lost by your opponents, though I may add a different craft that does this in the future. You can check out the Drain's full details in the registry.

New Map: Tetrad

The Tetrad map enables four-player combat for the first time. As our player base grows, I will continue to add maps with more player slots.

More soon!

Focusing on Gameplay

2012-03-23T08:44:00.000-04:00

Since Catastrophe X was brought online in August of last year I have spent almost all of my development hours adding peripheral features like player profiles, ratings, and forums. Although these features are important, it is time to focus to developing the core gameplay experience to ensure that Catastrophe X is engaging and rewarding to play.

To that end, I will be working on balancing existing crafts and creating new, interesting crafts. I will also be improving the behind-the-scenes framework for defining crafts so that more complex crafts can be implemented, such as crafts with intermittent behaviours, charge-ups, cool-downs, and more.

I am open to ideas, so don't hesitate to contribute either in the blog comments or in the forums.

Improved Accessibility to Newcomers

2012-03-20T16:48:00.001-04:00

Today's deployment includes a variety of additions and improvements aimed mainly at making the game more approachable for new players. In particular:

There is now a Newcomers' Guide available prominently in the Capital.
The video tutorial has been partitioned into three easier-to-digest pieces and updated to reflect developments in the game over the past few months.
Each video tutorial is now also available as a text transcript.
There is now a single example detachment, and it is used in the battling tutorial.
There is now a documentation area available in the Capital, containing detailed information on all aspects of the game.

Returning players will also notice the following changes:

Improved Capital screen.
Top commanders section has been renamed the Podium.
Forums and the Podium now open in their own screens.
Smaller Luna map -- it felt too large for only two players.

Looking forward, I will now be focusing on promoting Catastrophe X in order to build a larger player base. More on that soon!

Battle Interface Improvements

2012-03-07T13:57:00.000-05:00

As promised, today I deployed a shiny new look for the battle interface. Although the actual map graphics remain unchanged, the displays for things like undeployed units and energy reserves are now looking quite a bit more slick.

With today's deployment, I have also increased the game's idle disconnect from three minutes to thirty minutes. This large increase is a work-around for the fact that clients are disconnected if they don't perform an action on the server within the allotted time, even if they are interacting with the game locally (for example, typing a message in the forums). I will fix this behaviour more satisfactorily in a future release.

UI Improvements

2012-03-05T13:36:00.001-05:00

As promised, today's iteration of Catastrophe X incorporates a new user interface style. The new look has been applied to all areas of the game except for the battle interface, which I will be improving over the next couple of days.

You will also notice that the "Catastrophe X" game screen has been re-themed as the "Capital".

More soon!

Private Messages are Here

2012-02-20T11:58:00.001-05:00

Today's iteration of Catastrophe X includes the new private messaging feature. You can send a player private messages from their profile (even if they are offline), and you can see which players have recently messaged you in your headquarters. As with the rest of the game, all private message displays are updated in real-time as you send and receive communications.

Now that the most critical feature gaps have been filled, I am about ready to get started publicizing Catastrophe X. However, before starting I will be taking the next few days to make the game more approachable to new players. In particular I want to develop proper documentation, update the video tutorial, and spruce up the UI a touch.

More soon!

In-game Forums are Here

2012-02-12T15:17:00.001-05:00

Today's iteration of Catastrophe X includes in-game forums, which are accessible from the main Catastrophe X screen in the game. The forums are intended to provide a way for the entire community to engage in discussion without having to be online at the same time. As with the rest of the game, the forums are updated in real-time, so new threads and posts appear without refreshing the page.

Up next: private messaging. More soon!

Ranking of Top Players

2012-02-07T08:11:00.000-05:00

Today's deployment of Catastrophe X enables the top-rated players feature discussed in my last post, which is available from the main Catastrophe X screen in the game. The ranking is designed to display all players whose rating exceeds a certain threshold -- currently 1050, but I will increase this threshold as player activity rises. Since battle activity continues to be sparse, there are few commanders shown in the top-ranked list right now.

Looking forward, I will soon begin to devote more time and resources to publicizing Catastrophe X. To-date, I have invested very little effort into building a player base. This has been intentional -- it seems wasteful to invest time and money into promotion when lack of key features means that player retention will be very low. I have now filled the most obvious gaps in functionality (accounts, savable detachments, profiles, ratings, rankings), and at this point I think the game mainly needs better community functions in order to adequately engage new players (proper forums and offline messaging in particular). I will focus on these community features over the coming days and weeks, and once in place I will make developing a player base my number one priority.

Player Ratings are Here

2012-01-28T15:22:00.000-05:00

Today I deployed a new iteration of Catastrophe X that enables player ratings, completing phase five of the accounts project. Ratings are shown next to display names throughout (most of) the game, and reflect your past performance in battle. More details about how ratings work are available in the nascent game help section.

My next priority is to create a live list of the game's top-rated players -- more on that soon!

Battle Histories are Here

2012-01-24T14:31:00.000-05:00

Today I deployed a new iteration of Catastrophe X that enables battle histories. When a battle is completed, each player receives a new entry summarizing their performance in both their headquarters and their profile. The system also reports players' all-time total victories, defeats, and surrenders on their profiles and in their headquarters. As with the rest of the game, all updates occurs in real-time so you never need to refresh anything.

My next priority is to put together a rating system that aggregates each player's battle history into a single number. More soon!

Player Profiles are Here

2012-01-21T21:43:00.000-05:00

Today I deployed phase three of the accounts project, which enables player profiles. Throughout the game you can now click on a player's display name to open their profile. Profiles display basic player statistics, as well as real-time battle and upcoming battle activity.

With today's deployment I have also added a basic introduction page that shows the latest blog post and some information about how to get started. Down the road I will add player rankings as well as more in-depth help features.

I have also continued to roll out the new framework behind the scenes, and it is now fully in place on the hub. While I was there, I also made a variety of small improvements throughout the hub.

My next priority is to start recording each account's battle history to form the basis of player rankings. In anticipation of this feature, I have left space for battle histories on both your headquarters and on player profiles.

More soon!

New Framework and Chrome Connectivity Issues

2012-01-10T19:28:00.000-05:00

It has been a while since my last post, but development of Catastrophe X has been moving ahead at a healthy pace. Today I deployed my most recent iteration, which fixes a connectivity issue that arose in new versions of Chrome, and implements some core changes that will allow me to develop features more quickly going forward. More on that...

In my last post I announced that developing basic user profiles would be my next priority. However, after delving into the project I realized that my underlying framework for client-server communication was flawed. The issue was that whenever a player performed an action, the server was responsible for determining which other players needed to know about the action. This meant that each new feature would make it more difficult to determine which players needed to know about each action, which would increasingly complicate development.

The game's color-coded display name printouts (red = offline, white = online) illustrate the problem well. Under the old framework, when a player went offline the server would scan through that player's ongoing and upcoming battles to determine who needed to be notified. Since I plan on showing display names in many different places thoughout the game in the future (profiles, rankings, private chats, friend/enemy lists, and so on), this calculation would become increasingly burdensome, both to code and to execute.

My solution was to flip things around let the clients tell the server which actions they care about. Now when a player goes offline, the server just notifies all the clients that indicated an interest in that information -- it doesn't need to look at which battles the player is in, for example. This approach will make it easier for me to develop more complex features, reduce server load, and enable user-customized interfaces because each client can receive updates about whatever it wants.

Of course, changing this now is like trying to change the foundation of a house after the walls have been built. Many thousands of lines of code rely on the old framework, and it would take a month or more of uninterrupted work to update everything. Since I am not willing to stop feature development for that long, I have configured the new framework to temporarily run in parallel with the old one. I will immediately start building new features using the new framework while I update existing components gradually.

From a player perspective, today's game looks essentially the same as yesterday's. However, behind the scenes today's deployment will enable me to create new features at a significantly faster pace. I am now off and running on player profiles.

More soon!

Savable Detachments are Here

2011-12-14T18:25:00.000-05:00

With the today's release you can now save your detachments in your game account -- you no longer have to store them manually on your computer. You can create and manage your detachments in your headquarters, and then choose from your detachments when participating in a battle. For the time being you can design detachments using any craft you wish, in whatever quantity you wish.

On a related note, I have also reduced the number of maximum detachment size choices that are available when hosting a battle. This is intended to increase the competition to design the best detachment for each maximum size.

My next move will be to put together basic player profiles, which will open when you click on a player's name. More soon!

Accounts are Here

2011-12-01T08:21:00.000-05:00

Today I deployed a new version of Catastrophe X that implements phase one of the accounts system. As with most of the work I do on Catastrophe X, the accounts system core has taken considerably longer to build than I originally anticipated. However, I think the time spent will be a worthwhile investment, since the system has been built to perform, scale, extend, maintain, and internationalize well.

Early in the project I decided that registration would be required to enter the game. My initial impulse had been to allow both registered players and guests to sign on and battle, but when I delved into the project I saw that this would significantly increase complexity and yield relatively little in return. Although mandatory, I have made the registration process as quick and painless as possible – you only need to choose a username and password and you will be instantly signed in using your new account. No email verification or long forms.

In its current form, the accounts system is basically just a username reservation system. Soon you will be able to save your detachments in your account, view player profiles with battle history and ranking, send private messages, and other good stuff. Once I have some of these features in place I am planning to go on a promotion blitz to beef up the player base, but I am going to hold off for now since key features are still missing.

Accounts Almost Finished

2011-11-15T10:16:00.000-05:00

Just a quick update to say that phase one of the accounts system is nearly complete, and should be online within the next few days. Although it has taken longer than expected to build (as always), I have put things together in a way that should perform well and scale well. More soon!

Accounts Still Under Construction

2011-11-01T09:23:00.000-04:00

Phase one of the account system is taking longer than expected, and is not yet ready for release. I am working full-time on the project, but I underestimated the amount of planning that it would require. In particular, it has taken a lot of time to design a system that will be able to support a large number of users and a potentially huge amount of data (since, for example, I expect that players' battle histories will accumulate very quickly). I have also invested a lot of time into making everything multi-language friendly. Tackling these challenges has been time-consuming and a short-term solution would have been to ignore them, but I think it is best to make the investment now and avoid a costly overhaul down the road.

I am hoping to be finished this weekend, but it could be sooner or later than that.

More soon!

Accounts are Coming

2011-10-20T09:57:00.001-04:00

It has always been my plan to implement an account system for Catastrophe X, and over the past few days I have gotten started on this large undertaking. The account system, once in place, should add much a much-needed element of longevity to the game. Battles will have more significance because you will be ranked against other players, and as a result there should be more incentive to develop strategically effective detachments.

I intend to deploy the kernel of the account system next week, and then add to it in phases.

Phase 1 (next week)
Basic account registration and sign-in capabilities. No actual account functionality other than reserving a username.

Phase 2
Ability to save custom detachments to your account and use them in battle.

Phase 3
Basic player profiles.

Phase 4
Record battle history and display battle stats in your headquarters and on player profiles.

Phase 5
Devise a good rating system to rank player performance.

There will be more to add once these features are in place, but I won't get ahead of myself. More soon!