played a few hours yesterday. great game. since 1.03 crashes on the iPad 1 are very rare. I've read the feature/fix list for 1.04 and it sounds wonderful! one minor bug: tapping on a save game several times (while loading) crashes the game. and one question: is there a place where I can see my planets stockpiled production when I choose "Economic Hoarding"? keep up the good work!
Hi KittyMac, first please allow me to say that you did a fantastic job with this game. I've always been a 4x gamer ever since I played Alpha Centauri many years ago and your game had filled that void in my heart to play 4x games on my IPad. I've always wanted to get into game development on iDevice but never seem to find the time to do so. I thought that with a 11 hour full-time job it wouldn't be possible (a financial analyst in the real world). But seeing that you have developed this great game over a year while having a full-time job, it really inspires me! After all it's not easy to program and write the game every day after getting home tired, when you could've spent that free time to go watch a movie or play games. I've made up my mind recently to get into game development and bought an MacBook a week ago. Though having some experience with coding, I'm relatively new to iOS programming and therefore bought several books on Objective C and Cocoa Touch. A few days later while browsing on the web, I saw someone mentioned about Corona SDK and Lua and how developing 2D games with it is 10x faster and much easier to learn. Could you please give me some advices regarding this? Should I learn Objective C/Cocoa/Coscos2D or Corona/Lua? Is Starbase Orion written with Objective C or Lua or something else? I know my question isn't really Starbase Orion related, but if you could please give a fellow part-time game developer wannabe some pointers, I'd greatly appreciated!
v1.0.4 was submitted to Apple yesterday. Review takes about 5-7 days, so it should be available last next week.
Starbase Orion is built using ObjC. It uses the standard UIKit controls combined with Cocos2d. So, for the galactic map, the ship battles, map select backgrounds those are all Cocos2d. The menus, dialogs, ship designers, colony tables are all standard UIKit. This made a good combination for SO; it feels like a natural iOS UI because it is, but it uses custom OpenGL rendering where needed. Standard advice for hobbyist game developers is to start small. Don't embark on an epic project right out the gate. Make tetris or something similar. It will benefit you more to choose a simpler project and get it finished vs starting something big and losing motivation 10 months in. Also, join a game dev community. iDevGames.com is a great place to hang out and ask questions. If you decide to use Cocos2D then get active on their forums.
Game Impressions First of all, thanks for a long-anticipated game... Have been playing MoO I and II, since I got my first computer. However, although the game is great, it has a lot of bugs and maybe incomplete features. I don't know if those things are corrected with a next release, but still I will post my observations here (Bug list): 1) It crashes regularly at the end of the game, when I conquer a planet and then instantly click on other fleets in star map, it crashes (so work around for me is that I wait for one turn after conquering and then continue selecting fleets) 2) When game sound is turned off, by iPhone side switch, it comes back if I open other races or a galaxy planet view... than again it turns off when I open a colony view. 3) There is no sense in researching Robotic Factory if one does not have Automated Factories, because you can't build it without other... than why it is proposed in the research dialog? 4) It is impossible to transfer population from top to a bottom colony because one cannot scroll down the Empire screen while holding colonists 5) Why conquered colonies suddenly, for example cyborgs, start to give birth only to humans, if a human is selected game race? So after conquer, they stop breeding? 6) AI is really too week... I saw someone other posted the same complain. 7) Autobuild annoyingly switches on by itself (without notification) if a colony has nothing to do... (Starts to build things that are unimportant at the beginning of colony development, like "Marine base" and "Agent training"). 8) Autobuild selects buildings that are not within their specialization if there is nothing else to build. Those were general bugs in the game that should not be there, but then there could be also suggestions to improve the game: 1) Possibility to terraform for colonization gas giants and asteroid belts would be nice. 2) At least some minor diplomatic relation (like temporal Case-Fire until all other are crushed) 3) Higher control for a space combat or at least possibility for more strategy (like battle formation and so on) 4) To be able to save not only the beginning of a turn, but also applied manipulations of a game. It is a bit long list, but as I love a game, I had to write it down
Thanks; I will look into this situations. These are all addressed in version 1.0.4, which should be out this week. Focuses builds items by priority; so, in Focus Industry it builds industry items first, then research, then farming. It does not mean, "just build industry buildings". If you need finer grained control, you need to specify your buildings in the building queue. There are user requests on the SO forums for additional features here, I am evaluating what we can do. Yup! Definitely mirrors other user requests, and plans are being laid to expand these areas.
Some more bugs Thanks for clarification on my previous post. It is good to hear that many improvements are already made to the game I just wanted to update point one in my bug list... The crashes seem to be random, or I can't find any correlations with other processes in the game. However, if a crash happens at one point than after a restart, the crash will happen at the same point indefinitely. After the critical point is avoided (by skipping a turn and not selecting any other fleet after an invasion of a planet), the next this type of crash will happen at random point during gameplay. Hope it will be helpful... The other bug I forgot to mention, is that when a Mammoth ship is designed and more than two "Warlord Overhauls" have been selected. The additional weapon slots appear outside of the screen, and are useless... It seems like the second row of wepon slots are continued when a third should be created. One question before I finish here. During a battle, it seems like a damage to enemy ship is counted at the time when Plasma Turet has fired and not when it actually hits a ship. Is it like that or I am just seeing things that are not there? PS. What about Hall of Fame? It would be great to have some comparison between games played... like which is a better strategy and gives the best economy or/and population count at the end, so on.
Thanks; although as a result of your post, I did indeed discover and fix a crash bug when selecting a fleet after invading a planet. It could be the same bug you are seeing elsewhere. Yes, known issue. It took lower priority than some other issues, so it didn't make it into v1.0.4. Yes, sometimes that happens. The results are calculated ahead of time (when the end turn happens), so you are seeing is just the results visual. Definitely.
Bug an suggestions Yesterday was playing on Impossible difficulty with Vass and noticed one bug. At some point, the technology while being researched became available within colony view before it was finished, also the research counter was still counting like normal (showing how many turns until it is finished). At this point, if a technology was switched the research continued on the new one (with research points from previous tech), while "un-researched" tech stayed permanently. The other point is that the sensibility (or active area) of "hurry production" button in colony view (for iPhone) is really small. It takes many trials for it actually to work when pressed.
Version 1.0.4 is now available for download from the AppStore! Full change log is available on the SO forums.
FINALLY have enough time to get into this one today... no reviews on my plate, only one RPG I'm in the middle of... no more platformers unfinished... and Blue Libra getting me all excited about the Sci-Fi RTS genre. Looks like the updates have changed quite a bit of the game too. Hope that guide posted when this first came out is still pretty accurate. =oD
The next big feature planned is colony and ship leaders. After that I will explore how diplomacy might be sensibly implemented for Starbase Orion.
Version 1.0.5 is now available for download from the AppStore! Full change log is available on the SO forums.
Even with yesterday's release of Ravenmark (though not even in the same genre, tactics rather than strategy, it will appeal to some of the same people, thus the comparison), and the existence of games such as King of Dragon Pass, I'd still call this the most sophisticated strategy title for iOS. It also comes with some of the, if not THE, most dedicated developer support I've ever seen. And for those looking for long and in-depth matches, there is no asynchronous multiplayer like that of Starbase Orion.
=oO FINALLY got to get into this today. So far, I've been playing for about 3 hours... and am totally blown away. Again, it blows my mind that there's only one developer working on this. Crazy crazy crazy. Out of all the sci-fi strategy games I've played while trying to get more into the genre, Starbase Orion is easily my favorite so far. Thank you for this amazing game. =oD **edit** can't believe I stayed up for 4 more hours last night playing this... time just got away from me! My wife woke up at 3 AM asking me what the hell I was doing. =oP LOVIN this one! It's the only game that's pulled me away from Epoch... =oD
So... Played another 5 hours today... The only things I would love to see improved is the time it takes between turns. I'm putting SO MUCH time into this game because of the LONG turn times. Moving forward 10 turns takes about 10 minutes... I'm not sure if it's because of everything that needs to be calculated and put together, or if it's a design decision, acording to a couple iTunes reviews, it was quicker in previous versions... Also, is there any way to change the course of a ship once you set it's destination? Or is this another design decision...? Other than that... I can't say enough how friggin amazing this game is!
Yes, this is a bug which was introduced in v1.0.5. We have v1.0.6 in to Apple that addresses this, just waiting in the review queue This one is a design decision. SO is a thinking game at heart, so sending a fleet on a long journey across the galaxy can have consequences.
=o) Thanks for responding. Great to hear that the game will move quicker with the update. And nice to know the ship flight limits were done on purpose for strategy. =oD
