Retrograde Legends - August Progress Report

Hi everyone! 

Retrograde: Legends is a hard sci-fi space-sim featuring orbital mechanics, realistic ships and a dynamic, living, breathing world set in the near future of our own solar system. The simplest way to describe the game is Mount and Blade + The Expanse.

Today I want to give an update on what I've been working on for the last month. The work I've done this month hasn't been as flashy mechanically or visually as previous months but has been very important groundwork for achieving the vision of a living, breathing world that immerses the player in a myriad of interesting and in-depth choices throughout their playthroughs.

First pass at fleet formation flying: An important step for game progression.

Giving factions more meaning, direction and purpose.

Early UI stubbing for more complex relationships with and between Retrograde's factions.

Previously, the factions of Retrograde were there as a stand-in for the political, economic and territory conquest features the game will need. I decided in late July that since the factions and their interactions with each other and the player are so critical to the vision of a living, breathing world, that I needed to add some more life to them in order to address important questions about the experience.

In early August, I built logic into the simulation to allow the factions of Retrograde to go to war and make peace with each other based on a simple risk vs reward calculation, rather than randomness. The decision to go to war factors the strength of the faction as well as the strength and territorial holdings of its potential enemies. Additionally, war and peace determinations are influenced by a generalized "war weariness" value for each faction as well as ingrained cultural traits relating to violence and willingness to take risks.

For instance, Earther factions tend to be low-risk and defensive in their approach to interplanetary politics, leading to high war weariness and lower likelihood of an offensive war by the United Nations of Earth and Luna or the Orbital Peace and Defense Fleet that patrols Earth's orbit.

Martians, however, are culturally more focused on expansion and therefore the Federal Republics of Mars and the violent Martian separatist faction the Children of Ares, are often the belligerents of early conflicts.

The war and peace system is currently far more simplistic than the full intended design but it serves the purpose of creating dynamic movements of large numbers of ships between planets and planetoids, which is critical to the overall simulation.

Eventually war and peace will be driven by economic as well as by cultural factors such that factions will decide to attack others based on surplus or scarcity in their own manufactured goods and raw resource stockpiles.

Adding more meaning and purpose to NPC ships

Related to the improvements to faction politics and logic, I needed to better leverage NPC ships for creating the player experience I’ve envisioned. After the faction changes, ships could now move back and forth between worlds due to war and peace declarations, drop into orbit over planetary bodies and fight hostile ships when in range but other than that, their behavior was shallow and unbelievable.

I’ve since added systems to allow me, as a designer, to better define the structure of different types of fleets as well as define parameters for expected behaviors of various ship classes and strengths.

Now, ships will attempt to retreat when outmatched by hostile contacts or when badly damaged. Slow, lightly armed trade ships won’t go on full frontal attacks against a fleet of heavily armed destroyers or cruisers (a funny but unrealistic behavior).

Ships will also attempt to position themselves against enemy vessels in such a way that they can use the full scope of their DPS most effectively. (I.e. a cruiser or frigate will attempt to stay further away from an enemy than a destroyer to leverage its longer ranged weapons). All these changes are in an effort to allow NPC ships to feel more real and provide a more dynamic array of challenges and choices to the player as they engage with NPCs.

Most importantly, ships will change their goals mid-activity to fly to a friendly or neutral station to refuel or repair. This seems like a no-brainer conceptually and functionally but it was actually fairly complex to build and extremely important for the game. Why? 

The beginnings of a dynamic economy and world simulation

“RRR” as I call it in game (Refuel, Repair, Recruit) provides a critical secondary layer of ship movement and economic activity to the simulation. Ships don’t just move back and forth between their home location and attack targets any more. Now they have a pressure to move to other friendly or neutral locations in order to refuel and repair.

This may bring them into contact with hostile forces doing the same thing which creates more conflict. It also brings ships to lesser travelled locations in-between major planetary bodies, creating content that the player can experience outside of the main navigational lanes.

From a game economy perspective, repairing requires captains to spend money at stations and requires aluminum, titanium and iron. Refueling also costs money and requires hydrogen. The movement of ships from planet to planet and combat between them creates demand for hydrogen and base metals which brings money to the stations that can provide those materials and expends the money of the captains who need it. 

In this way, war drives shifts in economic equilibrium which in turn, drives more conflict, all providing opportunities for the player to take advantage of highs and lows in the costs of goods to turn a profit or take advantage of low supply of various goods to defeat a weakened adversary, unable to maintain the logistics of an interplanetary war.

As I mentioned above, the economic factors for when and why factions go to war are not built into the code just yet but these changes to the strategic AI provide an important base that opens up a world of interesting interactions and opportunities.

Simplified concept illustration of the cyclical interaction between economics and war and how they provide potential gameplay opportunities for the player.

Ship purchasing and fleet building

Player can now purchase new ships at stations. Each station has a limited selection of ships which its factories can produce.

As if all of those changes weren't enough, there are more improvements to talk about from August. In any "Mount and Blade-like" game such as Retrograde, growing your army is the core progression vector. Retrograde has been missing this and while I wanted to spend time adding content and getting the dynamic economy set up after the big strategic AI and faction changes, I decided that at this point in development, it's critical to have first passes on all major features that constitute the main game loop, even at the expense of depth, polish or external playtestability.

I added ship purchasing as a feature into the game. This, like all features, is a simplified version of the final design intended to test how the feature might work when integrated into the core loop and answer important questions about the player experience. How meaningful of a goal is saving up for a new ship? How cool does it feel fly around with a fleet of ships alongside you? In what scenarios is having more ships a help and in what scenarios could it be a hindrance? 

In June, I used existing AI movement functionality to test out fleet mechanics in such a way that I could add ships to my fleet and have them follow me around using all the integrated ship physics and found that it was tedious and frustrating. It felt like I spent most of my time trying to babysit my fleet into staying with my flagship. With this new, more intentional pass at purchasing ships and adding them to the player fleet, finding creative ways to stay true to the physics based roots of the game while still creating a fun and snappy fleet combat experience is crucial.

Lots of bug fixing and performance improvements around the edges.

I'm extremely wary of premature optimization around performance or code architecture. I’ve fallen into that trap before and know how much time it can waste. I’ve been making improvements on those fronts as I go and as the need arises.

It’s frustrating to me that little bugs, visual issues or performance hitches persist but I continue to remind myself that if I focus on what’s most valuable to the end user experience that I want to build, technical and polish problems will rise in importance as the game itself improves. That said, as bugs or performance become blockers to my own testing, I jump on them throughout work on larger tasks and those little improvements are always a relief.

Conclusion

For game developers, the period in early production where the game is changing in massive, highly visible ways almost every day is very exciting. It's always a big shift in attitude and expectations when you reach a point of more stability where the bones of the game begin to come together and you're not constantly ripping out and rebuilding mechanics or creating brand new features. 

August has in many ways been that turning point for me as movement, combat and ship mechanics have come into their own. It's sometimes a struggle to stay focused and motivated when you can't make catchy gifs of your progress every week but I'm extremely excited by the big behind the scenes changes that I've made to the game in the last month.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next dev log!