New Maps, Craft Updates, Password Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!