Kickstarter for Infinite Space

One of my favorite video games ever is a game called Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space. Weird Worlds was a sequel to game called Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, which I also liked, but WW:RTIS was the one that really hooked me. I played it to death over the course of several years, crafted and published multiple mods for it, and I still dust it off from time to time when I need to kill 30 minutes or an evening. Great game, and pretty much the best thing you could ever do on a lunch break.

There is currently a Kickstarter going for the upcoming third game in the series. Infinite Space 3: Sea of Stars. They've got two weeks left to go on the Kickstarter and are over 80% funded. If you pledge just $10, you'll get a copy of the game. Totally worth it. I got several hundreds of hours of play out of the previous titles in the series, and this one looks to be even better. Check it out.

Drives'R'Us, v4.0

I just uploaded the absolute best version yet of my Drives'R'Us mod for the video game Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space.



The 4.0 version of Drives'R'Us expands on my 3.1 version with 4 new spaceships, and over two dozen new quests. I've added colonies for most of the alien races, a few random invasion fleets to attack Glory, larger maps, and even the fabled fortified vault of Fomax. In addition to all that new stuff, I've also ported over the best bits from my "Teeming With Life" and "Sgqwonkian Crisis" mods. The variety of encounters and experiences is very high, to maximize the replayability. The file size of the download is nearly 3 times that of the previous version. I put a lot into this.

• Download Link

Future Plans:
Since the best bits of Teeming With Life and Sgwonkian Crisis are now in Drives'R'Us, it's unlikely those mods will see any future updates. There'll no doubt be a 4.1 version of Drives'R'Us somewhere down the road. There's always little things worth tweaking. A musically-gifted friend of mine offered to make me some new music for the various quests, so as he finishes up those sound files, I'll be updating the mod, probably with new quests and items.

I'd also like to make a mega-mod that incorporates content from other people's mods into one hugely unpredictable compilation. There are some technical limitations to the game engine, though, which I've been looking at and trying to chart out how much I can actually accomplish. If I go ahead with this, it would probably be published as a separate mod, not a new version of Drives'R'Us.

Even More Modding (Drives v3.0, plus a wiki)

More weird worlds modding this past week. It started with a tiny little update to Drives'R'Us, that was supposed to be just v2.2. And then, that snowballed into major changes so significant that if I didn't call it v3.0, nothing would ever qualify for that title. It's only been a little over 2 weeks since 2.0 went up, but I saw no reason to delay something that was a radical improvement in every way.

Here's a download link for Drives'R'Us version 3.0



Brief list of changes in 3.0

• Added 4 new mercenary / ally vessels.
• Radically improved graphics on all 6 of the custom ships from versions 1.11 and 2.0, and tweaks to the stats on most of them.
• 7 new items (on top of the 30 new ones from just 2 weeks ago), including the Shroud of Primordius, which is definitely my favorite of all the items I've ever added to the game.
• Miscellaneous minor tweaks to various graphics and game play elements. Very numerous, but none of them major.

I'm finding modding to be much easier than it was when I was doing it two years ago. Not sure what's changed, but I'm grokking all sorts of things that had been obfuscated from me before. And since I was having breakthroughs, I thought I'd share them with other modders. So I set up a wiki for Weird Worlds modding, and I'm giving myself a goal of adding at least one page to it every day from now until either it's exhaustive, or I'm exhausted. Hopefully, it'll encourage some more modding, as the community is a little slow and sparse these days.

Here's a link to the modding wiki. Should any Weird Worlds modders care to contribute, the secret code to signing up is "shrapnel and eel". You don't need to sign in to view it, but you do need the code to edit anything.

On a related note, I've been helping one of the other modders at the forums (ExplorerBob) debugg his mod. He's got a really neat set of quests that make the relations with various races unpredictable. So in one play, the Muktians might hate you from the start, and then next time you play they're friendly and amicable. It's pretty clever, and spices the game up a lot. I'm looking forward to his first real release, not just the partial beta test / debugging files he's given me.

Mods 'R' Us

I put up another Mod for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.

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This one is the 2.1 version of my Drives 'R' Us Mod.

Changes from the 1.11 version (which I'd made almost 2 years ago) include:

• Recalibrated prices on everything. I did extensive testing and number-crunching to arrive at more-accurate values for almost every item in the game.
• Technology items are now split into Civilian Tech and Military Tech. The Military mission focuses on military tech, and the Science mission gives a little bit of emphasis on civilian tech.
• Changed the starting equipment for all Terran ships, and what spawns on Hope.
• Over 30 new items!
  • 9 New Weapons
  • 3 New Drives
  • 2 New Sensors
  • 1 New ECM
  • 4 New Combat Computers
  • 5 New Repair Systems
  • 5 New Thrusters
  • 2 New Shields
• Miscellaneous tweaks to various systems and weapons.
• Added a couple new ship variants. Should mix up the fights a bit.
  
• Bloodfang is very different from the main game, and better balanced than he was in version 2.0.
  
• Removed all the Superweapon KEYS. The sheer quantity of items in this mod makes it unlikely you'll get a large stockpile of so-called superweapons.
  
• Tweaked the Civil War event. It's now a little more unpredictable (there's two versions), and no longer claims to be a supernova after the fact. I'm much happier with it now.
  

If you're thinking I jumped from 1.11 to 2.1, I didn't. There was a 2.0 version that I forget to link to from here, but it was only up for 3 days before I found some minor issues that I fixed in todays version.

Here's the download link: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=35857&page=

Have fun!

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I also updated Tech Transparency 2.1 to v2.1.1.
It's just a small fix concerning the text on the repair units.
Download link: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44512

Teeming With Life mod, version 1.4

I just posted a new version (v1.4) of my "Teeming With Life" mod for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.




Download the new version here.

I'm much happier with the look of the mod now, but I still really need to go tweak the amoeba-ships. Getting those to the level I want may take some time.

Return to Infinite Modding

My favorite video game is once again Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space, the game that lets you explore an entire galaxy on your lunch break.

For nearly a year I couldn't play it. My old computer died, and I'd somehow failed to backup my download of it.

A couple weeks ago, I got the game again. So! Much! Fun! I'm left wondering why I didn't rush out and buy a new copy the second I lost the old one.

And, of course, I immediately felt the desire to mod welling up inside me. Feeling the creative urge...

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I very quickly released a new version (v 1.3) of my old "Teeming With Life" mod. No real new content, but several bug fixes. It's amazing how problems and solutions stand out so clearly after taking a year off from something. Download Link

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I followed that up with a quick and dirty little mod called "Tech Transparency". It's significantly less ambitious than my other mods (and you can tell by the generic text-only banner).

After a year off, I just found I no longer knew which weapons and items were worth the trouble, and which ones were total junk. I realized it'd be a simple task to make a mod that displays all the relevant game data in the pop-up-window for each item. If I was going to make such a tool for myself, I might as well make it available for others, and thus Tech Transparency was born. Download Link

Now, some would say this mod is almost against the spirit of the game. Weird Worlds is all about style and mystery, not comparing game stats to maximize your efficiency. Those folks are right, but they have the main game and plenty of other mods they can enjoy. I will admit the mod certainly lost some of the cleverness of the original game, even a few of the sci-fi in-jokes had to be cut for space reasons, but I think it's worth it to figure out which three-coin beams are worth installing, and which ones are just trade-bait.

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Does this mean I'll return to full-blown modding? I don't know. Those were both easy to implement, and took just a couple of hours. I've got plenty of ideas for mods, but the loss of my Weirdyssey mod before it could even be released was pretty heart-breaking. I'd put way too many hours into that thing, and never got to show it off. Not sure I'll try anything that extreme again, especially considering how dead the WW:RTIS modding community is. I'd love to see the mod forums become active again, but that seems unlikely. Then again, I wasn't playing for a year, so maybe some of the other prolific modders will return, too. It's hard to mod with your fingers crossed. :)

Space Alert

As usual, I made this post way longer than it needed to be, so here's a to-the-point summary:

Space Alert is a fast-paced cooperative boardgame with a sci-fi theme. A single game of it is about 20 minutes, so you can cram in several plays in a night. It has some similarities to roborally, but the short length and real-time pressure means it is more tense and frantic. The short and exciting nature of it has promoted this to the slot of being my favorite cooperative game.

And now for the long winded raving:

My wife and I are semi-quarantined, so we spent the weekend (and last night) playing the new boardgame that I bought just an hour before the doctor said "It might be swine flu, so stay home, sleep as much as possible, and call me if your symptoms worsen".

That new boardgame is Space Alert, and man does it kick interstellar butt!

Space Alert is a cooperative game, where you are the under-trained crew of a "Sitting Duck"-class spaceship. You are exploring a new sector of the galaxy. You'll be attacked by enemy spacecraft and giant space amoeba, discover you're on a collision course with a comet, fight off boarding parties, contract exotic infections, try to manage your power core to keep fuel running to the shields and weapons, etc. It's good zany sci-fi fun.

And it's hectic and tense. The game comes with two CDs of 7 to 10 minute soundtracks. These soundtracks have the ships computer narrating events that happen in real time. You play cards, programming your actions like in Roborally, but instead of being in turns it's as you see fit in response to the events of the soundtrack. When the soundtrack is done, there's a 5-10 minute process of resolving the cards you'd played.

Like Roborally, if you played the wrong card, or a card in the wrong order, it messes up your later actions. That creates all sorts of craziness, where the whole crews plan hinges on the one character that goofed up. Picture the most dire Star Trek scenario, surrounded by an enemy fleet and barely enough power for shields and phasers if Scotty's working his miracles. Now make Scotty drunk and incompetent - that's Space Alert when you played the wrong card.

I've always loved Roborally, but I like Space Alert better. Roborally had problems with the "runaway leader" syndrome, where one player would get way ahead of everyone else. Clever track layouts could mitigate that, but not completely rule it out. If you made your track too hard, one person could be the clear leader for 30 to 45 long anti-climactic minutes. In Space Alert, the game is over in 15 to 20 minutes, the first 10 of which seem to pass in the blink of an eye. And you're so excited at the end of it, that you want to play again. Roborally is hard to teach to new players, as well, because it's a little overwhelming and they're guaranteed to lose the first two or three games. With Space Alert, you're working together, so the experienced players are motivated to coach the newbies, and can pick up the slack if someone's confused or making mistakes.

Speaking of "easier to teach new players", I feel Space Alert also compares very favorably to the Battlestar Galactica boardgame. It's got just as much going on (It feels like more is happening in Space Alert, but that may be an illusion because of the time pressure), but each individual component is a less complicated. You feel like your choices and actions have more impact, and there's less randomness. Space Alert is like the most tense critical moments of BSG, wrapped up into 15 lightning-fast minutes. It lacks BSGs long pregnant hours of sizing up the other players, trying to decide which challenge is worth spending which resource on, and regretting every action. So, if you were buying BSG because you wanted a game about space ships, Space Alert is probably the better choice. If you were buying BSG for the specific Galactica branding/flavor/characters, however, then stick with BSG. If you wanted a long, slow, cerebral puzzle, BSG is your ship. (If you were buying BSG because of the "Who's the Traitor?" element, I'd say get Shadows Over Camelot instead, as it's got that same feel with a lot less arbitrarily fiddly mechanics than BSG.) If you want decisive action and an adrenalin rush, Space Alert is definitely the better game.

And speaking of other cooperative and team games, Space Alert has replaced Pandemic as my favorite (which replaced Shadows Over Camelot, which replaced Lord Of The Rings). In that chain of replacements, there's a noticable theme. Space Alert is shorter than Pandemic which is shorter than Shadows which is shorter than LOTR. So, again, it never gets long or anticlimactic, and you can squeeze in an extra play or two into the evening. As far as complexity, though, Space Alert occupies a place somewhere between Shadows and Lord of the Rings, being much more complicated than Pandemic. If there wasn't the real-time element, you might overthink all the fun out of Space Alert, as every scenario is mathematically solvable - but you just don't have the time to do so, and it maintains its fun as a result.

As my last game comparison, it reminds me of one of my favorite computer games - Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space. It has that same goofy feel, and same quality of lasting just 20 minutes to a play. If you liked WW:RTIS, I think you'll get a kick out of Space Alert. Play WW:RTIS when you're alone, and Space Alert with a group.

The one worry I had about Space Alert prior to buying it was the soundtracks. I feared that they might limit the replayability of the game, because I thought they were entire scenarios unto themselves, and that you'd only want to play each one a finite number of times. Instead, the soundtracks don't tell you what's attacking, just what category of threat it is, when it shows up on sensors, and what trajectory it's approaching on. Something like "Alert! Time is T+3. Serious Threat detected in Red Sector." Then you flip over the top card of the Serious Threat deck, and discover it's an enemy stealth fighter, which you can't get a weapons lock on until it reaches the midpoint of it's approach vector. Or it's a giant "Space Octopus", that has to be destroyed from far away or else it will become enraged and rip your ship apart. Or it's a malfunctioning warhead in your missile bay, which has to be jettisoned before it explodes. As you can imagine, those three problems take very different solutions. Thus far we've mostly played soundtracks on the first disk, which typically give you about three such threats to deal with. Judging from our one play on the advanced disk, it gets much more frantic. In this one weekend of being ill, we've more than gotten our $60 value out of Space Alert, and we still haven't played three quarters of the soundtracks or seen half the cards.

One warning, however. My copy came with two production errors.

• A misprinted card, which they detected at the factory, and tucked a corrected card (and an explanatory note) into the box. Kudos to Rio Grande for catching and solving that problem.
• The other error was the swapping of labels on the two CDs. This they didn't catch. The Tutorial disc was labeled Mission, and vice-versa. So we played our very first game with the hardest difficulty soundtrack, which referenced all kinds of events that weren't covered in the introductory rules. Man, was that ever confusing. Your very first game should be one of the 7 minute tracks. If it runs 10 minutes or mentions an "Unconfirmed Report" or "Internal Threat", you're on the wrong disk.

Mod links for Brad

Okay, so anyone can use these links - it's just that Brad had inquired about the mod I keep trying (unsuccessfully) to finish, and I wanted to make sure he knew I had other mods completed:

Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space: modding forum and big list of mods. Note that the mod list hasn't been updated in months, so you'll find at least 3 or 4 extra mods on the forums beyond what's on that roster. Obviously, I only made a small fraction of the mods listed there.

Of the ones that aren't my creation, my favorite is Even Weirder Worlds by Phlagm. I tend to like the mods with new content more than those that just port the existing stuff over to a new setting (like the Star Trek mods). EWW has the most of that.

The mods I created can be downloaded from these links:
Teeming With Life
Drives 'R' Us
Sgqwonkian Crisis
Of the three I completed, Drives 'R' Us is probably the best, followed closely by Teeming With Life. Sgqwonkian Crisis is fun when it works, but it is really buggy and crash-prone, so it rates a distant third.
To access any of them, follow the links above, and then click on the little red "attachment" at the top of the first post on each thread. Once it's downloaded, just unzip and stick it in your Weird Worlds folder on your harddrive.

Error: Tried to destroy world that hadn't been created!

I'm attempting to get back into modding for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.
I really love that game, and when the mods work, they're a lot of fun. When the mods are crashing, it's not nearly so much fun.

In the past, when it crashed, I had no clue what exactly was causing it. Now, I have a debug tool. It's not great, but rather than being totally clueless, I get to ready pithy little reports like this:

Error: Tried to destroy world that hadn't been created.

Which is annoying to see pop up when there's nothing in your mod that destroys worlds.

Other interesting bits include:

Can't load asset misc/intro_scrugug.ogg

Frustrating when there's no scrugug.ogg referenced anywhere in your mod. In fact, a search of my harddrive indicates that file doesn't exist. So I thought maybe I'd try to figure out what referencing it. Searching the contents of files, I found the reference. The main game has a line that is supposed to trigger the playing of that file - yet the file did not come with my download.

Oh well, sometimes the debugging mode generates helpful messages. For example, it clued me in that I'd missed an "s" in one occurrence of the command to access the file graphics/items/s_itemssgq1.jpg. Adding in that s got rid of one potential crash.

And it gave me pages of the following:

warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
Fatal signal: Bus Error (SDL Parachute Deployed)
*** malloc[396]: Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x281ca00; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug
*** malloc[396]: Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x281ca00; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug

The malloc stuff is right over my head, but I at least have an alien race called the Gongaquai, who only show up if a particular quest is triggered, so I have a solid lead on where to start looking for the source of the trouble.

Crewing Weird Worlds

In the main game (no mods) of Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, you have no crew - or rather, the crew get barely any screen time and they don't really matter. They have no image. They serve only as NPC extras, a minor reinforcement of flavor. Sure, the science officer may figure out something about the Crystal Fish, and the whole crew celebrates if you smack the Kawangi, but they have no lives of their own.

The only way to impact them is to get the whole flotilla blown up. It seems that even if 4 out of 5 ships in your fleet get wasted by Urluquai, all hands survive and transfer to the remaining vessel. That, or it's assumed the Captain is a cold and heartless bastard who mourns no one. Not sure which. There are no funeral services, and no memorials to the nameless dead.

Esmeralda is the perfect example of your crew's passivity:

"Esmerelda, thief, smuggler and saboteur, is wanted in five star systems for a variety of crimes. Her notorious reputation and shady background only add to her mystique. The price on her head? 500 big ones!"

Ask any WW:RTIS player about Esmeralda, and they'll tell you how devastating and infuriating she is. Yet, when she robs or sabotages your ship, the crew's only comment is "Oh, yeah, I saw her on board, but I thought nothing of it." Weak-willed mindless sheep, this crew of ours! They deserve to have their towels stolen.

For my upcoming Wierdyssey mod, I've created crew (they sit next to your passengers), figured out how to track their morale and make it contribute to your final score, and how to cause events to deprive you of crew who get eaten or go AWOL. Just as Odysseus' crew got nibbled one-by-one before finally becoming lost-to-a-man, your crew will tick away, and their deaths will mean something to you. In keeping with the Homeric tradition, you still win as long as Weirdysseus gets home, but you have to choose how many redshirts get eaten by Scylla along the way.

It's not easy programming, and it's taking a lot longer than I ever suspected it would, but I hold fast to the belief that it will all be worth it when I'm done.

Modding is Hard

"Tiny purple fishes run laughing through your fingers" - Tales of Brave Ulysses, by Cream

I could have spent all day yesterday prepping for my Scion Campaign, or applying paint to a canvas, and not at all felt like I was wasting my time. My skills at both are honed enough that my wheels rarely spin in place, and I know how to work past minor blocks.

For modding, it's not the same. When I get done with 8 hours of modding and have but two minor visual jokes to show for it, I feel pretty underwhelmed.

Behold the warships of Troy! Color-curve-altered spaceships with the Trojan condom logo on them.

I spent the whole day yesterday trying to debug a section of programming that absolutely should be working. Everything was going along smoothly till I tried to make mercenary ships add to your crew roster. For some unknown reason, the UVAR codes (user variables) in these quests aren't talking with each other, and/or the haveshiprace CONDITION isn't triggering, so the crew count isn't incrementing. I tried to pinpoint the cause, and then 6 hours vanished in the blink of a debugging eye.

Crew Snapshot

Progress on my Weirdyssey mod for Weird Worlds has been slow. Partly, that's due to some debugging issues, and partly it's because I've returned to Oilpainting, which eats a lot of time.



To spur myself on, I thought I'd put a minor preview item here. For your viewing pleasure, here's the crew of the Weirdyssey...

Teeming With Life v1.2

Today I released a new version of Teeming With Life, a mod for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.


Teeming with Life is a mod that adds several new alien lifeforms, mostly nonsentient, to the game. It also develops existing lifeforms (from the main game) in new directions. Various non-sentient lifeforms such as the Fuzzy Lummox, the Piranha Bee, and the Megamoeba get new spins and become integral to new quests. We also get to see a new caste of Muktian society.

I had two goals when designing Teeming With Life. The first goal to increase the impact and importance of lifeforms in the game. Many of the lifeforms in the game start out new and exciting the first couple times you play, but become just "cheap stuff that doesn't do anything" after your 20th game. This mod adds new uses to various lifeforms to spice that up a bit. You never know what can happen if you keep that dreamsnake in your cargo hold.

The other goal was to make a mod that has great replayability. You shouldn't feel that you've seen all there is to a mod after two or three games. One thing I did to ensure that was to add multiple versions of nearly every new Quest I introduced in the mod. Certain lifeforms can be incredibly helpful in one game, and downright dangerous the next. I even added new versions of one or two quests from the main game to breathe new life into them. This is a mod you'll want to play again and again.

You can download Teeming With Life v1.2 at the Shrapnel forums. To do so, click on the link in the previous sentence, then click on the attachment link on the first post of the forum thread it takes you to. And, of course, you'll need a copy of Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space to play it.

Modding in Infinite Space

Since moving, I've been doing a lot of modding for a computer game called Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space.

You can download a free demo of Weird Worlds by clicking here. I highly recommend it.

It's a sci-fi game that takes about 10-45 minutes to play, depending on how large a star map you set it for and whether or not the dread Kawangi turn your flotilla (or homeworld) into a flaming asteroid belt. You can cram an entire game into a lunch hour, or you can waste a day playing back-to-back-to-back-to-back games.

It's mostly a turn-based space-exploration game. There's a bit of a card game / board game feel to it, as each star has exactly one planet with something interesting on it. Like you travel to a star for your turn, and draw a card from an imaginary deck to find out what's there. Strange creatures, new technologies, violent enemy fleets, intergalactic ambassadors, tech-hungry mercenaries, supernovas, ancient artifacts of long-lost earth, quirky humor, thinly-veiled references to classic sci-fi movies... there's a lot of different types of cards in that imaginary deck, and only a fraction of the deck gets played in any given game.

But when you find those aliens, the game zooms in to a real-time starship battle system. You have command of at least one ship, up to a flotilla of up to 5 on the large map if you recruit all the right allies and befriend the less territorial aliens. Between battles you can swap out systems and weapons on your ships, upgrading them as you find better tech goodies. Certain systems combo to be really effective in tandem, including a few that feel really degenerate and evil when you get them working. Mostly, I really enjoy those, but certain items *cough* *particle vortex cannon* *cough* are a little broken.

But that's where my favorite part of the game comes in: Modding. It's relatively simple to create new versions of the game, introducing new alien races, ships, events, quests, tech, weapons, etc.

I currently have produced three mods of my own, and am working on two others:

Teeming With Life, v1.1: Modding is a bit like house-ruling the original game. If you see something you'd like changed in the main game, just mod it! In this case, I felt that there wasn't enough variety to the non-intelligent life in the main game, making the science mission grow a little stale. So I fixed that. Lots more xenobiology to study and collect.

Drives'R'Us v1.11: Lots of additional tech goodies here. As the name suggests, there's plenty of new stardrives. There's also new weapons, new sensor suites, new shields, etc. New toys to add to your ships, and some "house-rule" style modding to control some of the super-weapons.

Sgqwonkian Crisis, v1: This mod introduces a new race, the peaceful herbivorous Sgqwonk, who are besieged and slaughtered by one of the hostile races of the main game. The player is sent on a mission of mercy or vengeance. This was my first mod, and as a result, it's kinda buggy. One day, I'll get around to updating it.

My other two mods in production but not yet released are The Weirdyssey: Inspired by the tales of brave Ulysses, and an as-yet-unnamed mod inspired by H.P.Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Weirdyssey will likely be ready fairly soon, but deep in Ryleh, dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.

If you'd like to get your hands on my Mods, and lots of other cool WW:RTIS mods, visit the shrapnel games Weird Worlds forums.

If you're interested in doing some modding your self, those forums are indispensible, as is The Modmaker's Guide To The Galaxy

That's all for now, but I'm sure I'll have plenty more to say about WW:RTIS some other day.