The Challenge of Infinite Space: A New Game Mode Suggestion

The Challenge of Infinite Space: A New Game Mode Suggestion

Even now, four years after its initial release, Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars continues to impress with seemingly endless replay value, more balanced gameplay and some of the best audio and visuals of any sci-fi roguelike on the market today. The campaign mode is the best it's ever been, and the Combat Simulator mode finally allows you to mix and match ships from different factions - and customize them to your liking for good measure. However, as a suggestion, I would propose a new game mode that could make it more compelling - for obvious reasons, I would call this the Challenge Mode.

The premise of Challenge Mode is as follows: you have a selection of preset battle scenarios, and completing the current challenge unlocks the next one. In each challenge, you are assigned a faction and flotilla of up to five ships, each of which has a preset weapon loadout and equipment configuration. You would start out with cheaper, lower-end items, but in later challenges you will get to use the more expensive high-end stuff. And you will most definitely be needing it; your targets will be more numerous and/or more heavily armed as you progress through Challenge Mode. Completing a challenge requires you to destroy some or all hostile ships and/or protect a vital allied ship or space station from enemy units. While I'm at it, I might add a separate tutorial for Challenge Mode to help you understand how it would work.

I'd suggest 15 to 20 challenges for this mode, to strike a balance between quick completion and a deep gameplay experience. Also, when you complete a challenge, you would earn a gold, silver or bronze medal depending on how many points you scored, with gold requiring more points than silver, which in turn requires more points than bronze. Fittingly, this mode would deserve several unique Steam achievements, most likely four of them: one for completing the first challenge, another for getting your first gold medal, still another for completing every challenge, and one final achievement for earning every gold medal the Challenge Mode has to offer. But how would this mode be introduced? Making it a paid DLC item might not be required (or even desirable), because with the base game, you already get plenty of bang for your buck, and forcing customers to pay extra for this mode weakens the game's value equation. It would thus be best to patch Challenge mode into a future update for the game for free, as has been the case for any and all content added to Sea of Stars throughout its entire history.

In short, Challenge Mode, as I have explained above, would be a worthwhile addition to the game. Not only would it appeal to those who have already fully completed the campaign on the highest difficulty, it would also allow beginners to learn the basics of combat without having to jump into the campaign. Moreover, you get the chance to improve your skills by making the most of various preset loadouts. Because as you may or may not know, there is more to Sea of Stars than attempting to score 250,000 points during the campaign on the highest possible difficulty.

Doll Maker's Diary, Part 25: Cover Girl Duets

Doll Maker's Diary, Part 25: Cover Girl Duets

So far, many of the dress-up games I have tried have some sort of fantasy theme. However, there are quite a few of these games which are focused firmly on modern fashions. The Cover Girl Dress Up Game is among them. Uniquely, it allows you to create outfits for exactly at once: an elegant one on the left and a more casual one on the right. Here are two examples.

Above: Two examples of sketches made in the Cover Girl Dress Up Game. In this particular game, the doll on the left always has a more mature and elegant look, in contrast to the carefree, relaxed style of the second doll, and the list of items available for them differs accordingly.

As expected, the items available for the first doll tend to be more conservative and formal, while those for the second doll are more whimsical and flamboyant by comparison. But as always, with either doll, the possibilities for outfits are virtually endless. And there is very little for me to complain about, although I would suggest more color choices for the items, additional background patterns (a horizontal gradient is the only one available) and the ability to swap the dolls' positions around.

When you compare the two item sets available to your, it soon becomes apparent that the one for the doll on the left lends itself well to a mature, tomboyish look, and the other item set (for the doll on the right) exudes a more youthful and feminine flair. Best of all, however, the game allows you to do both at once, as shown below.

Thus ends my summary of the Cover Girl Dress Up Game. Stay tuned for the next entry in this series.

Doll Maker's Diary, Part 24: Fairy Tale Scene Maker and Other Doll Game Discoveries

Doll Maker's Diary, Part 24: Fairy Tale Scene Maker and Other Doll Game Discoveries

Recently, I have been trying out another one of the various Azalea's Dolls Flash games on the Internet - specifically, the Fairy Tale Scene Maker. It is quite similar to the Goddess Scene Maker, but instead of a Greco-Roman theme, it is heavily inspired by Grimm's Fairy Tales and adaptations thereof. Here are a few examples of artworks I created using this game.

 Above, from top: Examples of artworks made using the Fairy Tale Scene Maker.

You can have up to eight characters (which can be either male or female) in a scene at any one time. As usual, the first few menus are reserved for the character's basic appearance (face, skin tone, hair style and color, etc.); the next few ones after that are about the color and type of the clothes they will wear - underwear, tops, skirts, pants, shoes and so on. From here you can add accessories, from jewelry and hand mirrors to books and even weapons, among other things. You also have three backgrounds to choose from: a village, a path leading to a castle, and a dense forest.

In addition, I stumbled upon a few discoveries when trying other games on the site:

• You do not have to make every character that you created in a Goddess game artwork be (or look like) an ordinary human being - you have the option to give them mermaids' tails or angels' wings. Moreover, you can add babies to your artworks - cute enough on its own, but heartwarming when you consider the fact that some characters in Greco-Roman mythology actually were descended from gods. And you can customize them as well - although your options for those are much more limited compared to the ones available for fully grown human(oid)s.
• The Four Elements game begins with a quiz containing 10 questions, each of which has four possible answers; once every question has been answered, the game will select a theme based on your responses. Further details on this process (and the game to which it belongs) will be shown in a future post in this series.
• The Lord Of The Rings Dress Up Game is actually split up into three different games: one for creating scenes with nothing but Hobbits, another devoted exclusively to dwarves, and yet another for creating scenes with other types of characters (humans, elves, etc). However, all of them share many customization options with the Tudors and Game of Thrones Dress Up Games.

This concludes my summary of my recent discoveries on the Azalea's Dolls website; stay tuned for further updates.

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 61: Paint Box Problems

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 61: Paint Box Problems

The latest update to the color and materials system in UE4 Automation has opened up plenty of new possibilities for a car's aesthetics. However, it is not without its issues. In addition to overwriting all user-defined material colors, the layout of the paint/material selection tab has been significantly changed, with paint and material slots now being arranged into one of four different categories - a first for the game. This new may seem alien to Automationeers at first, but over time, it will be easily remembered - and offer more creative freedom to boot.

Creating an exterior paint color or editing an existing one used to be slightly more challenging than it is now, but the new paint editor offers much more variety of choice than before. For one, when creating or editing paint colors, you are taken to a basic paint editor, which is menu containing material type, hue, shine and flake presets. You can choose from high, medium or low levels of shininess and flake, as well as 147(!) preset hues and four material types (paint, plastic, carbon fiber and chrome). For even greater precision over color selection, you can open the advanced paint editor (a holdover from earlier builds) by clicking on its associated icon.

Above: The basic paint editor menu introduced in the latest update to UE4 Automation. From here, you can specify various aspects of an exterior color and its material type. Below: The advanced paint editor allows for greater precision over material color and type attributes, allowing you to adjust base and pearl colors by changing the hue, saturation and value for either or both of them.

As before, materials and color slots are still sorted into four categories: body, trim, wheels and miscellaneous areas. As before, car bodies can have up to four body color/material slots (primary body, secondary body, bumpers, and bonnet) and four trim color/material slots (main trim, window trim, wing mirrors, and pillars), while the car's wheels can have up to three (primary, secondary and lip) and brake calipers can only have one. However, trays and convertible tops can be recolored where possible - another first for the game, and a welcome addition requested by countless Automationeers.

Above: The list of body color/material slots in the redesigned paint selector tab. Below: There is also a similar list for trim slots.

Assigning existing materials and colors to slots is slightly more complex than before; however, the process required to do so is much more effective. Preset and user-defined colors and materials are currently sorted into three categories: On Car (i.e. those which were previously assigned to the car being created/edited in the car designer menu), Global (which includes every user-defined color and material) and Defaults (which includes all the default materials in Automation, with a few new ones, such as aluminum and leather, being added in the latest release); a fourth category, reserved for Campaign materials and colors, will be added in a later patch.

Above: The global paint/material group includes all user-defined materials and paint colors which have been saved in the car designer. Below: The list of default materials in the redesigned paint/material editor is much larger than it used to be.

In short, while the new paint editor menu may seem more complicated at first, it ultimately becomes a much more useful tool in the design phase once you get the hang of it.