MORSE News

Hey folks,

Just a quick nudge to say that development on MORSE is still slowly progressing:

+ Tutorial: Long overdue, but I've got a basic tutorial system in. It wasn't too much work given that I already had a lot of the framework for the tutorial from the previous version of MORSE. It's 90% of the way there, the game starts you off with entering the letters of LEARN (N = Dash Dot) and then blowing up 5 target ships as practice. It's short and sweet and I've been able to feed through the notifications system, I'll test it with folks soon and hopefully it'll be enough to get people started.



+ Refined Code: I did some lessons in coding before Christmas and I've been going back through the project and trying to imbue the game's logic with what I learned. Still haven't finished yet but making it easier to follow and if there's another break from the project easier to pick back up!

+ Mouse controls: As an alternative control method for the game, given it's just two inputs you can use left and right mouse click now to operate the game! Feels quite nice and I like that you can invert the direction of the mouse and press it like it's a telegraph key.

Whilst I don't really have an interest in commercial games development full time anymore (Given my previously explained statement and even more so from the dramatic industry downturn), I do still genuinely want to get MORSE released in this form this year, which I believe is possible given how much progress has been made on the project and the refined scope. The main next step is getting sufficient playtesting in to gauge how far off release I am.

Speaking of, tonight I'm going to be taking it to the local Wireless and Radio Society tonight to see what they think and if the tutorial is sufficient to onboard those players! I'm generally really interested in trying to engage the ham radio scene, really build them a project that takes into account the nuances of the input. There's a lot of "Rallies" that happen throughout the year so hoping to try get along to one of those, hopefully tonight should be enlightening in figuring out where to start.

It might seem a very niche audience to target but there's over 60,000 ham radio operators in the UK and 2 million in the US, so it'd be great to engage them with the project!

As an additional shout out! 1920: Beats of War looks absolutely lush and is a neighbour exploring the realm of telegraphy. Definitely worth a look and give it a wishlist!

More updates soon.

.-

Hello folks,

Hope you're all well! Thanks for your patience, here's an update on where MORSE is at. First things first, here's some footage showing the new version of the game!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

So the game footage will likely look very different to what you've seen previously. It's definitely a drop in production quality, but that is an intentional choice. Over the previous 2 years of pushing the project, there was an emphasis and pressure to increase the scope, upgrade the game to 3D, aim for a multi-hour experience to make it commercially viable for publishers to consider. Whilst I am genuinely glad I had the opportunity to lead a team of devs, tour the game around the world, delve into the richness of history involved with telegraphists and learn Unity as an engine, the truth is that bloating of the original scope and having to draft up and revise these huge budgets (not least from having to budget the hire of a programmer full time) distracted me from the fact that the game can be explored sufficiently and satisfyingly in a short, polished, minimalist 2D experience.

This isn't exclusive to MORSE. To be blunt, the games industry is rife with this kind of bloat, it's common practice for publishers to outright reject games below certain budget sizes so devs enflate their rates to match, then inevitably things go to pot when the developers can't deliver at that scale or the publishers don't see the returns on their gargantuan investment (So the developers never see a penny). It's unsustainable (as the scale of industry layoffs/closures show) and I'm genuinely really glad to have returned to a tool and scale I can deliver the project within.

So with that ramble in mind, here's the primary adjustments in bringing the scope down:

1. 3D -> 2D: I've changed engines from Unity back to Stencyl. Primarily because I can work incredibly fast and independantly in Stencyl, by contrast working in Unity was requiring an immense amount of faff and as mentioned above, would have required hiring a programmer to deliver the final game. I don't feel a massive amount (other than porting capabilities) is lost by shifting back, the game is much snappier, I can iterate faster and because of being able to program myself, that brings the dev cost down significantly.
   
   
2. Campaign based -> Wave based: This is easily the hardest change to make to the project, shelving the majority of narrative work that was done to create a rich period setting to ground the game in. The greatest loss of ditching Unity was Ink, the narrative tool developed by Inkle which allowed really sophisticated narrative structures for storytelling, that does not exist for Stencyl and to build an equivalent system for the tool is currently out of scope of what I intend to deliver. Compared to the previous iteration which was more oriented around a series of scripted dioramas interwoven with narrative segments, this latest iteration will be a tightly scoped, mechanics driven, procedurally generated wave defense game at heart. You fight off a wave, upgrade your arsenal, place defences then face the next attack on a new randomly generated map. Rinse and repeat.
   
   
3. Land, Air and Sea -> Purely Naval Combat: In the interest of keeping scope constrained, for now I'll be focusing purely on delivering naval combat. It's the simplest to deliver out of the three battlefield types and most thematically cohesive with it's closest neighbour, Battleships. Other perks are it doesn't feel unintuitive for units to be travelling in straight lines from left to right (unlike trench warfare which requires vertical depth and cover), defences can be focused around sea-mine placement and there's some really lovely, period ship designs to pull from.

What is nice about this approach is the above features aren't gone forever: They can be re-introduced if there's an appetite for MORSE and the game does well, but for now I can just focus on designing this tightly scoped and deliverable experience.

Now I've discussed the reduction in scope, lets talk about the improvements that have since blossomed now that my focus has shifted back to development instead of bizdev:

1. Fog of war: In the previous version of MORSE, there was some fog of war that hid enemies approaching off the edge of the screen, but with the latest iteration it's taken to a new form. All units are hidden until they're revealed by artillery, either permanently revealed by a direct hit or temporarily flashing from a nearby explosion, think of it as a muzzle flash effect at night illuminating nearby objects. Gameplay now requires more spatial awareness of ships and trying to predict where units will be in advance through reconnaissance, players often launching shells into the dark to illuminate hidden targets.
   
   
2. Locational Damage: Depending on where you strike on ships, you'll do more damage, it's possible to kill some ships with one direct hit, rewarding players for precise strikes.
   
   
3. Upgrade system: This is a pretty substantial addition, at the end of each wave, you get the opportunity to pick between two upgrade types by entering either a dot or a dash. There are two main groups of upgrades, Shell upgrades (discussed in the next bulletpoint) and general upgrades. General upgrades adjust things like the radius of illumination of your shots, the durability of mines, how far ahead you can see in the stack of queued artillery shells and the range at the rate of restocking ammo.
   
   
4. New Shell Variants: There's one new type of shell and alterations of the previous ones - I've added the suppressive shot, a shell that slowly strikes the same location multiple times, a handy tool when hitting larger ships. For the shells, they now need to be unlocked and upgraded over time, so every 3 waves the player has the choice to pick between unlocking a shell or upgrading an existing one. An example of upgrading an existing shell would be adding an extra row to the horizontal artillery shot, eventually getting 4 or 5 horizontal artillery shots in a row, a devastating salvo for any units caught in their path.
   
   
5. Defence construction phase: As mentioned earlier, as part of the flow of gameplay, you fight off a wave of units, a new word is generated, you choose an upgrade and then you get the opportunity to plant several mines on the map. These mines can be upgraded to have a wider blast radius and can be used near the frontline to reveal enemy ships or lining the backline to catch any stragglers that slip past your bombardment. For now there's just mines as part of this defensive phase, but I've created a framework that could spawn for example other allied units or defences for placement.
   
   
6. More enemy unit types: Compared to the previous build, there's already double the number of units as last time and straightforward tools to add more. I've adjusted the ships to look more familiar to the era, working from pictures of German classes of vessels at the time. My favourite by far is the Dreadnought, a slow moving, colossal, heavily armoured ship that launches massive explosive shells that cut through any defences. It's a genuine point of panic when it shows up in later waves!
   
   
7. Lifebar: The lose state for the game is now if your health bar is depleted to zero, which occurs if units successfully break past your defences. Small gunships take 1 segment whilst dreadnoughts will cleave 4 of 5. This means when you're being overrun, you have to consider damage control over what units you can feasibly let through.
   
   
8. Minimalist Input: The game is now baked down to just 2 keys: Launch and fire. It was already broadly the case to some extent in the Unity version but I've decided to fully commit to the scope of just 2 buttons. This means the upgrade screen is navigated with a dot or dash and confirmed with launch, gameplay is controlled with just two inputs and defences are placed using the same aiming/launching mechanism. What's a lovely addition too is I've added sliders to adjust the threshold to determine the difference between a dot and a dash (how long it needs to be held to change from one to the other) and the cooldown threshold for Morse Code input (how long after you've entered your Morse Code input will it take to convert your sequence of dots and dashes into a letter). What's lovely about this setup is it functions as an accessibility tool for those with reduced dexterity but also functions as a means of dialling up to 11 for Ham Radio enthusiasts who want to speed up their input!
   
   
9. Stats screen: After each game, you get the opportunity to see how you did, seeing the accuracy of your shots, number of mines placed, total shells fired and the final wave reached. In particular interest to me is the timer showing the gameplay duration. My average play time is between 50-70 minutes before I'm beaten, which is really promising given that the rough length of the 3D Unity vertical slice of MORSE was around 2 hours overall!

That's it for now, I'll talk in a later post about the things I want to add to this build. Again I want to thank again for your patience, I'm now only working on MORSE on the side so whilst the scope makes development faster, the intervals at which I work on the game are more infrequent. Stay tuned for more and feel free to ask me any questions below!

All the best and hope you all get some rest over the holidays,

Alex

Hey folks,

Hope you're all doing well! Been a while since I've updated MORSE. It's been an interesting time since I posted.

To give a brief summary, around a year ago I hit the peak of the project: I toured MORSE around Asia, winning awards in experimental design and exploring Japan and Korea. It was a thrilling time and I was genuinely so proud for it to soar to such heights. But a week after returning to the UK during a business accelerator, I realised I wasn't able to breathe and I was hospitalised with a suspected pulmonary embolism. After numerous tests, they concluded it was thankfully just exhaustion and ordered a week of bedrest. Due to this health scare and a number of compounding life reasons, I had to shelve the project last year. I'd been pushing it for 2 years and despite the positive reception, publishers just weren't willing to commit (despite them dragging out conversations for literally years).

You can read a longer post about this experience on TIGSource (as others have linked), but in short, I've taken the last year away from the game to do experimental design, stop trying to conform to the industry and actually explore the stuff I'm interested in. I've toured my work in Berlin, Manchester and New York, I've leant into controller fabrication and designing short, ground breaking experiences meant for physical exhibition instead of bloated, commercial projects that outstay their welcome to hit an arbitrary 2 hour mark.

My spirit for the project was truly poisoned by the awful behaviour of publishers, so it's only in the last few months I've felt any kind of motivation to work on MORSE again. But that enthusiasm has returned. Having said that, that experimental , minimal mindset has informed this latest iteration.

What was previously proposed is unsustainable to deliver, I can't financially or physically do it, my previous hospitalisation was proof of that. But, I'm in the privileged position to have the ability to make my own experiences without having to hire programmers, the main catch is it's not using conventional tools like Unity.

This is to say, you will at some point get MORSE as an experience, but it'll be made in Stencyl, it's going to be a lot more minimalist and as players you'll need to accept that there'll be constraints of the tool and possibly not features that most conventional launches have.

On the other hand, I am far more adept with this tool and am confident that this gameplay wise is already a far superior project. I'm excited to share updates on the new version and what's changed since I last posted. I recently showed the latest version of the game at EGX in London which went down incredibly well and since then I've introduced a slew of updates and systems, of which I'll share soon.

For those of you that have Wishlisted and followed the project, thank you for your patience.

Stay tuned!

.-

Hey Folks!

We'll be wrapping up LudoNarraCon with a final stream today! I'll be in the chat answering questions and demonstrating the custom controller and game.