Gratuitous Space Battles Message Board

Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, English developer Chris Harris talks about the good ol' days of being indie and the continued success of Gratuitous Space Battles. What's your game called and what's it about?

Gratuitous Space Battles is a strategy/management game that plays in an unusual way. It's a "hands-off" battle simulator for giant space fleets, which puts the player in position of the designer of individual ships and entire fleets, and in control of the orders those ships will use during battle, but the actual battles themselves are out of your hands. You can watch your fleet fight, but cannot change anything mid-battle (although we have recently added direct control as an option).

The game is all about ship and fleet design, rather than arcade action, and plays more like a puzzle game or tower defense game than a conventional RTS.

Do you see yourself as part of a larger indie movement?

Kind of, although I am not a typical part of it. The indie scene seems to be younger, cooler and much more American than me. I find it weird that indie games are suddenly hip and cool, and acceptable to buy, and make millions of dollars, because this is a very recent thing, and there is no guarantee it will last.

When I started making indie games, there was no Steam, relatively few online stores and the majority of people were still buying CD-ROMs and downloading from sites like download.com. The scene has changed dramatically since then and I'm always slightly wary of the fact that it could change again. Some indie games now make tens of millions of dollars and that is definitely going to change things in the long term. How, I don't know.

The release of the conquest mode for Gratuitous Space Battles caused me to reinstall and lose a couple of weekends plotting and planning. Conquest provided a campaign to sit alongside the standalone bouts of ship wrecking and, lo, it was good. A few months ago, unbeknownst to me, a clever sort who goes by the name Pendra on the Positech forums released a random galaxy generator, providing Endless Consecutive Contextual Gratuitous Space Battles. There was an update to the generator this morning, which Cliffski mentioned in the Twittersphere, and I’ve copied some details into the emptiness below.

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The point of Gratuitous Space Battles was that it was a fleet manager, not an RTS. So while you watched the space battles play out, you didn’t actually influence them – you were the admiral who had designed the ships and decided upon the tactics. And that made the actual battles gratuitous in terms of the gameplay. That, however, is no longer necessarily true. Cliff from Positech has sent word that he’s continued fiddling with the game, and has released a free patch to allow players to get involved with the battle-action. Cliff says: “It’s only an ‘optional’ feature, and only works in single-player offline games, but from patch 1.60 (which is now live, steam copies will be updated soon), the player can select ships and issue movement and fire orders mid battle, and even edit the ‘standing’ orders for ships in the middle of an engagement.” There’s a video, which explains it in a bit more detail, below.(more…)

Lewie’s away being fitted for birthday hats and I’m all alone in the Savy Tower this weekend. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I was racing the bargain-bots down the endless stairs when Lewie appeared to me in a text message. ‘Tony, you should probably find cheap games’ he said – in an impressive hat – so here I am. If you are in London on May 4th, please do come celebrate five years of Savygamer, more details and daily deals are on SavyGamer.co.uk. Hats welcome.

In the bucket today: Syndicate (the fab one), Gratuitous Space Battles, Total War packs, Serious Sam 3 and, oh, all sorts.(more…)

Updates to Gratuitous Space Battles have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

- Bug Fix; Fixed campaign crash bug where you fought a battle with multiple fleets, captured enemy ships but your first fleet was lost.

Observant eyes may have noticed that there’s a new expansion out for Gratuitous Space Battles, the fleet building slice of indie goodness from Positech. While this fresh bit of DLC doesn’t add any new game modes, it does add 10 new ships, three new pieces of equipment and a new scenario. The new ships belong to the titular Parasites faction, who sound very unpleasant indeed. Swanning around the galaxy looking for host species to grow their larvae in? It’s not on. There’s a trailer showing some particularly gratuitous space battles below and a new pic from Positech’s upcoming Gratuitous Tank Battles for your eyes to look at.

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#britain If the Develop Conference in Britain earlier this week was good for one thing, it was a healthy dose of games industry shit-talking. Like this rant from Positech's Cliff Harris, in which he says "Mark Rein is a jerk". More »

Gratuitous Space Battles get even more gratuitous with The Tribe Expansion Pack.

Truly gratuitous space combat that befits the name!