Juju
Member
In between paid work, I like to fiddle around with side projects. This usually takes the form of writing open source libraries but recently I've been thinking more and more about making a game of my own. I've made some small games before with various people in loose teams, but I wanna do something a bit larger. It's just me on my lonesome thus far.
I've wanted to make a strategy game for a while, and something in 3D. I've experimented with 3D a few times in isolation - Planet Model 2 and A Mind Is A Small Place - but I'm yet to put it all together to make a traditional finished product. Strategy games are less common in the indie game community for a few reasons, but I'm gonna give it a shot.
So here we are, Flagship: A moving game of space chess, where you must defend your flagship with your fleet of ships, whilst attempting to destroy your opponent's flagship.
The gameworld is realistically modelled with gravity and momentum behaving as you'd expect in Space. Ships are customisable and get the full MechWarrior treatment where weapons, engines, shields etc. have lots of stats to balance out. The game is rendered in a vector display style, potentially aping Atari's vector rendition of Star Wars (though with hidden vertex culling to avoid visual clutter). Edit: Just remembered Vib-Ribbon which is a sorta-vector-emulation game.
The game is turn-based, and players take simultaneous turns. This is a departure from most strategy games, though Frozen Synapse does a good job of it. The game is playable in single player and networked multiplayer; turn-based games tend to be much easier to pull off with networked multiplayer. I find simultaneous games fascinating as there's more of an element of prediction and anticipation, and from a practical standpoint games go a lot faster since you're rarely waiting for long until your next turn!
The main sticking point for the project is going to be AI. Predicting trajectories in space is infamously difficult - NASA have entire supercomputer clusters dedicated to it - so it's going to be a big challenge. I think a large appeal of the game will be PvP so I'm not too worried, but it's still something to keep an eye on.
I'll be updating this thread as I go. I hope you'll join me.
I've wanted to make a strategy game for a while, and something in 3D. I've experimented with 3D a few times in isolation - Planet Model 2 and A Mind Is A Small Place - but I'm yet to put it all together to make a traditional finished product. Strategy games are less common in the indie game community for a few reasons, but I'm gonna give it a shot.
So here we are, Flagship: A moving game of space chess, where you must defend your flagship with your fleet of ships, whilst attempting to destroy your opponent's flagship.
The gameworld is realistically modelled with gravity and momentum behaving as you'd expect in Space. Ships are customisable and get the full MechWarrior treatment where weapons, engines, shields etc. have lots of stats to balance out. The game is rendered in a vector display style, potentially aping Atari's vector rendition of Star Wars (though with hidden vertex culling to avoid visual clutter). Edit: Just remembered Vib-Ribbon which is a sorta-vector-emulation game.
The game is turn-based, and players take simultaneous turns. This is a departure from most strategy games, though Frozen Synapse does a good job of it. The game is playable in single player and networked multiplayer; turn-based games tend to be much easier to pull off with networked multiplayer. I find simultaneous games fascinating as there's more of an element of prediction and anticipation, and from a practical standpoint games go a lot faster since you're rarely waiting for long until your next turn!
The main sticking point for the project is going to be AI. Predicting trajectories in space is infamously difficult - NASA have entire supercomputer clusters dedicated to it - so it's going to be a big challenge. I think a large appeal of the game will be PvP so I'm not too worried, but it's still something to keep an eye on.
I'll be updating this thread as I go. I hope you'll join me.
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