Yes I am working on Wargames, but I think its about time I revealed something else up my sleeve. This is something that I hope to get released (at least in demo form) sometime this year, but its a big project. You can read a short description here:
http://www.byond.com/games/Acebloke/Dreamland
What is special about this game is, although it wasn't intentional at first is that in a sense, its a "Spore" clone. Like many others, Spore for me, while in many ways revolutionary, when it came to actual gameplay it was stagnant and repetitive.
The Cell stage is by far the most fun, and shortest part of the game, the Creature-Tribal-Civilisation stages is a virtual rehash of each other, with little actual gameplay changing (the basic "charm" or "attack" methods essentially make it the same thing in different eras, even if in Civ stage you get to have ships and aircraft). The Space stage also was just a frustrating contest of defending one of your planets or its eco system every 5 minutes before you could actually do anything worthwhile constructive.
Doing a similar game but with much larger scope with more defining stages with differing gameplay is something of a target for me personally, if only for my own enjoyment. I still want to be able to have at the end of the game, a role-play styled game in which you explore the world you created, with races that have evolved on it be it Humans, Dwarfs, Elves, Giant ants etc and explore dungeons, buy and sell items and more. A long term goal would inevitably be to make it possible that you could make a civilisation out of something like Ants, as if it got to the technological level of historical or even modern day Humanity, a true sandbox game.
I'm now going to present the screenshots available at the link above in order that the player encounters them. Hardly final-version, but still interesting (at least to me) to show how much is currently done so far.
At first, you get to see the Big Bang, although this is not very exciting, click the central square and see it spread across your screen. Now you have a Universe to play with.
Currently, the highest level playable is a Solar "Neighbourhood" level (bearing in mind the game doesn't take account every single solar system in that Galaxy, only the parts you encounter in getting to your first planet), while I might add in some sections prior to this, the Re-ionisation period is effectively the first stage of the game. Mould the Universe to create its first Stars; one of them is going to be yours.
So now your are at your Local Cluster. You get a juicy 24 systems to pick from, while some of it is random (such as the type/size/temperature of the Star, although this is based on actual pecentage data; about 75% of all Stars are 'M' Class or Red Dwarfs, the weakest Star available ingame) the number of stars is dependant on your Re-ionisation process. Our personal Solar System has only one star, but 2-3 and more Stars per System is relatively common. I've seen a 7 star system in-game generation, 8 is the highest.
So now you've picked the Solar System you wanted. For display purposes, I chose a traditional 1-star system, although these aren't overly common in-game generation. The "protoplanetary disk" is choking the screen, its now up to you to start forming planets by grouping this space dust/gas up. Some stages, such as this and Re-ionisation I've developed an auto-mode so the Computer will do it for you, presenting you with a unique Solar System every time without need of you clicking, if that be your interest.
Once your done collecting that gas into dust and then planets, you get to choosing your planet. This'll be important because it decides not only the size of it, but what kind of climate its in. Right now, There is a "habbital zone", along with a "hot" and "cold" zone, as displayed here. The game will hopefully feature the ability to develop life in any three of these zones with special rules and features for all of them. At the moment, the game doesn't discriminate on which climate you take. This mode also sets moons for planetary bodies too close to a larger body, which is also selectable.
Now you are on the planet, you get to have a bit of fun bombarding it with meteors and the like for awhile, and hopefully you'll start to get some kind of liquid for Life to start. There isn't a lot to this mode yet, its something I need to change before release.
Its time to get into the Primordial Soup, and start creating the first Life. While the game will theoretically be Multiplayer, where players can join together to help form a Universe, Solar System and Planet, at some point they'll need to start going against each other (if desired). The AI takes over of course if you are playing alone. This mode will decide who gets to go on as Eukaryote's, the loser will be stuck with Prokaryote's (namely Bacteria) for the rest of the game. The runner up loser in this mode at the moment gets stuck with Plantae, yes, plants.
A similar stage follows, although with new variables included. This time, another player is going to get knocked out of the Evolutionary scale, and act as Fungi. Something I'd like to do in future is to make Fungi develop'able at a later stage, possibly to the point where it becomes intelligent but for the time being it shares a similar fate to the Plantae player. The remaining (4 at the moment) 'players' get to advance to Animals, and start making their colonies back on the World map.
At this point, we've reached the end of what is currently playable, but I still got a bit more. At this point, the game is getting to the Cell stage on Spore, and inevitably some degree of control over what your things are going to look like has to come at this point. Using an editor, you'll be able to create and advance your species. But don't think that those knocked out players have just disappeared; they are still around.
Bacteria lives to plague all over life. While I'm not sure how I would (if at all) present Viruses, Bacteria is going to act as the "illness" player for now. The following screenshot shows a variety of possible Bacteria. Each element controls a different variable. For Bacteria it is "Infection" (for colonising inside another lifeform), "Transmission" (for escaping that lifeform in the hopes of infecting more) and "Defence" (its personal ability to defend itself while in the lifeform).
Next up is Plantae, this player will be quite important as its job is to colonise the planet with some of its first food and resources. Itself has 4 elements, Roots, Stems, Leaves and Flowers, each with its own individual job.
The Fungi player has 3 elements planned at the moment, and works in a sense as a mix of the Bacteria and the Plantae player, its reliant on other species like the Bacteria player but only spreads in a "fixed" manner like Plants. As explained above, this is something I want to develop in future.
Finally, we have Animals. They have elements such as "Limbs" (arms, legs, tails), "Organs" (brains, hearts, lungs) and "Senses" (such as smell, sight) and by far the most complicated beings of the four editors. It'll be here where all the juicy changes will be, and the editor itself will probably have to adapt later in game to explore more detail, certainly more than what my example screenshot has shown:
And that is about it for now, until I can develop another significant part of the game which I can show off. Its by far the most exciting project to me right now, and one I enjoy the most developing. There is so much more to flesh out, and expand on, but I hope my little taster has at least one of you interested! Until next time...
