ID:70458
 
How serious am I about putting together a game this time around? Well, I made my browser's homepage my BYOND site in hopes it'll help me stay focused on it. That's a first.

My focus on abstraction from yesterday has helped. Ladies and gentlemen, the product of one day's work:



It's not much, the art direction largely being snagged from public domain images. The GUI, by and large, is not complete because I haven't completely settled on my scope.

What you don't see in this screenshot is that this solar system has been randomly generated and is incorporating Lummox JR's Swapmap. The goal is to have a nearly infinitely scaling universe that allows players to go from planet to planet by ship, get out of that ship, have adventures on foot as well.

Little coincidence I've been dwelling so heavily on Hard Nova and Star Command lately. This is the kind of game I've been wanting to develop for awhile. It's most certainly the closest thing to "My Net Dream" that I've been trying to get out of my system for quite some time.

I haven't really finished all that much today in that I probably performed about an hour's work in 10 hours. Such is my frequency of interruption to engage in old habits such as forum/comment thread shouting matches or just incubate. However, the productivity frequency should improve once my focus is clearer.

The plan is to keep working on my game from now until I'm going back to school in late June... and I'll probably keep working on it even then.
Yea~
Good work so far, keep it up!
Awesome, BYOND needs some good space games!
Visually that looks very similar to Star Traders--a game that had the potential to be awesome if its creator ever intended to finish it.

If I may, you might improve on the look by changing the background stars. Having them vary a bit in luminosity and color will give the game a much nicer appearance, plus you can "halo" some of the bigger/closer/brighter stars as long as they're not on a tile edge.
What's the gameplay going to be like?
Foomer wrote:
What's the gameplay going to be like?

At the most abstract level, the players purchase a crew and a ship, then go out to perform adventures which both raises the skill of their crew while upgrading their equipment and the ship.

The specifics are being ironed out. I hope the make the gameplay feel involving, because I hate games that just have the player sit back there and do nothing while the game plays itself.

Given more time to code more advanced universal mechanics, I'm going to try to put a deep dynamic content focus in the game where the universe actually changes as a result of the actions of the players. It would be a bit like Master of Orion if you were one one member of a race within the game.

Lummox JR wrote:

If I may, you might improve on the look by changing the background stars. Having them vary a bit in luminosity and color will give the game a much nicer appearance, plus you can "halo" some of the bigger/closer/brighter stars as long as they're not on a tile edge.

Sounds like an excellent idea. Right now I've just some code in there that randomly spins four tiles to make the pattern very hard to recognize, but I could certainly add some more passes to beautify them.

I also plan to do a bit of color fudging on the planets and stars to create more variety.
Well if you have a definite idea in mind for how you want the game played, I'd suggest you work hard on getting the game playable before you worry about anything else (like whether or not the stars twinkle).

Words of Advice
Absolutely. You know, I think this whole idea of "have a game up and playable quickly" has been a major sticking point of mine.

Because the scope of my game is such that I want to have both a spaceship and personal perspective, I'm starting pretty far out there. "This Universe" is normally a pretty hard thing to bring to playable in short order.

However, my heavy abstraction focus is making "The Universe" be playable sooner rather than later.