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[James Coote]

UPDATE:
I've paused work on this game for the time being to concentrate on making a game for the upcoming OUYA console

Iridian: Star Syndicate
http://www.crystallinegreen.com

You are the CEO of a small transport and logistics corporation striving to make it rich in the space-lanes of the future

Build a Business Empire
Build a fleet of ships plying the spacelanes for vast profit and riches. Nurture business relations and fuel economic growth or mercilessly asset strip and plunder your way to glory

Sophisticated Economic Simulator
Supply and demand based fluctuating price system creates opportunities for savvy traders. Advanced consumer behaviour gives you the choice to surf the wave of the latest fashions or quietly grow rich on staples of galactic civilisation

[James Coote]

I've created a new video. It's my first real foray into video editing, but was fun to make:

Click to play

[James Coote]

I spent the last week and a bit working on getting the spaceships to dock in the correct docking ports. This has become a bit of a personal crusade for me, and I've spent far too long trying to create a system for doing this. It still isn't quite perfect, but it looks good enough for now.

I also took a day out to make another short video showing the effect, as much for practicing video making and just to have a break from maths and programming! You can see it by clicking below (I've still not worked out how to embed youtube videos into the forums here)

Click here

[eyeliner]

OH MY FUCKING GOD, YES!!!!!
Y no people say something?
MOAR!

[Giaddon]

This looks very interesting! Are there any details you can share about how the game's economy will work, what the player will be doing, etc.?

[James Coote]

Initially, players will transport goods from mines to factories to retailers and get paid for doing so. However, it's more RTS than RPG, as you control a whole fleet of ships, similar to Homeworld or Transport Tycoon.

After that, there are a huge number of things that can be added to the game, and it'll just be a case of what order to add them. For example, I'm looking to have player owned factories and an R&D module to let you research upgrades to ships or new products to sell.

As for the economy, each different product or raw material will have a fluctuating market price. Then, depending on previous supply/demand, a factory will pay x% more or less than that market price for its raw materials.

So if a plastics factory hasn't received an oil shipment in a while, it might pay +10% the market price. The player sees the opportunity to buy oil from another station and transport it to the station where the factory is located, making a tidy profit. However, over time, the factory gets less desperate for oil, so they start dropping their price to say +5% or +2% of market value

Equally, as the factory becomes more profitable, the station where the factory is located will start to grow, demand more consumer goods, more luxury goods etc.

Again, there is no real limit to the potential complexity of the economic model, just a case of adding in more supply and demand factors, growth factors etc over time, and making sure they are balanced.

[James Coote]

No shiny video this week 

However, I've lots of progress to report:

Lighting

I did some experimenting with lighting for the first time. The results were mixed, and I'm still not entirely convinced.



Early experiments got the geometry all wrong (using red here as a test colour to highlight the use of diffuse light)



Something more subtle with different coloured lights from different angles. The pinky hue comes from me trying to match with a pink star on the skybox (which is just out of shot to the right)

Programmable Ships

I (re)created a system whereby ships can be programmed to perform specific tasks when they arrive at a waypoint. Buy, sell, load cargo, unload etc. Eventually, I hope to expand this to allow advanced player to set the parameters of each task. That way, they can start doing sophisticated logistics chains. For example, when ship 1 arrives at point b, buy 300 tonnes of corn feed and undock ship 2 from station alpha.

Players and Wallets

I introduced a special "Credits" resource to act as currency in the game. These credits are held by special "player" entities, that represent the player in the game, and can be loaned out to the assets (the ships and factories and stations) the player owns, so that all transactions go through the player's wallet

Eventually, I'll also add additional players to act as NPC or even rival AI controlled corporations (though that will be some time in the future)

Business Stuff

I put an entry onto the indie db website (http://www.indiedb.com/games/iridian-star-syndicate). Getting the shiny header picture just right was an absolute pain with the css style formatting. It's still not quite perfect, but good enough for now. For anyone else interested in doing something similar, here is the code I used:

Code:

<img src=" http:// your banner image .png "/>
<a href=" facebook.com/YourGame " style="position: absolute; top: 343px; left: 666px;">
<img src=" http:// facebook icon .png "/>
</a>
<a href=" googleplus.com/YourGame " style="position: absolute; top: 343px; left: 790px;">
<img src=" http:// google+ icon .png "/>
</a>
<a href=" your website url " style="position: absolute; top: 439px; left: 725px;">
<img src=" http:// your game's icon .png" />
</a>

Where the top and left are the coordinates of the top-left point of the image you want to link. The images float over the top of the main banner, so be careful if you're using transparencies (you might want to cut the icons out:



I also tidied up the social media plugins for the crystalline green website and added links to this devlog and the indie db site:

[tha_Chiller]

You are the CEO of a small transport and logistics corporation striving to make it rich in the space-lanes of the future

Build a Business Empire
Build a fleet of ships plying the spacelanes for vast profit and riches. Nurture business relations and fuel economic growth or mercilessly asset strip and plunder your way to glory

Awesomesauce, been looking for some in vein of EvE Online since I can't afford it right now.

[tha_Chiller]

.

As for the economy, each different product or raw material will have a fluctuating market price. Then, depending on previous supply/demand, a factory will pay x% more or less than that market price for its raw materials.

So if a plastics factory hasn't received an oil shipment in a while, it might pay +10% the market price. The player sees the opportunity to buy oil from another station and transport it to the station where the factory is located, making a tidy profit. However, over time, the factory gets less desperate for oil, so they start dropping their price to say +5% or +2% of market value

Fuck yes. I love persistent Economies, tracking on indieDB dude

[James Coote]

Hey all. Sorry for the silence:



This developer has been rather tied up having all play and no work at the olympics. Managed to get back on track the last couple of days though.

I played a lot of Eve online (ex CVA), so I'm happy to admit I've taken a lot of "inspiration" from Eve, as I think a whole generation of game devs and players have.

UI Revamp

I've (finally) finished the core engine, so this week I've moved onto revamping the UI. On the last version of the game, the UI was too clunky and slow and not very intuitive.

With any luck I'll have some shiny screenshots to post later this coming week

Business Stuff

I spent a few days last week drafting a business plan, doing the cold, hard maths on indie development. The conclusion? Well lets just say I can probably forget about that luxury yacht for a while. It's not all doom and gloom though, with my aim to break even by the year's out. Of course that all depends on releasing a product sometime soon, so extra motivation to crack on with development now that the summer's sporting distractions are firmly out of the way

[James Coote]

Wow! Been a while... Well after the olympics came the paralympics, then I moved house and spent two weeks decorating. But back to work now!

UI Improvements
However, I have been working on the UI, on and off. It doesn't look as shiny as I want to, but if flows far better and has far fewer layers to navigate in the general hierarchy.

There is also a nice "pager" view that Google introduced with ice cream sandwich, that allows you to flick between pages Apple style. I made a quick video showing off how this works with the list of ships that players own:

Click to Play

[James Coote]

Simplifying Game Mechanics
After getting lots of feedback from friends and acquaintances, I decided that the game as it stood was too complex. In particular the programmable ships were going to be a nightmare to implement an intuitive and easy to learn UI scheme for.

Instead I've set each ship to initially have only a single cargo type that is determined when the ship is purchases.

When waypoints are added, the are given certain default behaviour depending on the waypoint and ship.

So if an Iron Ore Freighter has an Iron Ore Mine added as a waypoint, the freighter will automatically fill its cargohold with Iron Ore when it arrives at the mine

I will add in "Advanced controls" that allow more fine tuning of ship behaviour at a later date.

UI Improvements
I've also been jazzing up the UI, rearranging some layouts and adding in more shiny borders, edges etc. You can see the progress in the video below. I'll be adding some transitions between screens, make buttons light up and fade when pressed and other things to make the UI feel more 'alive' in the coming week

Click to play