Welcome to Amelia - A planet rich in natural resources.
Your company has been contracted by Amelia's owners to extract precious minerals from its abundant deposits. Use your business acumen to exploit Amelia's wealth of natural resources and build a thriving industrial colony. Flex your financial muscle to out-compete rival mining conglomerates and wrest control of the planet.AimPlayers compete to build up mining colonies on a far-future planet. The bigger the colony, the more "influence" the player has with Planet Amelia's corporate owners. Gain enough to be granted exclusive mining rights to the planet, and win the game
StyleThe game is like a board game but played on a sphere, (to represent the fictional Planet Amelia), which I've tiled with hexagon (and a few pentagons) to create a unique surface that adds extra dimensions to the usual flat board games. I've tried to take the all the good design principles of a well constructed board game and apply a unique setting as is only possible with a video game.
OUYA ExclusiveI'm making this an OUYA exclusive game, with the aim of being a launch title when the console comes out in June this year. I may bring it to android or other android consoles later, but it is really designed to work with 4 friends sitting round a TV rather than 4 friends huddled round a tablet or 4 people trying to play over the internet in real time (I have no skills at network programming
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NotesI should have started a dev log and updated it as I went, but instead you'll get the full story of development up till now in one go, then I'll post updates regularly from now till launch
Martian Settlers was the WIP title of the game. I've now settled on Executive Star
Teaser TrailerFinally got round to making a teaser trailer. Enjoy!
(Will open youtube)
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HistoryBack in October, my current game project was dragging on and looking like it would never get finished. I'd made a lot of mistakes in the early design and they were all coming back to bite me on the ass. I'd signed up as an Ouya developer and decided to start a new game for that, in time for release of the Ouya in March
Around the same time I went to GameCity festival in Nottingham and heard Quintin Smith enthuse about board games and how board game design could be used to make better video games. I'd been thinking it would be cool to do a civilisation style game, but set on a globe instead of a flat board. However, thinking about the feature creep and scope issues of my last project, it didn't make sense to do a whole big strategy game, but rather a board game with simple rules that could be quickly learned (and more importantly, quickly implemented)
Prototype PhaseTo test this, I decided to do a quick prototype. Basically I would create something similar to a well known board game, but set in space / in the future. A week of coding and some awesome MS paint jobs later and my suspicions about board games were confirmed; with their concise and clearly defined set of rules, they were the way to go
Spherical ThinkingThen I discovered an image that reignited my interest in the spherical board/map idea again. Essentially, a way to tessellate a sphere using hexagonal 'floret' patterns (with a few pentagons mixed in)
Having learned the lessons from previous projects, I gave myself a week to find a solution before I moved on. After some searches on the internet into how to recreate this pattern, I slapped a post on stack overflow's maths site on the off chance, and continued with prepping my graphics engine for a 2D board
The solution that came back on SO was not a complex mathematical formula as I'd been expecting, but was in fact remarkably simple (on the surface):
Take the 2D tessellation and create an equilateral triangle between the centre of three florets, then apply that to the triangles of an icosahedron
By HandLooked easy enough, but I needed the vertices of each floret as I was going to use them as tiles for the game. So I created a series of helper programs that in steps, allowed me to manually build up the sphere.
1. Make the 2D tessellation
The floret pattern can be divided up into triangles easily
By specifying only the vertices in the triangle area, I managed to get a 2D floret pattern
2. Mapping 2D to 3D
Next comes the hard part: mapping the 2D vertices onto 3D triangles. I did this using quaternions, which I had previously implemented for another project. The idea would be to take one 'edge' of the 2D floret and rotate it to match the edge of the target 3D triangle.
Then I rotated the plane of the 2D floret to match the plane of the triangle:
3. Flipping and Mirroring
Next I wrote everything into an .obj file and imported it into blender. Some of the rotations meant the patterns were inverted or mirrored (plus some had just plain failed for whatever reason. My maths wasn't good enough to debug it).
So I manually flipped, mirrored and in some cases duplicated to fill holes until I ended up with this:
4: Stitching it together
Next, I had to stitch the individual patterns together. In some cases I had to create new edges, subdivide them and then create a new face from that to fill in the holes. Other places it was just a case of merging overlapping vertices:
5. Numbering
Each tile had to have a unique number so that I could identify which ones were neighbours (and so work out when players could move to adjacent tiles). This meant texturing each with a unique texture to represent its number, that I could then parse in my program
6. Spherify
Finally, I could load all the vertices into a helper program and spherify them. This was easy, as being a 1x1 icosahedron with an origin at 0,0,0 to begin with, each vertex was a vector from the origin. All I had to do was create a vector object using the vertex x,y,z coordinates, normalise it, and the normalised x,y,z of the vector was the new spherified vertex!
I also added some mocked up UI on this screenshot. Well all of that took more like 3 weeks, but I got it done before Christmas holidays, so I'm happy :D
TexturesI quickly made up some textures to represent different terrain types. They are actually photoshopped from a real image of Mars. Satellite images of deserts on Earth, which I had originally intended to use, all have some sort of copyright protection or are low resolution
However, all the images from Mars Express Orbiter and a couple of other Martian satellites are free to use in commercial applications (with attribution).
I got mine from a slideshow of highlights on the Nasa site in the end, but there are a few other sites that also host either the entire mission data (including all those high-res images of Mars) or host other selections
I'm currently working on finding some artists to do stuff for the UI and icons, for concept art, textures and various other things that I can't do myself
Dividing tilesI'm currently working on the relationships between the tiles, getting tiles to highlight when selected or change colour depending on ownership. Once that is done, I can get onto the meaty gameplay stuff that is going to really make the game fun to play
TL:DRLocal multiplayer board game, set on a sphere, scifi theme, for the Ouya. Let me know what you think! I'd love to get some feedback or criticisms