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[Walt Destler]

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Cosmoteer (formerly known as StarWright) is a strategy & simulation game in which you design and command the starship of your dreams, battling other starships to earn bounties and using that money to expand your own ship. There is also a "Creative Mode" in which you can design any ship you want without financial restriction.



You design your starship by placing individual rooms, weapons, and corridors on a grid. Ship flight and combat are both physically simulated, and so you must think about where to place your thrusters and weapons. Damage is recorded for each individual room, and heavily-damaged ships will eventually break apart into smaller pieces.

Your ship's crew, numbering anywhere from a few to more than a thousand intrepid souls, are the lifeblood of your ship and its most important resource. They pilot the ship, operate its weapons, and carry ammunition and plasma batteries from system to system. Since most systems and weapons require either plasma batteries or ammunition to function, you must think carefully about where you place the systems relative to each other and how you lay out the corridors so that crew can travel throughout your ship as efficiently as possible.

Designing starships is extremely flexible. Case in point: The above logo was created in-game using the ship designer. Cosmoteer goes much deeper than any other "spaceship building" game I've seen by providing a true "inside the starship" simulation with crew, rooms, doors, power, ammo, etc... The simulation is both honest (i.e., when you see a crewperson carrying ammo, that's because a gun really does need that ammo to shoot) and emergent. Damage from ship-vs-ship combat is tracked per-room, meaning that individual rooms can be destroyed, and ships can even break into multiple independent pieces.



All these simulation elements are fun to watch, but they also serve the goal of making ship designs *matter*. It matters where you put that cannon relative to the ammo supply because the faster that ammo can be carried from the ammo supply to the cannon, the faster the cannon can shoot. It matters where you place your thrusters because that will realistically effect the agility and speed of your ship. It matters where you put armor because armor is heavy but blocks enemy weapons from penetrating deep into your ship.

I've been keeping a development blog in which I talk a lot about the design and programming of the game. But not many people read it, so I figured I'd start cross-posting my progress here in this forum.

Please feel free to download the game. I welcome all of your feedback!

[Tom Felshmoon]

Wow, it looks like my favorite game - Battleships Forever

[Panurge]

Playing FTL I remember thinking that this is what I would like to see next - a game which hands you complete control of your starship's design. I'll be following this with interest.

[Evan.Greenwood]

Is "Starwright" a pun on Will Wright? (the creator of Sim City)

If so then I approve heartily of the name!

This game looks like it has a ton of potential. I like good simulations where decisions matter and I love starships.

[jO]

Agree with Panurge, I'm getting a nice and warm FTL vibe from this.
Will follow :-)

[Walt Destler]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone! FTL is definitely a source of inspiration, though Starwright is a significantly different game underneath the surface. Aside from having fully-customizable starships and not being a roguelike(like), starships are also far larger (the largest I've designed has 500 crew) because I really want to hit that feeling of incredibly epic starship combat. You also have full RTS-style control over where your starships move and what they attack. Because of this, micromanagement of crew is out of the question (I've tried it, it's really tedious and distracting), so the moment-to-moment gameplay is more about maneuvering your ship(s), selecting targets, choosing special weapons to fire, and managing the simulation at a macro level (i.e., adjusting priorities and turning on/off systems) than it is about controlling individual crew members.

Is "Starwright" a pun on Will Wright? (the creator of Sim City)

The name Starwright is a play on several things, most basically the word "wright" which means "a maker or builder". For example, a "shipwright" is someone to builds naval ships. So a "starshipwright" would presumably be someone who builds starships, but that's too wordy for a game's title, so I shortened it to Starwright.

Starwright is also a pun on the names of two of my personal heroes and favorite makers: Will Wright (of course), and Frank Lloyd Wright, arguably the most famous American architect. When I was a kid I wanted to be an architect, and I spent many hours designing houses and space ships on graph paper. Those old space ships are a big inspiration for me right now as I work on this game.

My issue with the name "Starwright" is that I'm worried it's not descriptive enough (or too subtle) to get people really excited about the game.

Wow, it looks like my favorite game - Battleships Forever

I haven't actually played Battleships Forever, but always thought it looked awesome. How much starship customization is there in that game, and if it has customizable starships, does the design matter, or is it just aesthetic?

[Impmaster]

Looks awesome.

[Cloudiest Nights]

I had an idea for a game like this, but I don't have the programming knowledge or skill to do so. Thanks for making my idea a reality! I'll be watching this one! 

[eigenbom]

I do like an honest simulation. This looks like it could be really great!

[poe]

This looks fantastic!

[Walt Destler]

This update is cross-posted from my blog: http://blog.waltdestler.com/2013/06/starwright-power.html
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Over the past couple of weeks I implemented one of the last remaining starship simulation mechanics that I had planned to create. This mechanic has to do with providing power to all the various ship systems.

The power mechanic works very similarly to the existing ammo mechanic. As I blogged about earlier (http://goo.gl/jO8rh), the purpose of the ammo mechanic is to require the player to carefully balance weapons (which consume ammo) with ammo supplies. The closer the ammo supply is to a weapon, the faster the ammo can be delivered, and the faster the weapon can shoot, so the player has to think carefully about where they place weapons and ammo supplies relative to each other. While I've found that this mechanic is successful in giving greater depth to the design of small, localized areas of ships, it adds little depth to the overall design of larger ships since ammo rarely needs to be transported more than short distances.

The power mechanic is intended to complement the ammo mechanic by providing greater depth to the overall design of larger ships. Power works similarly to ammo in that many ship systems (currently thrusters, ammo supplies, and the cockpit) require power to operate. And just like ammo, power "batteries" (for lack of a better word) must be hand-delivered by the ship's crew to the systems that need power. But power is different from ammo in the distance that batteries travel, the rate at which batteries are consumed, and the cost of creating batteries. Ammo is consumed very quickly during combat, but ammo typically travels only short distances, since ammo supplies are cheap enough that any well-designed ship will have one for every few weapons. Producing batteries, on the other hand, is extremely expensive due to the very high dollar cost of the "reactor core", a new ship part that produces batteries. The reactor core is so expensive that most any medium-size ship will only have one. Thankfully, power-consuming systems need fresh batteries fairly infrequently, so the potentially longer distances between the power core and power-consuming systems is not as big a deal as it would be for ammo. However, the distance that power has to travel is still a major consideration when designing a ship, so choosing a relatively central and protected location for the reactor core and keeping traffic congestion (http://goo.gl/PuALZ) low is very important.

Here's a screenshot showing a power core and glowing batteries being carried to some nearby systems:



As I mentioned above, the ammo supply now requires power to operate. You can see the new redesigned ammo supply and thruster artwork in the above screenshot, which clearly shows how many batteries the thrusters and ammo supplies have remaining. Since producing ammo now requires power, power is now the most important resource on any ship. Without it all your systems will eventually become non-functional.

Reactor cores are very expensive, but they can produce an unlimited amount of power. Sometimes when designing a ship, you may find it beneficial to have a closer source of batteries, but you don't want the huge added expensive of another reactor core. The compromise solution is a "battery storage" which can be seen in this screenshot:



A battery storage room does not itself produce batteries, but it can store up to 15 batteries in case of an urgent spike in local demand for power. When all 15 batteries are used up, then any additional batteries must come directly from the reactor core, or the battery storage must be re-filled from the reactor.

If you think it's weird that power must be carried by hand instead of over wires, then I admit you're right. This is a design decision where I have deliberately compromised realism for the sake of deeper ship design and a more transparent simulation. The ship design is deeper because batteries make large-scale ship design decisions and corridor layouts more meaningful. And the simulation is more transparent and understandable because, rather than having some abstracted representation or numbers for power levels, you can actually see how power travels throughout the ship as it is being carried around by the crew.

[Ankmannen]

I absolutely love this concept and really hope this makes it into the market! I'll be following this thread closely.

[C.D Buckmaster]

I'm interested in seeing what kind of damage system this game has, such as the different ways you could cripple a ship attacking specific areas.

I'm definitely following this.

[ColePowered]

Very cool the DIY ship design type space sim was also on my 'ideas to possibly develop' list too. Looks like you're doing an awesome job though, I can't wait to see how this develops!

[dhontecillas]

It looks pretty cool, but if you want to stay away from comparisons with FTL, you should start looking for your own visual style. Or are you going to rework the art once the game mechanics are finished ?

[Walt Destler]

I'm interested in seeing what kind of damage system this game has, such as the different ways you could cripple a ship attacking specific areas.

Sure, here's a brief rundown of how damage currently works; let me know what you think! ...

Damage is tracked "per room" (or "per tile" in the case of corridors and armor). If you tell a ship to attack another ship, then all the weapons will pick their own individual targets (rooms or tiles) to shoot at. It's also possible (and usually preferable) to tell your ship to focus-fire on a specific room/tile of an enemy ship.

Rooms actually have two different sets of hit points. One is "operational" HP, and the other is "structural" HP. When a room runs out of operational HP, it can no longer function, but it still exists in the sense that it's still helping hold the ship together in one piece. Once a room runs out of structural HP, it is completely destroyed. By completing destroying rooms, it is possible to literally chop enemy ships into multiple pieces, each of which is then essentially it's own (likely crippled) ship.

Additionally, some weapons have a high "penetration" ability, meaning that they can pierce deep inside enemy ships, killing crew and destroying vital internal systems such as ammo supplies, control rooms, and reactor cores. To defend against penetration, some weapons and armor tiles have a very high resistance to penetration. So if you're concerned about penetration weapons destroying your internal systems, you should consider protecting those systems with armor tiles.

There are various different rooms that you might want to target, depending on the situation. Here's a bunch of different choices you might make just off the top of my head, but there are many more, all emerging from the situation at hand and the design of your ship and the enemy ship.

• An obvious choice would be to target the enemy weapons. Weapons are always on the exterior of a ship and thus easily targetable.
• Another choice might be to target the ammo supplies, depending on whether your ship is outfitted with penetrating weapons and on how far from the exterior they are (when you design your ship, there's a tradeoff between the ammo supplies' distance to the weapons and its vulnerability). If you destroy an ammo supply then you can potentially disrupt or disable a whole group of enemy weapons.
• You might notice that most of an enemy ship's weapons are on one side, so you target its engines to reduce its maneuverability and then fly around behind it for the kill.
• You could concentrate on destroying one of its vital systems, such as the control room (without which it can't be given orders to move, attack, or focus-fire) or the reactor core (without which the ship will eventually run out of power and all other systems will shut down). But those systems are usually well-protected deep inside the ship, so they will take considerable effort to destroy.
• You might even notice some narrow points in the ship's shape which, if you destroy, will sever the ship in two, potentially crippling the severed pieces.
• You might notice that a single corridor is being used to transport a lot of ammo and power throughout the enemy ship, so you target that corridor, potentially cutting off systems from ammo and power.
• You have two small ships facing off against one larger enemy ship. It's brimming with weapons, but you see that it doesn't have enough crew to simultaneously operate all of them. So you flank the enemy ship, forcing it to spread its crew too thin and reducing the effectiveness of its weapons.

It looks pretty cool, but if you want to stay away from comparisons with FTL, you should start looking for your own visual style. Or are you going to rework the art once the game mechanics are finished ?

The existing artwork is definitely temporary. I'm obviously no great artist, and I certainly plan on finding a "real" artist to make the game gorgeous before a commercial release. I might try improving the art at a later time, but for now it's adequate for proving out the mechanics.

That being said, I think that the comparisons to FTL are ultimately unavoidable given the 2D "floor plan" camera perspective of the game and deep simulation mechanics. I don't think that comparisons to a great game like FTL are a bad thing though, as long as people don't see the game as a clone. If people describe the game as "it's like FTL but way bigger and you can build your own ships!" then I'm pretty okay with that. ;-)

[Walt Destler]

Hey all!

It's been a while since I last posted about Starwright. I haven't had time to get much work done on it, but I *have* just put together a build of the game that shows off ship design and combat. I hope you enjoy it!

Download it here: http://starwright.waltdestler.com/

Please send me all your feedback and bug reports! :-)

You can show off your ship designs by posting your .ship.png files to this thread. If you drag the .ship.png file into the game, then you can actually play with it.

Thanks!

[Toughbrook]

A ship,thing.

[Atrus]

Hey man got an error:

Code:

SharpDX.SharpDXException: HRESULT: [0x88760868], Module: [SharpDX.Direct3D9], ApiCode: [D3DERR_DEVICELOST/DeviceLost], Message: Unknown

   at SharpDX.Result.CheckError()

   at SharpDX.Direct3D9.Device.Present(IntPtr sourceRectRef, IntPtr destRectRef, IntPtr hDestWindowOverride, IntPtr dirtyRegionRef)

   at Halfling.Windows.D3DWindow.<>c__DisplayClass3.<ApplicationMain>b__2()

   at SharpDX.Windows.RenderLoop.ProxyNativeWindow.Run(RenderCallback renderCallback)

   at Halfling.Windows.D3DWindow.ApplicationMain(String[] args, IEnumerable`1 iterator)

   at Halfling.Application.Bases.GenericApp.ApplicationMain(String[] args)

   at Starwright.StarwrightApp.Main(String[] args)

[vortex]

I like the name Starwright in that it's your name. I see so many problems with naming-- and many folks don't realize that making up a word is the best path to branding/copyright. However; Starwright...yeah-- it doesn't evoke the game. Starcraftcrafter. Hmm.... I don't know-- put a big delta/change triangle over that one-- maybe...I don't know.