next »

[vivaladav]

@vivaladav: I'm developing in Unity, so I see no reason why a Linux version isn't a distinct possibility! I'm one of those strange people that has never even played around with Linux, though, so I can't say it's super high on my list of priorities :|

Yeah as a developer I know it's not easy to support other platforms, especially when you are a solo developer and the TODO list is endless... and also that Linux is still a minor platform in terms of gaming, so no worries, I was just wondering.

Keep up the good work and good luck with the development!

[logophil]

Great to see another ambitious solodev space game, and look forward to seeing some gameplay in the not too distant future!

@vivaladav: I'm developing in Unity, so I see no reason why a Linux version isn't a distinct possibility! I'm one of those strange people that has never even played around with Linux, though, so I can't say it's super high on my list of priorities :|

My personal experience is its definitely worthwhile supporting Linux if you're using Unity, as it does add to the player base and there are very unlikely to be Linux-specific issues requiring additional support (unlike Mac where there are all kinds of additional complications). You'd just need to setup a Linux system for testing I guess (just for peace of mind if nothing else!), but that's easy to do especially if you have a spare older computer lying around.

[leeharris]

@vivaladav: Thanks for the encouraging comments! I notice you list your own developing game as an RTS/4X too, which I've been doing similarly since the beginning, but I'm wondering if I did that more to appeal to both sets of gamers or something and will have to choose which side of the fence I'm going to land on at some point


@logophil: Since I'm starting to look into getting started on Steam myself, I have to say that your own page for Relic Space is looking very well thought out, kudos on that, looks like you're ticking all the right boxes! Maybe this isn't the right place to ask but I was just wondering if your experience with 'the business side of things' pre-EA has been positive thus far ?


-----


Hi again,

This update marks a real shift from focusing on core underlying technical hurdles that needed to be overcome in order to reach this point, as well as a much needed aesthetic overhaul for the UI, ship models and audio design. Key features introduced include the surface scanning mechanic and embark-able ground units which need to be deployed via support drop ships.

The visual overhaul

First off, I finally got around to removing those ugly un-textured (!) ship models I had been using as placeholders since the beginning of the project, replacing them shinier versions representing the Support Carrier class, which... err.. carries support units, and the Heavy Transporter class, which has a lot of inventory/cargo space to make use of, but not much in the way of offensive capacity. I've upgraded the engine nozzle effects to make use of some nicer HDR particle/trail FX and even added in sound effects for the engine 'idling', speed changes and some clever use of 'cinematic' sound FX to enhance the system loading/warp-in sequence.

One of the more time-consuming processes of the past month has been a rethinking of the entity user interface. I had originally tried to minimise screen space use to a rather extreme amount, but I began to realise that this wasn't a particularly smart approach to a strategy game. Information needs to be clearer and easy to get to, and tiny little numbers in the corner of the screen felt like a bad design choice. Lesson hopefully learnt.

Coupled with the new ship model imagery, I could now build a modular UI that allowed entity modules to be visually shown where they were located, and to introduce a sleeker futuristic design that kept things simple and adhered a little closer to the games that inspired it (i.e. Homeworld, let's be honest).

Gone is the strict character ability focus -- I've shifted the attention to installing components in each of the 'areas' (modules) aboard the ship/unit, with each component performing a specific role, such as the Ion Drive allowing orbital movement, the Sensor Array providing access to surface scans on the Command Deck, and the Docking Control facility allowing for a certain number of ships to be docked and maintained in the Docking Bay module. Components can have crew members assigned to them, with the number of crew assigned directly impacting the efficiency with which that skill/ability is performed. Furthermore, each component can register 'stats' with the parent ship/unit, such as Ion Acceleration or Scanning Range, with those registered stats modifiable by other components, leading to compound efficiency boosts through careful consideration of components chosen and crew allocated. Components take up valuable space and have power requirements, so you'll need to plan your loadout as the fleet evolves over time to make the most of these limitations (these volume and power requirements are themselves a stat which can be modified too!)

Scan for life signs, Harry

I had been delaying this one a bit because it meant I had to learn how to project images on to the surface of a sphere and for a long time I wasn't sure about the best way to proceed. Alas, this is now sorted, and the green glowing circle you can see in the image above is indicative of the type of surface scans you'll be able to perform on the planets you come across.

In this case, the Sensor Array on the Command Deck provides the functionality to scan for biological organisms on the ground below. This is a continual scan, internally performed as 'raycasts' in a cone downwards with a search radius equal to that displayed by the ring itself. Unlike traditional RTS where things that move close to your units are automatically discovered, the idea here is that you have to direct your scans to discover things, with the scan dimensions adjustable depending on your requirements. Components can also upgrade the scan rate and/or search radius; and having multiple ships scanning the same area of ground actually does make a difference -- you will increase your chances of pinging against an object!

Beyond organic search scans, there will also be technology-based scans and resource scans, with differing scan types requiring different unit-based components to perform.

Early prototype before I learnt how to apply decals in URP!

Do you want to live forever ??

Up until now I had been simply pressing a key to place a ground unit on a planet surface, which worked great for debugging purposes, but obviously didn't represent the intended goals: a fleet that has to carry everything that they need from system to system. So as part of the UI revamp, I've also added 'slots' for ground units to occupy on board ships, and further slots for what I'm describing as 'support ships'.

Ground units (and support ships) take up valuable space on your ships, with the Support Carrier principally designed with this prerequisite in mind. The Docking Bay module allows units to be stored, with the Docking Control component providing 4 such spaces, as well as the means to repair and rearm vehicles upon their return. It also allows 2 support ships to be moored as well, which is handy since one of the support vehicles is a Dropship.

The drop ship does what the name suggests: it allows ground units to be deployed to a planet surface (and to bring them back up again, but I guess that could be considered optional depending on your play style..). The docking bay maintains an internal scheduling system that allocates support ships as they are requested (the player doesn't directly control support units), so if you only have 1 drop ship and 4 ground units docked, you'll need to wait for each unit to be carried down to the surface and return empty, get refueled and prepared for the next drop mission before taking down the next one.

Other support ships that will be introduced will be the Shuttle (for moving passengers and Leader characters from ship to ship), the Cargo Freighter (for moving cargo between ships in the fleet), the Repair Drone (which repairs external damage) and probably some kind of Scanning Drone which can do remote scanning sweeps.

Needless to say I'm pretty happy with how things are shaping up!

Always happy to hear any comments you may have (and suggestions for improvement)!

Thanks for dropping in

[Ramos]

Holy hell! I just noticed your progress since the first post, it is beautiful, truly Grade AA quality!


I haven't got the chance to read all your notes but I did saw all screenshots/gifs and I must ask will there be real-time ship combat? I would love to see that

[vivaladav]

@vivaladav: Thanks for the encouraging comments! I notice you list your own developing game as an RTS/4X too, which I've been doing similarly since the beginning, but I'm wondering if I did that more to appeal to both sets of gamers or something and will have to choose which side of the fence I'm going to land on at some point

That's probably something that only you can clarify, but I can tell you that from what I have seen so far I would have not used the tag RTS for your game. The vibe I got was more 4x, grand strategy and tactical.

I watched your latest video and I saw that you have introduced ground units that can land a planet. Are they going to combat with enemy units and are you going to control them individually? If so you probably have a (classic) RTS game as well, even if in that case you are risking to aim for a scope that could be out of the league of a solo dev.

Anyway, I am sure you know what's best for your game and you will decide what to focus on to make it a great game.

[Alain]

Adding textures make your ships so much more vivid! I thought things looked nice before, but this takes it to another level. Great job here and also on the scanning mechanic. I'm looking forward to watching the full devlog as soon as I can

[leeharris]

@ramos: Thanks, I've definitely taken more than a few shortcuts, though, so don't look too closely :d There will certainly be fleet warfare in Homeworld-esque fashion: I'm still evolving the movement systems at present, but I want to do some early prototyping of targeting and attacking orbital targets soon, ideally with turrets that have limited arcs and such, but weapon fire is still going to be deterministic rather than physics based.

@vivaladav: Yeah, so the intention is to try something that strays a little way from the classic ground RTS.. I want to have ground units that 'represent' a squad or group, so you give orders to the 'command unit' of that group, which is the 3D model representation you can see from orbit, and the rest of the squad moves/act based on what the commander is doing-- you don't directly interact with them at all. I guess it's a bit like Total War or something. That might still qualify as a big job for a solo dev, I don't doubt. But you can see how I'm thinking this makes it more of an RTS than a 4X, even if you can move around the whole solar system and jump to others.

@Alain: Your comments and insight are always appreciated, sir

[leeharris]

Hi again,

This update chiefly focuses on the development of the world-building tools that will allow planets to leverage the ease of procedural settings coupled with hand-crafting 'level design' that allows planets in FE to still have a unique flavour and possibilities for scripted behaviour. A bunch of new ship designs and ground units have been included too, as well as better visual feedback for movement throughout the solar system (principally in the form of interstellar dust). All of this is leading towards gathering resources from the planet surface, and using these resources to build base installations and units, and more complex materials/components from there, which is really at the centre of the eventual gameplay loop.

Building worlds with the bundled planet editor tool

The intention has always been to package the world and solar system tools with the finished game, but they're the very same tools that we will use to craft the included scenarios and solar systems that are part of the overarching story structure (beginning with the fleet exodus from Earth), so it makes a lot of sense to get these tools working fairly well early on. Not to mention we had reached the point where being able to gather resources and such from the planet surface was quickly becoming an important next step in moving things forward.

The new planet editor allows the user to customise settings specific to the planet type (EarthLike and Rocky, so far-- Gaseous to be added, as well as more specific variants like Lava and Ocean, etc), adjust the planet radius, turn on and off the ocean, atmosphere and planetary rings, then tweak some of the colour palette multipliers, before moving on from the procedural framework and entering the hand-crafting 'feature placement' mode.

Placing features involves choosing from the slide-in palette of surface pieces (which will hopefully grow rapidly) that can be positioned and rotated whilst aligned to the surface grid itself, with pieces able to overlap and be finely adjusted for more creative results (like mountains forming volcanic islands when placed out to sea). This ultimately turns the planet editor into an in-game 'level editor' of sorts, with the intention being that users can sculpt a particular theme or tailored environment using the features on offer, to tell a story or just force ground units to land at specific points on the surface ready for an ambush.

A later revision of this tool will include scripting placement, which will allow for scripted events to occur when certain areas of the planet are discovered, or when units move into a defined collision region. Hooks into these scripting objects will be available in the node-based scenario editor.

Filling out the fleet roles

We've added a number of new ships to the roster of possibilities, including the Strike Carrier (shown above), which carries a squadron of small strike/recon/fighter/bomber craft which can be dispatched towards other planets but have limited fuel reserves and need to meet up with the carrier again before too long to refuel. This capital vessel joins the Heavy Transporter (big cargo hold) and the Support Carrier (has a docking bay for dropships which ferry ground units to and from the surface) seen earlier.

On top of these somewhat role-based capitals, we've also added the first of the Frigate and Cruiser variants, which serve as more versatile options, having the possibility to perform a multitude of roles albeit in a less capable fashion than the capitals built with that goal in mind. Frigates are on the smaller end of the spectrum, with much more limited carrying capacity, whilst cruisers were built for more extended tours of duty and are therefore capable of resupplying themselves for a greater duration than the frigate class ships.

As well as extending the fleet options, this update also sees the inclusion of a few ground models: the Spider tank, which is a fairly slow moving unit that can traverse pretty much any ground terrain without complaint, and makes up for its slow speed with a rotate-able turret mounting (though actually shooting at stuff is yet to be implemented!)

Another starting vehicle is that of the Quad: a nifty, cheap to build vehicle ideally suited for reconnaissance and exploring worlds, but doesn't possess any means to defend itself if it were to come across any trouble.

Finally, we've also started to flesh out the 'Prefab modules', which are deployable ground base installations that can be dispatched to the surface to kickstart a ground base operation, before being picked back up (via dropship) once the expedition needs to evacuate again. This provides a way to allow such buildings to be upgraded and provide progression in a game where you'll be exploring many worlds along your journey, often building ground bases only to have to abandon or salvage them afterwards. The prefab base modules take up slots aboard the fleet much akin to the ground units/fighter craft, so there's always going to be the choice of how to make the most of the limited space you have available.

Filling the interstellar void

This won't show up particularly well in photos (check out the YouTube channel for plenty of in-game coverage) but we've also added 'interstellar dust' throughout the solar systems. The idea was to better show the movement and sense of speed when ships are travelling between worlds. A lot of space games achieve this effect in one of two ways: adding a particle effect around your ship, with the effect being influenced by the speed of the ship, and simply following it around everywhere, activating the effect when required.

The other option is to simply disperse particles throughout a large medium (i.e. the entire game area) and cull the particles that are too far away from the player ship, effectively only rendering those that are a fixed radius away from your location.

In FE, however, the player isn't tied to one specific player ship. The camera can focus on anything: planets, ships, units, it's all fair game for being a camera rotation target. So the first option is out. With such a free-roaming camera rig, it becomes a lot more difficult to work out which particles should be active at any one time. This makes the second option pretty fiddly. I've ended up with a system that works out which group of dust needs to be active depending on the camera targets location, with a network of dust patches turning on and off as required, and stretching towards the camera view as it moves with greater speed when locked onto a ship moving at higher velocities. Long story short: it works, and it looks pretty okay!

Passing one year of development

I recently celebrated reaching one year of development time by putting together a video compilation charting the progress from early prototyping to more recent developments, and I invite you to check that out if you've more recently come across the project:


(We also have a Discord community over at https://discord.gg/ZhyKev2R7X if you fancy dropping in on our home base of sorts!)

And the recently uploaded Dev Log #17 essentially recaps the main points from this update in video form:

[logophil]

Wow, I agree with the others, this is starting to look really high quality now! And the fact that you are planning to add ground combat is very impressive too, and I think could be a good selling point. As someone developing a space game myself, I just noticed your UI panels for the ships, showing what seem to be different slots (which is very similar to an earlier idea I had for the UI for my own game!) - I'm curious do these represent equipment slots, or are they things like fighters, or both?

[Alain]

Great update as always. I can't believe that you got to this point within a single year, that's amazing.

[leeharris]

Thanks Alain, I don't even work that hard tbh, so I don't quite know how that happened, my work/life balance is pretty good  (and we might be missing the point of being an indie if we don't have that?)

Depends on which UI panel you're referring to, phil, there's quite a few boxy looking things lurking around The larger ones on the left-hand side above the currently selected entity are the child entities-- the things that the parent unit is currently carrying (grayed out when that child unit is not aboard the parent). At the bottom of the main UI is the 'ability slots' which aren't really doing much so far. Equipment slots are essentially baked into the ship component UI, which is the slide-out panel on the left side of the screen, but the nuances of that are quite specific to the build-up of my entity system. You could certainly do equipment slots with something like the sub-entity layout, though, why not

[Ramos]

@ramos: Thanks, I've definitely taken more than a few shortcuts, though, so don't look too closely :d There will certainly be fleet warfare in Homeworld-esque fashion: I'm still evolving the movement systems at present, but I want to do some early prototyping of targeting and attacking orbital targets soon, ideally with turrets that have limited arcs and such, but weapon fire is still going to be deterministic rather than physics based.

Well then not only I appreciate what you do from a developer perspective but I also see your project as very attractive from my player point of view as well.

A bit of a side topic, do you have a release plan? Do you plan to self-publish and if so, can you give us some hints about what kind of marketing strategy do you plan to make for this amazing project?

[leeharris]

Well then not only I appreciate what you do from a developer perspective but I also see your project as very attractive from my player point of view as well.

A bit of a side topic, do you have a release plan? Do you plan to self-publish and if so, can you give us some hints about what kind of marketing strategy do you plan to make for this amazing project?

I suspect its not super smart to mess with serendipity and discuss marketing strategies somewhere that shows up so high in google search listings  Personally, I'm open to a lot of approaches at the moment, but the next step for me is to put out an 'announcement' style trailer with some seriously cinematic flair and finally launch the Steam page at the same time. But getting that trailer noticed without a having a previous title to bounce off from is obviously the tricky part here. I think the reality is that people tend to respond well to content that looks as professional as possible, and that an indie ultimately has to conform to certain expectations in order to do well. But this is coming from someone who is yet to get there myself, so let's not pretend I know what I'm on about 

[Ramos]

I suspect its not super smart to mess with serendipity and discuss marketing strategies somewhere that shows up so high in google search listings  Personally, I'm open to a lot of approaches at the moment, but the next step for me is to put out an 'announcement' style trailer with some seriously cinematic flair and finally launch the Steam page at the same time. But getting that trailer noticed without a having a previous title to bounce off from is obviously the tricky part here. I think the reality is that people tend to respond well to content that looks as professional as possible, and that an indie ultimately has to conform to certain expectations in order to do well. But this is coming from someone who is yet to get there myself, so let's not pretend I know what I'm on about 

Wise words leeharris, thank you for sharing that!

[leeharris]

Hi

So I finally got to the point where I was happy to 'reveal the game to the world', and here's my first stab at something resembling a decent trailer:

Finally on Steam, too! It almost feels like a real game now  

Oh, also, indie partner of Gamescom 2021. There's a booth somewhere around there if you're bored 

[JobLeonard]

Congratulations!

[Schrompf]

Looks really good!

[leeharris]

Since this thread is pretty much where it all started for the game, I still like to update the story contained within if that's ok with everyone here, and, well, I finally got around to making another trailer =)

I've also partnered with Texas-based Hooded Horse, who publishes games close to the strategy genre, and that certainly feels like a pretty hefty forward step to make. It's possible it won't be a solo venture for much longer-- getting used to being part of a team again after two years of making this thing solo will be quite the transition, but I guess I feel that you need to grow with the game or you risk spreading yourself too thin. And I definitely spend a considerable chunk of time these days running a business on top of the game development itself, so, yeah, cautionary tale time (though you guys probably know this already), don't get into gamedev if you want something resembling a simple life

Thanks,
Lee

[Alain]

That is amazing news, Lee. Congratulations on the partnership with Hooded Horse, they seem to be a great fit for Fragile Existence. Love the new trailer and I am excited to see where you and your team will go with the game!