I'm happy that I now not only have stellar systems grow from a single random seed, but also their population.

Super Flight.

Rocketeering.

I'm working on a robotic race who are supposed to be able to build giant stations in the deep empty space between stellar systems ... also 4 more races to populate my toy universe.

Angband has a black market where items which are usually not for sale in town are offered for astronomical prices.

Diablo II allows to gamble unidentified items, which often just is a loss of money.

Both work well as money sinks for rich players.

I think, decisions like "Skip the +1 armor and save up for the +2, accepting a harder time in combat till the money is made" add to the game, and make it more insteresting. It rewards the player who thinks, which is a good thing IMO.

Very interesting work, keep it up.

Thank you Also thanks for the link, the site was new to me, and it sure will give more inspiration for modelling planets and space bodies.

Asteroid belts will be difficult, due to the large number of small bodies. But bigger asteroid bodies should be possible.

A while ago I had been working on some gaphics for pulsars, black holes and an asteroidal body. So far the more "normal" suns and planetary systems seemed more important, but once the core of the project is done, I'll try to include the more rare space bodies, too.

Nebulae might not appear as entities, but would make great background images for the galactical map and the system explorer. So far I'm a bit stuck with painting/renderiung such nebulae, though, so I have postponed them till later.

These are a few studies of mine, picturing a pulsar, a black hole and a chewing-gum asteroid. (Erm, yes, a black pulsar on black space is hard to see. But if you have upped your screen brightness you might still spot some of the pulsars surface )

50% is common in many games.

If you want to go over the top, provide full price if the item was bought but never used, -30% if the player left the shop and -75% is the player used the item.

My graphics skills improved quite a bit. I was always interested in drawing/painting, but it's been the projects that I have released which required quite strong improvements. Still not comparable with naturally talented people or trained painters, but now good enough for a bigger range of projects.

One project really helped me to improve my skills in object oriented design - but that is so many years past now, that it's not that useful anymore. But still, for a long while it was.

One project also helped me to train my skills as team leader. Not that I am particularly keen on doing that, but I now have better ideas how to work with people.

The question what compels me to continue on my hobby projects is hard and easy at the same time. Currently I only do what deems me fun to do. Fun can be exploring new technologies, new approaches to things, or just enjoying the moment if an ideas comes "alive" and works in such a tiny box called computer. As long as it's fun, I'll spend some amount of my free time on it.

 

The new space station panel shows government type and tech level. At the moment these are fixed values, just to have something to show. I'd like to include these values in the overall simulation algorithm, but I'm a bit clueless how to. I want to ask about the government type first.

If the stellar system generator produces a system, it's known how many inhabitable planets and moons are there, and how many space stations.

From these I can roughly calculate a total population of the system. A race can be randomly chosen, or chosen based on the planet types ... some races might prefer cold planets, others like hot planets, and there might be different needs for atmospheres, too. Different races could have different preferences for government types.

What government types would you suggest to include in the game? And given the above ideas, how would they be chosen for a particular system?

Looks cool Now I want to make a more steampunkish project, too

I've put up an experimental release. It has a number of features which are unreliable, particularly the support for dual star systems can create wacky systems. The reason to put this up was the new space station panel, and it should be good enough for testing that.

I've been trying to write a number of welcome and station flavor messages, so be sure to click several stations to explore them all. Some combinations of welcome messages and station descriptions are .. hilarious or stupid, depending on how you want to see them

- Experimental support for dual star systems. Sometimes it creates very wacky systems.
- New space station general panel with randomized welcome and station flavor messages. Just click a space station in the system explorer view to open it.
- Improved earthlike planet image included.
- Better random number generator used for solar system generation.
- Experimental Mac OS X UI bugfix added.

http://www.funkelwerk.de/applets/solarex-0_19rc

A 12 years indie project? man, I wanna see that

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simutrans
http://www.simutrans.com

I didn't even know that indie games exist when I started that First i jsut wanted to do it as a training project for C++ and OOP, but it soon picked up interest by players, and so it grew bigger and bigger.

7 years were too long though. I should have left earlier, or at least reduced the amount of time that I spend on it. It's not been fun anymore in the end.

What I mean is, the end result, when the deadline is over, I think it would be cool if I could somehow surprise the player. Adding a random name adds to some of it, but I think it needs more. A wild idea could be to actually hide the status of the different states, so you actually don't know how well your game is until it's finished. You also don't know how buggy it is or how well the indie community thinks of you. Hmm.

Usually games grow, they don't pop into existence. The developer should have an idea how buggy it is, also many people talk about their games and get feedback, sometimes even before the game is made while it still is an idea. So one also has a feeling what people think about it.

You can blur the status though. "Some people might like your game", "You already received lots of enthusiastic fan mail" or such give an idea if you are doing good or not, while still giving room to inpretation.

I like the overall idea of the game development game, though

I want the "mute stupid people around me" power up.

Indeed! I had once made sketches of sphere-based beings, which would have worked well with my rendering system, but I had given up since I didn't seem to be able to make them look interesting. And now comes this. Amazing and very impressive

I once had a really big project going. I lead it for about 7 years. The first three years I worked alone, then I was able to gather help. Team size changed between 2 and 5 people or maybe 7 once for a short time (most of them inactive ...) Team members joined and left, seldom that people stayed for more than 2 or 3 years. Well working teams were mostly small, it is hard to manage more than 3 teammates. Better have two people who really help, than 7 who keep you busy with mails, but don't get things done.

After 7 years I felt the need to leave, and one of the former team member took over the lead. The project still lives, reaching year 12 of age. It was playable about 8 or 9 of those years, but continued to grow in features all the time.

What I want to say, if some team members leave, you don't need to call it quits. Try to manage with a changing team. I know it is a lot of effort to teach new  members how everything works, and it takes a while till they can become productive. But it's how bigger projects work, I think.

Having said that, I've concluded that such projects are killers and I do not want to do it again. After my leave I took a 2 year break from game development. Later I wanted to get into game development again, but I'm going solo for the time being, and with much smaller projects. Looks more sane to me, at least for hobby/noncommercial projects.

I actually felt happy when I coded my new space station UI, despite it's simplicity. Quite often programming just stresses me these days ... would be fine to have more moments of happy programming again (I liked programming very much in the past).

To be brutally honest about all this, I really don't think I'm educated/experienced enough in either architecture or games to be writing this blog [...]

There are much less knowledgeable people wrinting about topics. Your blog is a interesting read - I don't care if you finished a game yet or not. You observer things, you think about your observations and you share your thoughts. That is alright, and it's on the reader to decide if this is useful for them or not.

Somehow this reminds me of the old "Sundog - Frozen Legacy". Which are good memories

Now I need some free time to try this out

At the moment they are rendered beforehand, and I have only a few fixed bitmaps on the server. So each of the earthlike planets will look like the others, although with different parameter sets each could be rendered unique.

The planet data will be calculated newly for each system, so all planets should be fairly unique, although they share the images. I wanted to keep the presentation simple, but dived more deeply into the generation algorithm for the systems, and the planetary resources.

The planets are rendered separately and just loaded as bitmaps in the game. I try to keep it simple, so that I actually have a chance to finish a game once again