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[Stuart Morgan]

Galaxial is the working title of a 2D space strategy game that I am currently developing. It features a sandbox mode allowing the player to explore, colonise and conquer star systems in a vast randomly generated galaxy.

Some of the features include:

• Thousands of ships and hundreds of star systems with each containing numerous planets in a single game.
  
• Protect your empire from enemy factions and raiding pirates.
• Take manual control of any ship you own.
• Explore the galaxy and discover valuable planetary systems and asteroid resources.
• Mine resources from asteroids to build planetary facilities and new ships.
• Colonise new planets with each type of world having a unique strategic bonus.
• 12 unique classes of spaceship (frigate, destroyer, cruiser, battleship etc...)
• Hundreds of different ship designs.
• Modules fitted to ships that enhance their abilities and give them specific roles.
• Hundreds of individual ship modules to specialise each ship.
• Assign your ships to groups so that they can fly in formation and work together to deal with threats.
• Research new technology to enable new ship designs and modules.
• Customisable ship, engine trail and turret colours to make your ships look unique.

Videos:

• 
  
  
• 
  
  
• Projectile Weapons

Links:

• Development Blog
• Galaxial page on IndieDB

Looking forward to reading any feedback you might have!

[LOUD]

Hi Stuart, i have to say it : Very Good Work.

In my opinion, it's really a nice start for your game.
The clean UI make it's simple.
The battle gives me the impression of seeing an emerging fractal. Beautiful.
The peaceful view gives a little feeling of control on the battle due to the top view.
And the gameplay sound really interesting, i want to try it soon.

I don't know at what stage of the project you are but keep going like that.
If you need some help on graphics, for advices or maybe collaborative work let me a PM.

Obviously, all is not perfect :
- i don't like the asteroids design
- it can be confuse sometimes on some battles with a big amount of spaceships
and probably other stuff but i need a bigger analysis of the game

Meanwhile, i'm going to try the game Solar because i never heard talking about this.

[cragwind]

Looks great!

Reminds me of Homeworld, but I think 2D can make for a bit more usable RTS.

As far as the visuals, I like the explosions. The asteroids are a bit flat. I often see 3D rotating/textured asteroids, which look good, but I'm not sure if that would fit your visual style here. I didn't realize the planet was a planet until I read a description elsewhere; my first thought was a force field or selector around a station. At this stage, you probably don't need to worry too much about graphics, although a good looking space game can attract a lot of attention -- just look at Infinity.

You mention the hundreds of ships/types/possibilities/etc. It'll be a challenge to balance it all, avoiding a certain 'best' combinations and making sure all these possibilities represent meaningful choices. If you're aiming for PC only, I suspect you're going for a more hardcore audience that might put up with more complexity if it means greater depth. Even so, make sure you cut out any choices that aren't pulling their weight.

As far as the UI, I generally don't like popups in any kind of UI, and I wonder if there's a way to put the popup I saw on the edge of the screen or somewhere out of the way. I didn't look too closely, but there appeared to be a lot of options in it, and I wonder if that could be simplified as well. It would be better to cut out the need for UI elements in the first place than to design the UI around underused options. The styling of the controls is clean.

Hope to see more!

[Xyvir]

I second that. If you can avoid pop-up dialogue I suggest doing so. It looks pretty cool so far though. During the video it was a little hard for me to distinguish between friend and foe outside of what lasers they were shooting, but it was easy to see in the minimap. Consider using more polarizing colors for the main ship graphics, like you do in the minimap, to better visually identify friends and foes.

[_discovery]

Looks really cool. There are some ships that have a bit of an interesting shape when glanced at ( the kind of shape parents warn their children about ) but other than that it looks cool.

I also think the game play sounds interesting, looking forward to trying it out.

[Dragonmaw]

Moved to Devlogs, as this is an unfinished game that does not have a public beta/demo.

Looks sweet though.

[mihai]

I must say I was dreaming to such a game with swarms of ships in space, it looks impressive. Maybe there should be multiple speeds for combat, as I personally would like to slow down, give orders and them watch them battle at blazing speeds

[tcstyle]

This looks great but also somehow confusing to play. How to distinguish the different factions?

[mihai]

This looks great but also somehow confusing to play. How to distinguish the different factions?

I think they must go for some really hard visual differences, obtain shape and color contrasts between the factions, even if it is a bit against their current art direction.

[wuhu]

Wow this game looks very polished already.
The video left me amazed 

[Stuart Morgan]

This looks great but also somehow confusing to play. How to distinguish the different factions?

I think they must go for some really hard visual differences, obtain shape and color contrasts between the factions, even if it is a bit against their current art direction.

Consider using more polarizing colors for the main ship graphics, like you do in the minimap, to better visually identify friends and foes.

I would like to keep the ability for the player to customise the colour style of their own ships so instead the ships have lights on the turrets that are coloured depending on the relation between the player and other factions (green for player owned, blue for neutral and red for enemy) I will make these much more visible as I agree its hard to distinguish the factions in the first video, especially when zoomed out.

Heres a short video to show the visibility of the lights increased, I will have an option to disable the pulsing effect as some people may not like it.

Maybe there should be multiple speeds for combat, as I personally would like to slow down, give orders and them watch them battle at blazing speeds

There will be a 'tactical pause' feature so you can assign new commands or orders to ships and move the camera about freely around the galaxy to view what else is going on while the game is still paused.

[tcstyle]

With this red/green contrast it's way better to distinguish.

[mihai]

Indeed now they are more visible. As long as the colors stay as close to complementary as possible, there is no confusion. How about energy shields? Will you have that in your game? Those could also contribute to color identifying when hit.

[Stuart Morgan]

Indeed now they are more visible. As long as the colors stay as close to complementary as possible, there is no confusion. How about energy shields? Will you have that in your game? Those could also contribute to color identifying when hit.

Yes energy shields are already implemented in the game but are quite hard to see from the video and screenshots I posted. They show up as a blue glow around the outline of the ship when the shields take any damage. I will tweak them slightly so they are more visible.

[mihai]

That is nice. If you consider shields to be spheres around ships, then you could simulate their "density" by applying a gradient from color at the edge to transparent in the middle of the ship.

[Stuart Morgan]

The past week I've mainly been working on the parallel (multi-core) code ensuring its all stable, tracking down any race conditions and seeing how it all performs with lots of battles going on.

Below is some screenshots for the stress test I did to help me decide what to set the maximum number of ships per game to.

The galaxy I generated had 100 star systems, 200 planets and at each planet there is a 36 vs 36 ship battle taking place at exactly the same time. So in total there are 14,400 ships being simulated in full detail. The chances of there being so many battles taking place at once in a real game is extremely small. The much larger "total objects" stat in the screenshots includes asteroids, wreckage as well as the ships.

My development computer has:
AMD Phenom X4 9950 (4 cores)
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260
2GB Ram

Overall I'm fairly pleased with the performance so far as I havnt yet profiled or optimised most of the code. However the galaxy view in the second screenshot still needs work as the stars in the background are not rendered very efficiently.

Screenshots at various stages of the test as more ships get destroyed... (Click images for fullsize)

[Stuart Morgan]

I would be interested to know what people thought about "Galaxial" as the game name.

It was originally just going to be the project name for during development but now I'm thinking of keeping it as I'm having trouble coming up with a better name that I like or isnt similar to something else.

The only similarity I can think of that could cause confusion is the 1979 arcade game Galaxian although it was some time ago...

[kz012]

I think the name works just fine. 

[tcstyle]

The name is totally fine.
Your progress with the game so far looks really promising.

[Craig Stern]

Ooh; this looks awfully promising. I'm looking forward to seeing a greater variety of ships and weapon types. I take it you're going to have defenseless harvester ships that go out and mine the asteroids, yes?