next »

[synapse]

Updated 10/20

Lucre

This is the first project for my recently-started indie game effort Synapse Games.
http://www.synapse-games.com

It's a business simulation in space.  Gameplay is centered around building production facilities, setting up trade routes for their required products, and tweaking parameters like buy orders and advertising to optimize your sales.  Obviously, the goal is to make lots of money.  There is a free-play mode with a random world, where you can compete with rival AI corporations.  I've also finished a tutorial scenario, and hope to add other scenarios to put the player in specific situations.

Gameplay Video (a bit out of date - from 9/7):




I'd love for people to try out the game as it is now.  I'm hoping to submit it to IGF, even though it doesn't fit particularly well with any of the categories.  I would greatly appreciate any feedback, including comments, bug reports, or suggestions.  The best place to start would be the tutorial, because it's a somewhat complicated game.
Link to Pre-Release [~12MB]:
http://www.synapse-games.com/LucreDemo.exe

Known issues currently include:
-Main menu sometimes doesn't show up.  This is probably a driver issue, but I'm trying to work around it.

[Tobasco Panda]

The shots so far look very cool and I can definitely extrapolate some good gameplay coming out of that. The UI feels a bit... overloaded at the moment, but that very well could be different in actual play. The odd part is that really most of the gameplay seems as if it will take place in the windows.

Do you have any plans for visualizing trade vessels or perhaps color-coding planets/settlements based on economic status?

It will be interesting to see what options are available to the player to be able to compete other companies. Are you thinking actual attacks on other colonies, corporate espionage, or simply economic competition? It seems to me that can be one area that keeps the game interesting and provide difference from say Civilization and Sim City.

Looking very cool though, and I look forward to seeing how it plays at some point. 

[Tobasco Panda]

One other thing... it seems odd that the name of the game is Lucre, but the monetary unit is "$"s. Just a nitpick. 

[synapse]

The UI feels a bit... overloaded at the moment, but that very well could be different in actual play. The odd part is that really most of the gameplay seems as if it will take place in the windows.

Do you have any plans for visualizing trade vessels or perhaps color-coding planets/settlements based on economic status?

This is my big concern at the moment.  Part of it is that a lot of the information is basically debug info I've needed to make sure the economy simulation is running correctly.  I don't know how much I'll be able to hide, but hopefully enough to simplify things quite a bit.

As far as visualization - I'm considering whether or not to have a "system" view which displays the buildings located within a single system - sort of like the city view in Civilization.  This would help reduce the UI load a bit and give some variety to the visuals.

Beside that though, it seems like most of the gameplay really will be within the windows.  Is that a major downside for people?

[synapse]

[9/8] added new screenshots demonstrating some new features:
-Solar System view of facilities
-Planets (which consume produced goods)
-shipments
-new facility layout
-augmented gameplay (though this isn't quite as obvious just from screenshots)

[Cymon]

I like it.

Funny that a programmer of which I know just did a conversion of Star Merchant. Not exactly the same sort of thing you're doing here by a long shot, but similar enough.

I'd link to the site but it seems to be down now.

[synapse]

10/20 - updated to include a link to the pre-release version.  Comments would be greatly appreciated.

[muku]

Cool. Some initial feedback in random order.

The batch file for starting is annoying... it just pops up a console window and closes again. At first I didn't notice that the program was running (I was still at the desktop) and started three copies. Needless to say, that bogged my CPU down.

The interface, while sleek-looking, is very, very dark on my screen. Sliders are practically invisible, so I had to guess at their location in order to drag them. Perhaps a gamma control would help. Also, the font seems a bit small and squint-inducing which is quite a killer for such a text-heavy game.

I finished the tutorial and then started a proper game; upon entering a system, I noticed a window that might have been "left over" from the tutorial. I clicked some button on it and got a crash with the following message:

Assertion failed at (.\source\server\BuildingManager.cpp:123)

I don't feel qualified to comment on the actual gameplay yet as I've only played the tutorial so far, but I like the premise. I'll try again later, hopefully.

[synapse]

Awesome, thanks for the feedback.  I've made the following changes:

-lightened the GUI a bit
-changed the font and increased the default text size
-replaced the batch file with the exe and DLLs
-fixed the windows staying visible bug

Thanks.  Keep em coming!

[muku]

With the new version I got a nondescript crash after less than one minute of playing The address was 0x4322ed... sorry, not much more info. I think it was a memory access exception.

Also, the font might be a bit better now, but I think the basic problem is that there is absolutely no hinting; the characters are basically all over the pixel grid, which leads to nasty interpolation artifacts. I've circled some here:



Typically this gets worse the smaller the font gets. I don't know how hard this would be for you to change. Of course you want to hit the IGF deadline and this certainly isn't your main priority, so I'm just throwing this out as something to keep in mind. (I recently read an excellent article on the topic; if you are interested, I might be able to dig it out.)

[synapse]

I've been aiming to do get fonts aligned properly for a while.  It's a pain, though, because the way I'm handling it all is to render components individually to a texture, which speeds things up quite a bit but makes it all more susceptible to blurring if things get resized by even one pixel.  But it's on the list!  Thanks again for the feedback so far.

I'm also curious why I haven't gotten more feedback from people.  If you aren't even interested in downloading the demo - is it because the graphics are weak?  The genre doesn't interest you?  Again, all comments are helpful, even saying "looks dumb, don't care"!

[pnx]

The game interests me, I just haven't gotten around to playing it yet, been rather busy, as I know are some of the other people around here. I've noticed that since this is a predominately developer based forum whenever one of these competitions comes along most everyone digs themselves into making a game.

I'll download it and let you know.

[synapse]

Thanks for the info!  I've actually been playing with an idea for a Lovecraftian-style game for quite a while.  It's a bit more ambitious than I can handle now, but it's good to know that some similar concepts will be coming out now.  Very cool!  Best of luck with your entry.

[pnx]

Ok, so I've played a couple of games so far, I've only encountered one actual bug and that's the fact that most of the facilities needs and capabilites don't match up with the ones on the build screen.

Before I go any further I'd like to state for the record I'm not the best source of advice on this stuff.

I think you should give the player more of a challenge and more of an ability to develop strategies, most of the time I feel like I'm just spamming power plants/ice mines & water cyclers, then building randomly from there up.

There's a few ways you could help this, for one I might recommend making the economy more cyclical, make drill parts a necessary part of all mines and similar things to make it so that no building is without needs. You might also want to increase the value of some of the buildings so that there's room for fewer of them in the economy. Other than that I'm not sure, I'm told a good economy simulator can be difficult to balance right, probably because the real thing is so unbalanced.