The basic ideaIn this game you get to build your ships out of construction blocks Lego style. Your goal is to destroy the enemy AI while collecting resources from asteroids and destroyed ships and protecting your mining ships and mother ship from enemy attacks. Story wise, the game takes place after an apocalyptic AI rebellion that destroyed most of humanity. The player's role is that of a human-sympathetic AI trying to save as many people as possible. Therefore, all ships in the game are robotic, controlled by either you or the enemy AI.
Gif showing the new dynamic particles. The gif has pretty bad quality, see
here for a webm version.
Latest game footage:GameplayYou construct ships block by block by first collecting resources from asteroid fields floating around in space, or by harvesting the destroyed ships of your enemies. Once you have enough resources in your mother ship, you can order a ship you have previously designed using the ship editor to be constructed at one of the mother ships' construction bays. You can either control your ships directly with your keyboard, or you can give them orders to carry out using standard RTS controls.
The goal is to keep your mother ship safe from enemy attack, as that is where your central computer brain resides. If it is destroyed, you lose the game. In addition, you use it as your sole ship factory, so protecting it from even getting damaged is important.
Game mechanicsThe game simulation is entirely physics based, with each block being simulated separately. Blocks can get knocked off ships, and each block has their own hit points and impact resistance values. Each block has a different function, be it a gauss gun barrel, a magazine for a machine gun or a generator. A ship has a central computer that controls the whole ship, and once that is destroyed, the ship is useless. Other than that, losing parts will only hurt the maneuverability or other functions of the ship. They'll still try to kill you as long as they have thrusters to aim with and guns to shoot at you.
In addition to standard hit points that blocks lose when they are hit, the game also simulates the bonds holding the blocks together breaking when the impact is sufficiently high. In addition, all generators, weapons and engines generate heat, and if the temperature of a block gets too high, they start taking damage and eventually become disabled if the heat is not radiated to space using heat sinks or conducted to adjacent blocks.
Youtube video demonstrating the heat system:
DevelopersAlthough the workload sharing is a bit fuzzy, here's a rough list of what each of us has done so far.
- PunCrathod - lead developer, game engine, some AI, eventually multiplayer
- Piipu - physics, sounds, all of the current placeholder art, fiddling with shaders
- Powly - OpenGL, graphics framework, shaders, physics, math
We still need to find someone who can make proper textures for all the blocks. The sound effects are also just free samples found on the internet, and we don't have any music so far. Currently all of the art is largely placeholders.
Right now, the game is pretty much just AI vs. AI skirmish we use to find bugs in the physics and test the tactical AI. Things currently on our to-do list:
- Higher-level AI. We need the AI to be good at strategical thinking for the game to be fun to play against the AI.
- Ship editor. Designing ships works through .txt editing through notepad currently, and it's not good at all. A graphical editor where you can paint different blocks on a grid and be able to simulate the design in combat will be extremely important.
- Multiplayer. We are also planning to implement co-op multiplayer, where players will be able to play on the same team against the AI. We'll probably do some sorts of pvp game modes as well.
- Sensors. We're planning a complicated sensor system with active and passive sensors and sensor data transfer systems. The aim of this is to enable different roles for ship designs and make it harder to design a ship that can do everything by itself. (Although that shouldn't be impossible, just very expensive.)
- Better sprites. All the sprites have been drawn in Paint spending little or no time thinking about the designs. We'll need better sprites for the blocks as well as particle effects.
Demo download linkRequirements: .net framework version 4, OpenGL 3 capable GPU, visual c++ redist 2012.
You should note that the game is quite GPU and CPU intensive right now. If you have fps problems, you can try reducing the particle and star counts in the GFX.ini. If you don't have a high-end GPU and CPU, you probably won't get very much performance out of the demo. The game isn't too stable either, and still crashes occasionally.
If the game crashes when you try to run it, it would be nice if you could post the crash dump here. It should be located next to the game exe, named errordump201103103.txt or something along those lines. If you can also include what sort of GPU and operating system you're running the game with, it might help us to solve the problem.
GUI Controls:
The remake button resets the scenario, picking random ship designs for all ships in the game. The amount of ships created can be inputted in the text field next to the button. Recommended amounts between 10 and 20 ships.
Reload shaders obviously reloads the shaders in the game. You probably shouldn't touch this unless you really want to modify them yourself.
Query performance measures the time taken by each part of the rendering process and copies it to your clipboard. This probably isn't very useful to you.
The enter editor button only brings up the confusing work-in progress ship editor GUI that doesn't really do anything at this point.