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[ModMax]

*UPDATE: Our Kickstarter campaign is now LIVE!*

Check out the campaign here: Halcyon 6 Kickstarter

We're also LIVE on Steam Greenlight. Please vote to help us get greenlit! Thanks!

Halcyon 6 on Steam Greenlight

HALCYON 6: STARBASE COMMANDER

Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander is a story-centric, character-centric sci-fi strategy game we’re developing for PC and Mac, where the player takes command of an ancient, abandoned alien space station and uses its mysterious power to conduct a war against a bloodthirsty alien armada.

It’s going to features lots of base-building, crew management and tactical combat. Think FTL meets X-Com with bits of Star Control 2, Master of Orion and Jagged Alliance inspiration thrown in.

Gameplay
Along with volley-based ship and ground combat and an x-com-style base building system, we’re implementing a really cool character skill and trait system that makes it so every playthrough can be a totally different experience.

Our main goal is to replicate the kind of “highly-skilled people working together to accomplish a difficult goal” feel that usually accompanies the best works of sci-fi shows like Star Trek and Firefly, but which generally hasn’t made its way into sci-fi strategy games per-se.

Features planned

• a mix of gameplay types, including 4x-style base management, real-time combat and pop-up event system
• volley-based real-time tactical combat system for both ship and ground combat.
• deep character system with over 150 skills (passive and active) and traits.
• emergent story system built around procedural and criteria-based event generation.
• awesome, dark sci-fi horror-infused main campaign
• different alien factions to interact with, fight or do missions for

Background

We’ve had the idea for a while, but we’ve been focusing on fulfilling our outstanding contracts with different publishers the last few months, so that we could pay the bills while positioning ourselves to be able to develop Halcyon 6. Due to all of the pre-production work we’ve done already, we think we can get it to Early Access within a year.

Tech & Resources

We’re using unity for the main engine, and Lua to handle the character skill system/generation and emergent story event system.

Plan

We’ve got a Kickstarter on the way (March 10th, 2015!), so that’s the first step. Along with helping us raise the necessary funds to make the game, we’re hoping we can use the campaign to spread awareness and interest. And, you know, Kickstarter will help us see if people actually want to play the game!

After that we’re going we’re going to be expanding our current prototype into a proper build, integrating the Lua systems with an appropriate test environment and then getting something together for early access hopefully by summer (fingers crossed!)  Then in the broadest possible terms, we plan to get the tools in place, then do a big content push, then content QA, then release, etc.

Let us know what you think! We’re super excited to be working on this, and we’d love to get some feedback from fellow indies!

Thanks,

Ken, Peter, and the Halcyon 6 team at Massive Damage.

[DrunkDevs]

Good to know there will be red shirts. Well Orange, but that's sort of red.

THERE WILL BE AWAY PARTY MISSIONS AND COMBAT

[Noogai03]

CLOSEUP OF THE BRIDGE

DAT BRIDGE

omg this is even more like Star Trek than FTL 

[ModMax]

Just to be clearer about our design intentions for the game.. here's the moodboard that we drafted for Halcyon 6:

[pmprog]

Looks pretty good. Any gameplay vids?

I'm assuming there will be space combat and "ground" combat as you mention FTL and XCOM? How will these work?

[ModMax]

We're still working away on the core ship and away team combat mechanics so we don't have a gameplay video yet. We'll be posting some more stuff soon so we can get your feedback on the combat mechanics.

thanks!
Ken

[ModMax]

Hey everyone,

Here's an update on one of the alien races, the Xlar-Yanthu.



And the first reveal of the ships for the the Zilrathar, the bane of the universe



More to come soon!

[ModMax]

We've been busy gearing up for PAX East! If anyone's going, hit me up on Twitter (@kenseto) if you want to meet and chat 

Here's a new test animation for our tactical ship battles, enjoy! 

[pmprog]

Really excited to see what comes of this. Looks really good

[ModMax]

Here's how we're implementing ship combat:

Ship Combat Design Goals:
- most ship combat should be relatively short but exciting, satisfying fights that last no more than 2-4 minutes.
- players should have tactical options they can deploy during combat to adjust to changing battle conditions
- both player skill and the quality of their crew will factor into how well they can fight in battles.

Ship Combat Overview:
- Ship Combat Overview:
- before any battle, players will choose a ‘squadron commander’ from their crew list
- certain crew members will have skills or traits that provide extra tactical abilities that can be used in combat
- there will be a leadership point system that will dictate how many and what types of ships you can deploy for a battle. The more leadership points you and your commander have, the more ships (or bigger ships) you can deploy
- battles will occur in real-time (sorta MMO-like speeds) where each ship will cycle through their weapons types, each of which will have different timers
- players tactical options include the following:
- they can switch ’tactics’ at will, which will dictate an overall strategy (attacking weakest first, attacking weapons first, attacking shields first..etc)
- they can activate any special abilities. These abilities will have limited number of uses and/or have timers.
- ship combat abilities are derived based on Captain and Squadron Commander skills and traits, as well as possible new tech from research.
- combat ends when one side is destroyed or retreats
- players will earn building materials and various XP and/or skill gain from ship combat

Any feedback on this is welcomed!

Thanks,
Ken

[ModMax]

Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander is currently being featured on Square-Enix Collective's site!

I've added more details regarding gameplay and our current design goals here:

http://collective.square-enix.com/projects/47/halcyon-6-starbase-commander

Please vote for us if you're as excited as we are to get this passion project ramped up!

Thanks,
Ken

[pmprog]

Are there any updates to this game?

[ModMax]

Are there any updates to this game?

Great timing!

We got sidetracked last month as we were launching our puzzle game, Zombie Puzzle Panic. It's actually doing pretty well so that should help out with funding some more concept art and design before we start the Kickstarter campaign.

I'm currently working on a trailer. Once that's done, we can start our Kickstarter properly.

Current target is mid-August to get the trailer done.

Thanks for your interest! I'll update this thread once we have the trailer done

Ken

[pmprog]

Thanks for the update

[kingdinosaurgames]

This kickstarter will get my money, do not doubt it.

[ModMax]

Hey everyone,

Just a quick note to let you know that Halcyon 6 has secured some funding and resumed development! We also have a Kickstarter starting March 3rd!

I've happy to announce that we've spent the last half year finishing up some contractual obligations and secured some funding to take this game to completion. Along the way we have continued to work on the game design and overall art direction.

As you see with some of the new art that I've posted in the original post, we've really nailed down the palette, character and ship designs.

Here's a couple of examples (please see the top post for more!):

We'll be continuing to post here as development continues and we welcome your feedback as always!

Our Kickstarter for Halcyon 6 is set for just a month away, March 3rd, 2015. Feel free to sign up for our mailing list at http://playhalcyon6.com if you want to be notified when it goes LIVE!

Thanks for your continued interest and we're looking forward to sharing our development notes and art as we go forward.

Cheers,
Ken, Peter, and the Halcyon 6 team.

[Voltz.Supreme]

This looks unreal! I hope you've got a really nice and original sci fi music score to match.

[Bombini]

This looks fantastic!
Love the art, dig the concept and will follow the kickstarter!
Good Luck!

[ModMax]

This looks unreal! I hope you've got a really nice and original sci fi music score to match.

Thanks! We're working with a composer that we think will be able to knock it out of the park with the score. We're trying to find a balance between the retro stuff like Star Control 2's score and the newer scores we love like Mass Effect and FTL.

[ModMax]

This looks fantastic!
Love the art, dig the concept and will follow the kickstarter!
Good Luck!

Thank you! More art to come soon, including some combat screen UI and more.