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[tlark]

Hi, I am building a really nerdy game where you fight autonomous space ships designed out of modular parts.  I wanted a game where being smart was more important than stats and time spent in the game. It has a single player mode to teach you the programming model. I wanted the programming to be quick, so there is no text, and the game penalises complexity. I wanted a game I could play on my commute. It's essentially a simulation, so you can play with zero realtime interactions. It's trivial to play but obscenely challenging to master.

At the moment Corepox is still developing, but its worth playing now. It's only available on Android at the moment. You can get it https://corepox.net/get-on-android-play.





Here are a few space ships people have built. When you play multiplayer you are matched with a similar strength opponent. It takes a while to get as good as these guys!

[tlark]

Fixed obligatory auth bug preventing progress being saved. Should work now from version 1.43

[michaelplzno]

cool, can you program the AI for the ships or just build their bodies?

[tlark]

cool, can you program the AI for the ships or just build their bodies?

Yes, you design the AI too. The #1 game design challenge has been teaching players the programming model. Some components have input, like an engine. The thrust of the engine is proportional to the input. Some components have outputs, like the radar. When you connect the radar to the engine, the engine fires proportional to the angle of the nearest enemy. With a little work you can make a space ship turn toward and follow other space ships! It's fun when components get destroyed the ship starts malfunctioning

The game naturally penalizes complex AI because the components take up space and weight, so too much logic detracts from other stats like speed. I didn't want players spending too much time programming.


Here is a close up of a ship fairly compactly wired for hunting behavior.

[tlark]

We release a new version with Auth issues fixed (again).

We had a good opening, 1300 different space ships in the universe now. Some real killers dominating the leaderboard!

We added hyperdrives which provide great tactical advantage. This ship is ranked 8th.

[tlark]

Wow this was a cool battle, two multi-part ships duke it out. One part is a bomb ship (6 o'clock)




I didn't design the opponent! People have created lots of ships now, there are 1996 ships in the Corepox Universe now.

I added a feature so you can export and import ships to a URL/JSON. This was because a player built their own Javascript ship editor and so I added a way to synchronise with external tools. Join the community on Discord

A ship URL like https://corepox.net/universe/ships/3D7CCF5F47464B550170477BE56B3347 has a screenshot and the JSON representation on a webpage (try it!). I extract screenshots using a serverless Chrome instance visiting a web build of the game. I blogged about the serverless visual snapshotting technology here: https://corepox.net/devlog/visual-game-worlds-hosted-on-functions



 

[tlark]

The leaderboard is now on the website. You can browse loads of cool ships, and copy them into your game.

Go to the live page here: https://corepox.net/leaderboard

[tlark]

Stats were showing people got stuck a lot with one particular mission (Avoid). So we spent time iterating it, and fixing lots of other UX bugs that trip newbs up.



Maybe what different about me as a developer is I have worked in startups and can thus can build custom dashboards and follow-the-data. I wrote about it here if you want to learn the setup: https://corepox.net/devlog/building-a-custom-executive-dashboard-with-firebase-analytics-google-datastudio-and-bigquery-1. Given my game is not successful yet, I guess we will see if my straight-to-the-store-with-data-driven-iteration is a good strategy for indiedevs or not!

Just to recap, there is a new release! its a great time to try: Android