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Drox Operative

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:38:43 -0700

Just wondering if anyone else is keeping an eye on this one as well? I loved the concepts behind Soldak's prior non-space based titles, but the graphics tended to hold me back from them I'm ashamed to admit. Drox Operative is looking a bit better though, and looks as though its going to offer a fair bit of roleplaying, trading, pirating, mercenary work, and exploring in general.

Not sure when the actual release will be yet. It appears as though the game has been in development for about 8 or 9 months thus far.

Astriarch version 1.1.0 Released - Now supports saved games

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:13:31 -0700

It has been awhile since I've been able to devote some time to working on Astriarch, but recently I was able to get enough free time to implement a much needed feature: Saving and Resuming Games!

Here is the full announcement:
Astriarch: Ruler of the Stars version 1.1.0 has just been released.
Version 1.1.0 automatically saves the current game at the end of each
turn and allows the saved game to be resumed. There are also a number
of minor bug fixes and other enhancements.

Play Astriarch now at astriarch.com

Astriarch - Ruler of the Stars is a turn-based single player space
strategy browser game implemented in HTML5. Build planetary
improvements and star ships to capture planets and defeat your
enemies. Your ultimate goal is to become the master of the known
universe, and earn the title of Astriarch!

I'll also be working towards building an in-game tutorial soon, and after that I plan on having a campaign mode along with special events and planet effects. Thanks Space Sector and Adam Solo for your continued support and feedback!

-Matt Palmerlee
Mastered Software

Orchestral Composer

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:22:19 -0700

If you would like an orchestral composer for your project let me know!

www.jamesdunlopmusic.com

Megastructures in 4x Games

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:24:33 -0700

Once upon a time, I was fascinated by Dyson Shells... I even wanted to use one as a setting for a tabletop RPG. More recently I've been pondering how much material would be needed to make either a Niven Ring or a Dyson Shell, and how that might make including them in a 4x game quite absurd. This is primarily an effort towards grasping the mass needed to build a megastructure. I will not be trying to tackle any of the real engineering/physics problems involved. Using basic info @ Wikipedia, here's what I came up with...

Surface Areas @ Earth's orbit
Niven Ring: just shy of 1555 trillion square kilometers ( or 1.5544*10^15 km^2)
Dyson Shell: 272 quadrillion square kilometers ( or 2.72*10^17 km^2)

That's a whole lotta real estate. Earth is just over 510 million square kilometers... So a Niven Ring has 3,047,421 times more surface than Earth, and a Dyson Shell has 533,256,011 times more surface than Earth.

Stellar Scale Masses
Our sun accounts for the vast majority of the mass in our solar system, about 332,900 Earth Masses worth. The next two largest bodies are Jupiter (318 Earth Masses) and Saturn (95 Earth Masses). All of the planets total up to a mere 446 Earth Masses, including the little blue marble we call home. Earth by itself is 5.9736*10^24 kg, or shy of 60 quadrillion gigatonnes, to give a sense of how much an Earth Mass Unit contains.

For the sake of simple math with these large numbers, I am assuming that 1 Earth Mass will create {1 Earth Area plus the needed infrastructure above and below} on a megastructure. The surface plus a couple kilometers of crust is a tiny portion of the total mass of Earth. However, the megastructure's outer shell and the day/night panels need to be made of incredibly stout stuff, so all that mass would get reorganized into a much denser material. By necessity, I am also assuming this advanced species has Cheap Transmutation of Mass, as discussed in Ringworld.

Megastructure Mass Costs
The above figures combined with my usage assumption produce...

Niven Ring, planets only: 6,832.78 Solar Systems in Mass
Niven Ring, planets + Sun: 9.1419 Solar Systems in Mass

Dyson Shell, planets only: 1,1195,640.84 Solar Systems in Mass
Dyson Shell, planets + Sun: 1,599.704 Solar Systems in Mass

I have the Sun Included totals primarily for comparison. (If a species was advanced enough to safely disassemble a star, why would they need to bother to build a megastructure? srsly) The planet only numbers are rather ugly, and they get even uglier. Our G2V yellow sun is fairly uncommon in the galaxy... Red dwarf stars are estimated to be 85% of the total stars in the Milky Way, each with half or less the mass of our sun, and likely half or less the mass in planets, if it has any at all.

The Milky Way Galaxy contains 300-ish billion stars, so there's definitely enough mass present to make a megastructure... but it would leave many many stars barren of planets, or a large swath of space void of anything.

In conclusion, the math I have presented does not support building a megastructure in a 4x game, even if the game scales to several thousand worlds. The entire map would need to be devoured to build it.

Best sci-fi trailer ever

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:13:18 -0700

I just can't get enough of this trailer.

What's your favorite sci-fi movie one(s)?

Ready Player One (by Ernest Cline), have any of you read it?

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:00:29 -0700

A book that is definitely targeted at gamers, though not strategy folks specifically.

I read it around New Year's, and my head exploded. (I got better, like that time I was a newt)

Tutorials for Strategy Games

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:10:01 -0700

I'm curious to know what everything thinks about tutorials in the different games they play. My questions would be do you think they are an absolute necessity? Do you think they should be built into a game, or provided separately (e.g. on a website as movies or something)?

I tend to lean on tutorials that are built into the first mission of a game. I am one of those who just wants to play the game and so I dive right in (and am always grateful when there's help in the beginning). I wish I could say I was the kind of person to sit down and read a manual, but that's just not me!

We are currently working on some options for our own game tutorial, including one that would be part of the game itself vs. a series of tutorials that could be referenced instantly and freely from the website. I would love to know what gamers things about them in general, so that we have an better idea of what would suit our gamers best!

StarLife: The universe awaits

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:56:25 -0700

An Indie 4x Space Strategy Game currently in development by Purple Orange Games

Site: http://purpleorangegames.com/index.html
Blog: http://www.blog.purpleorangegames.com
Forum: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php...arlife.42/

This project is about building a turn-based 4X science fiction computer strategy game, just like Master of Orion 2 which is the main inspiration for us.

The game will be divided in two parts. Evolution and Spacefaring.

In Evolution you will be able to create your own race until it reaches space.
Then the Spacefaring part of the game will begin and play mostly like MoO2.

Screenshots: http://www.blog.purpleorangegames.com/p/...shots.html

Concept Art: http://www.blog.purpleorangegames.com/p/...t-art.html

Videos: http://www.blog.purpleorangegames.com/p/videos.html

More about Evolution: http://www.blog.purpleorangegames.com/p/evolution.html

More about Spacefaring:http://www.blog.purpleorangegames.com/p/...aring.html

To-do list:http://www.blog.purpleorangegames.com/p/to-do-list.html

Download:http://www.blog.purpleorangegames.com/p/downloads.html

The download is a bit oudated, but I will be providing a new one soon.

Feel free to ask anything about the game.

Introducing Project BARK (which is a temporary name)

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:55:09 -0700

Hello. I am new here and would like to announce a game a friend of mine and I are in the process of designing. The purpose of this thread is to get thoughts and feedback on the idea I will present here in order to gauge how welcomed a game such as this would be. As you will see it is a very large undertaking but I feel we are up to the challenge as time is our most numerous resource right now.

For now we call it Project BARK because we have yet to come up with a proper name. We would be open to suggestions if anyone has any. Obviously it is a 4x sci-fi space game.

It turn based in nature with a sort of real time aspect to it. We are tossing the idea around of having the game go into a real time sort of mode when the player passes the turn. When the player hits the 'turn' button, the game will continue to cycle through turns until 'something' happens, or the player chooses to interrupt the cycle. Something could be anything really. Some project they start completes, some research completes, a fleet arrives somewhere they were sent to, a non-player fleet is detected. We are thinking of doign this in order to sort of automate those times when the player is just click the 'turn' button over and over while doing nothing each turn waiting for something to complete or whatever.

The idea with the game is also to dial down the grand scope of a typical 4x game. In a typical 4x game, I feel things are just too 'easy' and they miss the scale of how certain things would really get done. For instance, creating an artificial planet in Master of Orion 2 is trivial. In or game, creating an artificial planet would be a monstrous undertaking and would take a very long time in real time, let alone game time. Or idea is to tone down the scale of things going on. There will be grand things able to be built such as Dyson spheres, artificial planets, and space ships of epic proportions, but they will be a rarity. It would not be for a considerable time that a player would construct such things. We hope to create the feeling that each and every ship in the player's fleets is to be treated like a treasured jewel. The loss of a ship would be a major set back. They would also be difficult to lose if the player is careful. Outright destruction would not be common. Most ship losses would be ship captures from boarding actions or damaged beyond use, but salvageable. They would have a history to them. Their christening would be recorded, battles they fought in would be noted. Their crews would gain experience (and lose experience as members are replaced with fresh recruits). Their captains would make a difference.

Exploration would also be a major undertaking, something I think all 4x space games fail at. In a typical 4x game you fly to a planet and you instantly know all there is to know. In our game, we aim to make the exploration process more involved than a 'go to star a, discover planets and know which ones are good and which ones are bad'. When you arrive at a new planet, you will know nothing about it other than appear and size. From there you will be able to conduct scans, send down probes, send scouting parties, and other things, to determine the attributes of the planet such as atmospheric composition, temperature, weather conditions, gravity, soil composition, and various other aspects. Even after building a settlement or outpost there (also not a small task), you will still have a huge planet to continue exploring. It could be quite some time before the player explores the entire planet. You could settle on a planet and much later discover something new that is horrible or terrific.

Colonization is also something we are going to take a different approach to. Typically, in most games like this, you make a colony ship,fly it to a planet, and start a colony. What we have in mind is you fly to a planet, spend time exploring it to determine if it is suitable for your species to live on and if not, explore what it would take to live there. Then the player can decide, based on the outcome of the survey, choose to investigate the possibility further or abandon the plans deeming it not worth the while. If the player decides to pursue it further, they will then have to discover a suitable area to place the colony or outpost. After that, they must ferry in supplies and they must have it be built. The player will not have to waste time doing this manually, it will be built into the process and abstracted away. Another goal is to have the player not waste time with meaningless actions that only annoy. A settlement will also take time to grow. It would start off as something like a small city of a thousands of people and build over time into a sprawling city, if things work out right. The settlement will also eventually branch off into new settlements as resources, population, and exploration allow. It could be quite some time before the settled planet resembles the home world and is fully inhabitated.

Running a colony is also going to be streamlined. Each colony will have a leader character, who will have attributes that will affect certain aspects of the colony. These leaders will also be organic in that they will grow and change over time and will react to the situation around them. If the player treats them poorly, they could quit, defect, start and insurrection on the world and attempt to break away, or something else. We also plan to have different species needing to be treated differently. For example, a species such as humans which are individualistic would have to be given much leeway and freedom or else they could grow resentful and rebel or they could become extremely unproductive whereas a race that had a pack mentality would need to be treated sternly or they would perceive leadership as being too weak and would break off in order to go it their own or join another faction that they perceive as being stronger.

Colonial improvements would largely be abstracted away instead of the player having to build a marine barracks and an armor barracks, using Master of Orion 2 as an example, they would simply have a number of military installations, a number of which they can increase or decrease. These would use up logistics that the colony has. The same applies with things like research labs and construction facilities and farms.

Diplomacy is also going to take into account the psychology aspects mentioned earlier. If you encountered a race such as humans, you would need to treat them as equals in order to gain favor, whereas with the pack mentality race you would have to be more aggressive in your behavior towards them in order to gain respect.

Discovering a new species would be an explorative subject on its own. We intend to have the discover be one of mystery. Who are these people? Where do they come from? What do they intend? You would not even be able to speak with them. You would need to take time to learn how to communicate with them and learn how to interact with them.

The different species that inhabit the galaxy will also not be set in stone. There won't be a specific number of species in the galaxy but will instead each be created from a list of traits, much like creating a custom species. Each race in the game will be a custom race.

Research will also be more of a mystery rather than a tree to plot a path down. Some of it will be based upon research from before, such as improvements over current tech, while some will be in reaction to things that are discovered, while others still will be based on things captured from enemies. You will also be able to research many things at once based on the number of research facilities you have. You can research one 'tech' per facility or you can assign multiple facilities to one tech, but this causes a diminished return. The more facilities you put onto researching the same thing, the more innefficiency you introduce and the more waste you have. You could play two games side by side and have very different research possibilities in each game going on.

There are many more topics to touch on, but I think this is enough to generate significant discussion. I realize it is a large undertaking, but I don't really have anything better to do with myself right now. A large problem can be made easier by breaking down into smaller problems and tackling those one by one.

So please, feel free to ask questions, comment, and offer opinions!

Star Command

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 11:17:25 -0700

Have you seen this? It looks pretty interesting. A "GameDev Story" style take on starship command, with a strong dose of X-com. for Mobile sometime later this year.

Linked to the kickstarter page, because it currently has more info:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/star...f=category

THQ Jobs

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:07:37 -0700

THQ Inc, one of the biggest American developer and publisher of video games, has lots of job vacancies for game programmers, artists, designers, testers, PR, marketing ... etc.

I'm bringing this up because since THQ owns the Homeworld IP rights (and Relic studios), and there has been rumors ever since they acquired the rights that they could be preparing a sequel to this fantastic franchise, that who knows, maybe this would be a chance (for how remote it may be) for you to take part in the making of Homeworld 3

Here is the link for the huge list of THQ's game jobs.

Galactic Patrol Pirates

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:59:13 -0700

Hello! This is Apalala... I am new here, and am introducing myself at the same time as the company I run with three others, Black Dragon Studios, LLC.

We are wrapping up our first game, a science fiction strategy (RTS) game called Galactic Patrol Pirates. We are getting ready to enter beta-testing and so my job now is to get the news out that we exist!

I am excited about this forum, as I am a science fiction buff and gamer and have been for a long, long time.

Job: Programmer / Associate Game Developer [L3O/Horizon]

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:51:31 -0700

L3O video game developer is looking for more hands to join their team in the frame of the Horizon development.

L3O.com dev team Wrote:"(...) we are looking to add a couple of experienced game developers to the team. If you happen to be a programmer looking for work in Toronto you can contact us here."

L3O full announcement here.

Update: Detailed positions info here.

Recent Sid Meier Interview - Industry Gamers

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:10:48 -0700

Came across with a recent Sid Meier interview given to Industry Gamers (dates to 13 Dec 2011). Sid talks a little bit about how he started in the industry. He also gives his take on social and mobile gaming today and makes some predictions regarding gaming.

It's always a good read to listen what Mr. Sid Meier has to say.

Job: 3D Game Artist [L3O/Horizon]

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:27:02 -0700

L3O video game developer is looking for more hands to join their team in the frame of the Horizon development.

L3O.com dev team Wrote:"(...) we are looking to add a couple of experienced game developers to the team. If you happen to be a game 3D artist looking for work in Toronto you can contact us here."

L3O full announcement here.

Update: Detailed positions info here.

Supporting the site...

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:10:06 -0700

So I know that if I click on a game link on the main site and then proceed to buy that game from Gamer's Gate, you get a little credit, too.

Does that only apply to the game from the link, or do you get even more credit if I buy other games on top of that (in the same purchase)?

Starships Combat

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:06:29 -0700

Preface

Hi to everybody, proud of my first blog article I will reedit it here to open it to the more private forum discussion.

Will start with the introduction and then I will add the themes one by one, directly enriched with Adam's thoughtful answers.

Body

In 4X turn-based or real-time grand strategy space games conflicts resolution can be done in various systems ranging from the economical to the diplomatic but, more often than not, it will be decided in the cold space with starships that will use every technological advantages they have in store to erase the competition from the skies.

While this can be a quite gloomy view of our future it is also exciting and very appropriate for a game genre that proposes eXtermination as one of his four salient points.

How much importance and depth this system should have in relation to the rest of the game? Well the rule of the thumb says that as eXtermination is just one on four goals of a 4X game and there are other way to accomplish that like the even more bloodier planetary invasion (or bombardment) system or the more civil economic buyout system linked to the diplomatic one then it should not take more than one eight of the time.

Well, that happens rarely. It seems that our players really like the sound of the exploding ships in the void (pun intended) or, at the least, the game designers think so.

Adam's take

My take is that highly tactical space combat is not really a must in 4X strategy games (in fact far from it). I do like to be able to give individual orders to my ships if I like however I think there should always be a way to auto-resolve things (for the repetitive, boring, unfun battles). So, for me space combat plays a minor role in my ideal 4X strategy games. Not that I’m not fond of giving orders to my ships and watch all those explosions, react in awe to planetary bombardment (like in Sins for example) and be able to destroy individual ship modules. I mean if you can do all that and still be able to deliver the 95% rest of things left to do to make a great 4X space strategy title then by all means! I’m all for it. However experience tells us that you can’t make many things right.

Job: Highly-skilled pixel artist / 2D Illustrator [Zer0sum/StarDrive]

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:21:37 -0700

Zer0sum guys are asking for a skilled pixel artist / 2D Illustrator to help on StarDrive development.

Full announcement:

zer0sum Wrote:We need a highly-skilled pixel artist / 2D Illustrator to make some art. Industry-standard pay. Please post a link to your portfolio in the comments or on the forums!

Announcement link.

StarDrive is an action-strategy 4X space game targeted for release in the Summer of 2012. Closed-beta targeted for March 2012.

More game info here.

adamsolo's Feedback Thread

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:04:32 -0700

Playing Alpha 0.0531

Couple of preliminary comments:

Very nice opening music (a bit too melodramatic though), don't fancy the second rock one sorry

I see you have more tooltips now. Great. At least in the races customization screen, however I'm a bit confused, a bit puzzled with the modifiers (dissent, cost to improve governance) Probably the modifiers descriptions (not all though) need to be a bit fleshed out. Well, it was 8 o'clock in the morning, so maybe that was it.

Why does cloning upset other races? I mean worsens relations with other races. It's like a galactic polemic issue? Just curious, nothing really important.

ESC key causes game to go straight to desktop. Can you put a simple confirmation screen/button before that happens? It's an old habit.

The Future

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:44:16 -0700

My Future 4X Game is steadily approaching the present...

I bring a screenshot which I hope all of you will enjoy: