StarLife: The universe awaits

[tiagocc0]

I quick animation test I did the other day, forgot to upload it:
http://purpleorangegames.com/StarLifeTac...onTest.mp4
https://vimeo.com/42808946

The object I'm using for most of the animations wasn't intended to be used like this, instead it was made to make a interactive menu where the menu items would follow a path.

Cheers!

[tiagocc0]

I'm making a Qt QML Tutorial, for those interested:
http://www.blog.purpleorangegames.com/p/...orial.html

[tiagocc0]

This version you will find a little story I’m making to make it easier to test the tactical combat.

Expect the next version to come up faster and to have a story/ship editor.

Check out the modifications on this screenshot:




Shouldn’t be longer to start the other StarLife modules.

Download it here: http://purpleorangegames.com/StarLifeTac...pha 0.4.7z
Or the torrent version here: http://purpleorangegames.com/StarLifeTac...7z.torrent

[farcodev]

Cool and clean interface, your game remind me of Full Thrust.

Good job, keep it on

[tiagocc0]

(Sep 17, 2012 12:25 AM)farcodev Wrote:  Cool and clean interface, your game remind me of Full Thrust.

Good job, keep it on

Thanks!

I'm preparing some mock up screens of what will look like in the game, I would like to hear your opinion on it if possible, I will post it here as soon as I finish them.

[farcodev]

(Sep 17, 2012 07:54 AM)tiagocc0 Wrote:  Thanks!

I'm preparing some mock up screens of what will look like in the game, I would like to hear your opinion on it if possible, I will post it here as soon as I finish them.

No problem

[tiagocc0]

Here is one faction of the humans!
And two mockup screens on three images. One mockup is about the planet screen and the other is the main screen.
On the planet screen you will notice that there is no buildings, just services.

This is something that I wanted to do for a long time, on games like this usually you have to build a lot of things on your planet, but even in Civilization it's kind of strange, to put some buildings on a city that should be something with thousands of thousands of buildings but was simplified to just a few.

Now imagine simplifying a planet to the same amount of buildings and you end up with Civilization on space where planets resemble cities.
So instead of a building, you have a service. You are going to pay a high maintenance value but you can stop and resume the service anytime you want.
A planet is divided into two resources, population and infrastructure.
If you have a population of 3.2 billion, then you maximum and ideal infrastructure is 3.2 points.

There are two ways for population to grow, by itself so if you have low population it will grow slowly and if you have a lot it will grow faster.
And population from other planets may also immigrate to your planet so you can end up with mixed population if your govern tolerates other races. But it can also happen between your own planets.
A planet has a maximum population limit, but it can be surpassed and will be. This will cause a lot of trouble so think careful before trying to make your population increase too quickly.

Infrastructure increases slowly because your civilians are always investing in your own race, you can however pay for a service that helps civilians to increase a planet's infrastructure.
If you have a population of 2 billion and an infrastructure of 1 point it means that your planet is actually performing most services at half of it's maximum performance.
So keeping infrastructure as close as possible from your current population will result in maximum output for that quantity of population.
So a planet with 3 billion and 3 points of infrastructure will result in X production for example and a planet with 6 billion and 6 infrastructure will result in 2X production.

This way planets that can hold an higher number of population will produce more.
Planets that increase their population too quickly will be penalized, planets that increase their population above the planet's maximum will also be penalized.

With this I can explain the population type.
For every 0.5 billion you will get one person that represents that population. This person is symbolic and you can use it to set their focus.
A planet with 3 billion will get 6 persons. There will be 5 types of person for you to specialize:
Civilian - Increases infrastructure
Farmer - Produces food
Builder - Gives production points (Used in some services like to build starships)
Businessman - Produces credit
Scientist - Gives technology points

So most of the early planets will consist basically of Civilians and Farmers, then move on to Businessman and Scientists, or Builders for planets that produce starships.
Planets will have specializations, after a certain criteria they will level up, depending on your current technology you will be able to specialize them to get bonuses.

Ship production will be made empire-wide, that means that you will produce ships using all your planets instead of each planet builds their own ships.
You can however choose in which planet the ship will appear or if it will remain on a pool. Ships in a pool means that they are deactivated so their maintenance costs are low and that if a war arises you can quickly activate them and spread them over your empire. If you keep all your ships active you will be able to respond more quickly to an war but it will cost more to maintain.

On the other mockup you can see some buttons:
Economy
Planets
Starships
Research
Diplomacy
Espionage

[farcodev]

Sorry I couldn't read your post tonight, I'll do it tomorrow at my job (during my breaks). I have a sh*tload of job to do for the alpha 4 and tonight it was intense.

Cool screennies btw

[adamsolo]

Replying to your last post is in my TODO list Tiago You'll have my feedback.

[tiagocc0]

(Sep 18, 2012 01:40 PM)farcodev Wrote:  Sorry I couldn't read your post tonight, I'll do it tomorrow at my job (during my breaks). I have a sh*tload of job to do for the alpha 4 and tonight it was intense.

Cool screennies btw

(Sep 18, 2012 08:06 PM)adamsolo Wrote:  Replying to your last post is in my TODO list Tiago You'll have my feedback.

Thanks guys!

Here's some more info about infrastructure:
If you have over-population you will be able to have over-infrastructure, but having more infrastructure than population shouldn't give you bonuses because it's like having a factory with no people in there to work.

If for example your population decreases, your infrastructure will stay the same. If your population rises again it will be able to use that infrastructure that was disabled because of lack of population.

But I may allow for the player to set a infrastructure limit, so you can build infrastructure faster than your population grows.
You cannot however stop infrastructure from growing. And maybe having more infrastructure than population could result in maintenance costs or it would decrease until it reaches the population number again.

[farcodev]

(Sep 17, 2012 02:24 PM)tiagocc0 Wrote:  Here is one faction of the humans!
And two mockup screens on three images. One mockup is about the planet screen and the other is the main screen.
On the planet screen you will notice that there is no buildings, just services.

This is something that I wanted to do for a long time, on games like this usually you have to build a lot of things on your planet, but even in Civilization it's kind of strange, to put some buildings on a city that should be something with thousands of thousands of buildings but was simplified to just a few.

Now imagine simplifying a planet to the same amount of buildings and you end up with Civilization on space where planets resemble cities.
So instead of a building, you have a service. You are going to pay a high maintenance value but you can stop and resume the service anytime you want.
A planet is divided into two resources, population and infrastructure.
If you have a population of 3.2 billion, then you maximum and ideal infrastructure is 3.2 points.

There are two ways for population to grow, by itself so if you have low population it will grow slowly and if you have a lot it will grow faster.
And population from other planets may also immigrate to your planet so you can end up with mixed population if your govern tolerates other races. But it can also happen between your own planets.
A planet has a maximum population limit, but it can be surpassed and will be. This will cause a lot of trouble so think careful before trying to make your population increase too quickly.

It seems to be a cool and simple mechanism for the planets, and the mixed population could tirgger unexpected events (racial problems, cool projects raised form interracial cooperation, hybrids and so on).

(Sep 17, 2012 02:24 PM)tiagocc0 Wrote:  Infrastructure increases slowly because your civilians are always investing in your own race, you can however pay for a service that helps civilians to increase a planet's infrastructure.
If you have a population of 2 billion and an infrastructure of 1 point it means that your planet is actually performing most services at half of it's maximum performance.
So keeping infrastructure as close as possible from your current population will result in maximum output for that quantity of population.
So a planet with 3 billion and 3 points of infrastructure will result in X production for example and a planet with 6 billion and 6 infrastructure will result in 2X production.

This way planets that can hold an higher number of population will produce more.
Planets that increase their population too quickly will be penalized, planets that increase their population above the planet's maximum will also be penalized.

With this I can explain the population type.
For every 0.5 billion you will get one person that represents that population. This person is symbolic and you can use it to set their focus.
A planet with 3 billion will get 6 persons. There will be 5 types of person for you to specialize:
Civilian - Increases infrastructure
Farmer - Produces food
Builder - Gives production points (Used in some services like to build starships)
Businessman - Produces credit
Scientist - Gives technology points

It sounds a bit like in Civ4, with the specialists, even if the system is different.

(Sep 17, 2012 02:24 PM)tiagocc0 Wrote:  So most of the early planets will consist basically of Civilians and Farmers, then move on to Businessman and Scientists, or Builders for planets that produce starships.
Planets will have specializations, after a certain criteria they will level up, depending on your current technology you will be able to specialize them to get bonuses.

Cool idea, you could employ the same sort of things as the levelling system w/ special skills/feats in Advanced Dungeon & Dragons. don't laugh, I use many idea from pen & paper RPGs for FARC.

(Sep 17, 2012 02:24 PM)tiagocc0 Wrote:  Ship production will be made empire-wide, that means that you will produce ships using all your planets instead of each planet builds their own ships.
You can however choose in which planet the ship will appear or if it will remain on a pool. Ships in a pool means that they are deactivated so their maintenance costs are low and that if a war arises you can quickly activate them and spread them over your empire. If you keep all your ships active you will be able to respond more quickly to an war but it will cost more to maintain.

You could use a sort of intersystem transportation capability that could influence the global production. Even if you don't do a simulation, it stay a space-based game and make the things globally requires to represent the space as a VERY BIG place. By this way you could disrupt the production of a faction by attack the transportation capability of this same faction, pillaging it, or introduce bad/sabotaged points that could produce unexpected effects when you build a spaceship. "Sir we have a problem... this new shipment of transdimensional space drive just blown out the space dock..."

My 2 cents

[tiagocc0]

(Sep 20, 2012 02:55 AM)farcodev Wrote:  It seems to be a cool and simple mechanism for the planets, and the mixed population could tirgger unexpected events (racial problems, cool projects raised form interracial cooperation, hybrids and so on).

Exactly, =D

(Sep 20, 2012 02:55 AM)farcodev Wrote:  It sounds a bit like in Civ4, with the specialists, even if the system is different.

I was thinking more like Master of Orion 2, since they have farmer, builder and scientist and I added two more, but yes it does look like Civ 4.

(Sep 20, 2012 02:55 AM)farcodev Wrote:  Cool idea, you could employ the same sort of things as the levelling system w/ special skills/feats in Advanced Dungeon & Dragons. don't laugh, I use many idea from pen & paper RPGs for FARC.

I was thinking more like the perk system in Fallout, but I will take a look at the AD&D system.

(Sep 20, 2012 02:55 AM)farcodev Wrote:  You could use a sort of intersystem transportation capability that could influence the global production. Even if you don't do a simulation, it stay a space-based game and make the things globally requires to represent the space as a VERY BIG place. By this way you could disrupt the production of a faction by attack the transportation capability of this same faction, pillaging it, or introduce bad/sabotaged points that could produce unexpected effects when you build a spaceship. "Sir we have a problem... this new shipment of transdimensional space drive just blown out the space dock..."

My 2 cents

It's a great idea, but I want to make it as simple as possible because at mid and end game it can become quite complex to maintain an empire while several races keep constantly raiding your transportation system.
At this kind of micromanagement the AI will always excel the player unless the player has a very high micromanagement skill.
I will have to think a bit more about this. =D


Thanks a lot about your feedback!

[tiagocc0]

The game intro, just something I wanted to share: https://vimeo.com/groups/starlife/videos/49774695

[farcodev]

How the game going?

[Selina]

Looks great ! I like the whole Idea .. space ships in action..

[tiagocc0]

(Dec 13, 2012 12:30 AM)Selina Wrote:  Looks great ! I like the whole Idea .. space ships in action..

Thank you!

(Oct 27, 2012 10:53 AM)farcodev Wrote:  How the game going?

Sorry for the lack of update, our team got bigger we now have a pixel artist, a concept artist and a musician.
Our pixel artist sent me a preview of what he wants to accomplish so I changed the game accordingly, you can check the result here:
http://purpleorangegames.com/Videos/Star...review.mp4

His preview: (He still working on and everything will be improved, this is a very early preview)

[Hoverdog]

Hiya guys, I'm a writer/second designer of StarLife.

A lot of things has changed during the last months, including these sweet-looking new screenshots!

[farcodev]

(Mar 01, 2013 04:46 AM)Hoverdog Wrote:  Hiya guys, I'm a writer/second designer of StarLife.

A lot of things has changed during the last months, including these sweet-looking new screenshots!

Wow! Cool progress for crafty apes!

[adamsolo]

Yes, good stuff, and great progress so far. I especially like the combat grid shot. That looks like fun.

[tiagocc0]

Thanks guys!