I've been working on it for about a month so far and have given myself another month and a half to finish it - as I'm guessing my current progress to be about 50% done. This could change but I'm trying (very, very hard) to not let myself get carried away and add a million features that aren't necessary and would likely blow out my workload even further. This could also change if I decide to engage an artist to do/redo my sprites.
Currently, the game features the following:
- Level generation, allowing the player to determine a world size before they start the game. Large world sizes are more taxing but offer greater variety of rooms/objects and will theoretically allow for longer playtime (once there's a goal to work towards, anyway).
- Currently, the world size is able to support 400 individual 'rooms' *
- 2 'factions' to fight for or against, the Police and the Pirates.
- A third 'neutral' faction, to make up the majority of other ships in the world. The pirates currently attack neutral targets on sight.
- A reputation system - e.g. shooting at Pirates makes them rather unhappy but the Police love it when you do. Once missions/quests are implemented, these will also provide massive gains/drops to reputation.
- Large battles. Currently, I've been able to run with roughly 100 ships on screen with only a small decrease to FPS *
- Really bad sprites that I drew myself using GIMP.
(What?! It's totally a feature.)
- Arcade or Simulator controls (i.e. World vs. Relative).
- Automatic or manual camera control.
- Shipyards for repairing and restocking weapons.
- More, that I've likely forgotten at this point.
* My hope is that this number will be increased through further optimisation.
Planned features:
- Roaming fleets: Groups of ships that will wander around the rooms, can be from any of the three factions.
- Additional ships that you can purchase at shipyards, assuming you've earned enough credits.
- Space stations for each faction: Heavily armed bases that take up an entire room. Will spawn ships/fleets from their faction and offer goods/supplies (assuming you're on the faction's good side).
- A trading system: Tradeable goods that can be purchased and sold at stations. Prices will vary between stations and will be generated randomly to allow for a wide variety of possible trade routes.
- Missions/Quests: These will be collected from stations and will likely be of the typical seek and destroy, collection or escort variety.
- A progression system: This I'm still very undecided on. I'd like to work towards a rogue-like setup, where death means loss of your ship and world but with benefits and upgrades that carry over to new games. **
** Ultimately, the end game and progression will depend on what I find to actually be fun - e.g. if a rogue-like doesn't work (or ends up just generally not being much fun), I'll scrap it and try something else. Most likely it will involve spending credits on upgrading/unlocking ships.
Possible features, depending on time:
- Bounty hunting (could end up being another quest type): tracking down a 'hero' ship, blasting it and returning the fugitive to the police (or pirates, depending).
- Ability to found your own space station: Once a room is cleared, or certain goals are met, you'll be able to build a station of your own to generate credits, provide discounted supplies, repair your ship, generate friendly fleets, etc.
- Multiplayer: This is something I would love to have but at this point, because this is a personal project rather than something I expect to sell and because I'm very much still learning, I'm just trying to keep things simple. Should this game attract enough attention, or should I find I have some time spare to do so, I'll look into re-doing the game for Multi.
Sounds cool, c00p. Where can I find some stuff to look at?
How's about right here, random stranger?!
Latest progress video, showing off some of the features added over last month:
A brief look at the main menu and a small Pirate battle (Made before I'd implemented the Police):
The level generation in action:
Testing the first AI system (has since changed rather drastically):
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