New Beginnings

It's been more than four years since I've had a project worth posting about on here.  Previously this blog was dedicated to progress on my own game engine.  Game engines are cool, but I'm more interested in making games.

Over the past two months I've been laying the groundwork for a new game project, and I finally have some progress worth presenting.  Most of that time has been spent creating extensible and generic components for building ships (compartments, machinery, exterior hull, etc) and an interface for putting them together.

So what do the first results look like?

Example Frigate Exterior

Interior Deck Layout

This game is a space strategy game with some twists.  I grew up playing games like Homeworld, and I loved the real-time strategy combined with the three dimensional battlefield (and of course, the spaceships).  But something has always bugged me about strategy games, and it is the fact that a gigantic space battlecruiser and an infantryman are treated exactly the same way: they are a singular unit which has x hitpoints before it dies.

I might be biased but ships are far, far more than a singular unit.  They're complex machines operated by hundreds of people.  In this game you can command your ship in a traditional RTS sense, but you can also go inside and give crewmembers orders to, for example, patch some damage or fight a fire.  I want the player to be able to see the chaos inside of a heavily damaged ship, and try to task their (surviving) crewmembers with repairs to keep the ship fighting a few moments longer.

Ships are comprised of compartments which have equipment such as engines, pumps, or terminals inside them.  This equipment is connected together with piping and wiring to form resource networks which allow them to function, such as providing power to blocks which need it.  The exterior hull is built in a Space Engineers style around the interior.

Battles will take place between small numbers of ships (2-3 per player) due to their complexity, with long time-to-kill for an individual ship.  As ships take damage, equipment will be damaged and resource connections broken necessitating repairs.  Fires can also be started, and will spread if not fought quickly.  If an exterior block has taken too much damage it can be destroyed completely, possibly opening a compartment to space.

One thing I am absolutely adamant about is that there will be no point where a ship loses all of its health and spontaneously ceases to exist.  As long as there is a single living crewman and functional equipment on the ship, it can still be selected and given orders (whether it can carry out those orders is another matter).

So join me on this journey into making the most micro-manage-y spaceship RTS ever.