Its been over a week since my project went public, I’ve had about 260 downloads so far (which I’m very happy about), but not much comments outside of people who took a look at the screen shots and the videos. I was hoping for comments on actual game play and such. Hopfuly these will come as the progress moves on and I provide the player with more reason to comment.

Anyway what I’m working on now is Iteration 1.5, basically a pre-cursor to iteration 2. Iteration 2 will see the game area transformed from a solar system into an asteroid field populated by about 10 or so large asteroids with bases in/on them. This is my attempt to combat the bad scale that is currently in place in the game. Planets are too small compared to ships. There is a lot of empty area (space between planets). I was trying to straddle the line between semi realism and a comprehensible game world (a solar system that the player could see in its entirety but still recognize individual planets), but it just doesn’t feel right. So anyway these asteroid bases will basically replace planets in function. They will be able to build basic ships such as corvettes. Bases also will have a hangar for fighters. The base will also create stations (like planets currently do), the initial stations will be your basic shipyard, and a (very powerful) defense platform. The shipyard station for will then build larger ships. I’m thinking that eventually the asteroid base will create space stations to augment itself further, for example a space station that is basically a floating city to augment the asteroid bases’s population capacity.

I’m thinking that the game play will be part fight off/defend against the alien threat, and part take over other bases to expand your power and empire. The other bases will be neutral or pirate, so they may or may not be activly offensive against you. This will be accomplished by building a ship that will have a boarding party which will then board the other base (or maybe through diplomacy?). This is where pie in the sky portion comes in, the game would then change to a first person shooter and the player would get a chance to be in control of the boarding party (thinking that the player will get to control a robotic avatar, that can be upgraded through research etc). Anyway this portion if it ever arrives will be far off into the future, possibly part 2 of the project.

The great news is that there is a great resource avaiable online to get me started down this path, Solcommand’s models this means that this new venture will look pretty awesome compared to what it would be if I were the modeler. Lets face it I probably wouldn’t be going down this path without this inspiration. As an added benefit, texturing these bases should be pretty easy, slap on some rocky texture to the roid, then paint the structures a greyish color and voila!

Here are some preliminary screen shots:

Asteroid base 1 – Full size

Asteroid base 2 – Full size