Screenshots Of My Future Pandora Space Exploration Game

[TrevorBradley]

OK, enough teasing in the developer forums, let me give you guys an idea what I've been working on this past month... Go easy on me... this game is not yet complete and I still have a lot of work to do on the UI...

The game I'm working on has the present working title of "Galactic Artifact". Without an Pandora on hand for development, in reality it's a Windows/Linux game I hope to port to the Pandora.

The game is a non-combat, real time space exploration game. That galaxy you see has about 40,000,000 uniquely named stars divided into 10,000,000 sectors of space. (The real galaxy has 100 billion stars, but mine is just a flat cross section). You can zoom in to see individual stars, or out to see the galaxy as a whole. The galaxy is filled with approximately 4.5 million artifacts, each with a unique name, type and value.

The goal of the game is to find a single specific "prize" artifact in as little time possible. To do this, you wander the galaxy, collecting the artifacts you find and selling them to interested parties of "Ancients", "Industrialists", or "Futurists" who will either give you cash for the artifact, or information about where this "prize" artifact can be located. The game is a "powers of two" game; you bisect the galaxy over and over again until all that's left over is a small region of space containing the artifact you're looking for.

It's not easy though. Early in the game you ship is too slow, too small and too inefficient to visit any but the nearest stars. You have to ugprade your ship with cash from sold artifacts to be able to travel far across the galaxy.

The game is a multiplayer game, and you'll be racing against opponents in the same space for the same artifact. If you can afford it, you can upgrade your ships computer to keep track on their whereabouts or even decrypt their private transmissions and steal their information. There will be a single player version as well.

More Screenshots:
Screenshot of development
Talking to Aliens
Exploring sectors

At the moment a game takes about 45 minutes for an unskilled player on "Hard", about 15 minutes for a skilled player. On "Easy" with no fuel or ship limitations you can usually win within 20 minutes. My wife and 8 and 11 year old kids all seem to enjoy playing the game

I actually have a working game right now, but it's still very unpolished and many things I want to finalize are missing. The fonts I'm using right now are SDL_gfx defaults (I'll be moving to SDL_ttf soon), the whole right side of the screen will have graphics improvements, and at least two dozen other major things I want to implement or clean up. I have serious doubts I'll be able to get the frame rate down to a decent level for the Pandora. But I have been keeping the lid on this for a while and thought I'd share how far I've gotten.

Once things are more polished I'll likely share an alpha of the game here. Even if I can't get this working with a decent frame rate on Pandora, I am going to release it even if it's just a Windows/Linux desktop application.

 

[GregorR]

License?

 

[TrevorBradley]

License?

It will be free. Might be open source too, haven't made up my mind.

 

[gaterooze]

That sounds very cool, Trevor.

 

[Trip]

Looks great
As much as I love violent games (beat'em ups etc.), I can still appreciate something like this and look forward to it being released.
Any plans of adding an AI opponent with it only being multi-player?

 

[plopperz]

This game sounds amazing! Really hoping you'll get it running on the Pandora.
*Blogged*

Any plans of adding an AI opponent with it only being multi-player?

....Or even just a "race against the clock" mode?

EDIT: Just so I have the right idea, will this be somewhat similar to Ur-Quan Masters/ Star Control II?

 

[cbox]

My God, it's full of stars!

 

[Tobriand]

That sounds awesome, and exactly the sort of thing I find extremely fun. Indiana Skywalker meets Elite can't make a bad game, I think!

Any plans for pirates to play a role, or are you going with the idea that space is so damn vast the chances of meeting a pirate in the same sector are negligible?

 

[stustaff]

WOW massive and very impressive, got me interested.

BUT WAIT!
How did you come up with 40,000,000 uniquely named stars???

a1, a2...b1,b2....c1.....aa1, ab1, ac1... etc etc ???

 

[dockthepod]

Very cool. Best of luck with this.

 

[Wolfsclaw]

Wow thats a damn original game, it sounds superb.
If Multiplayer means Wifi Multiplayer, I can imagine myself playing for hours with it. Or maybe I will already do that in singleplayer mode...

 

[Bramrash]

Looks awesomme, and can I add another vote for pirates?

Can't wait to try it out.

 

[cosurgi]

Is it possible to configure bigger font? I have a good sight, so there's no reason to make it worse by using it to the extremes. (I prefer to use it to the extremes when looking at moon or venus through a telescope )

 

[Esn]

I can't quite visualize it in my head, but it does sound interesting. It would be cool if it was somewhat like Ur-Quan Masters or Starflight.

I might be interested in painting some aliens, if you would ever need that sort of thing.

 

[TrevorBradley]

Awesome, glad to get some responses!

Here's some answers back...

AI multiplayer is going to be a bit difficult. There's a lot of tricky decision making on where to go next. The algorithms for displaying "excluded" areas of the galaxy are tricky enough, getting an AI to figure out where to go would be even harder. It is possible though. A race against the clock is definitely possible. Presently the clock ticks upwards and gives a final time at the end of the game, there's no reason why it can't tick down. Multiplayer DEFINITELY means Wifi. It's why I've been antsy about the Pandora's Wifi antenna.

Pirates: I hadn't even considered this. The only other ships I was think about were opponents and a tow truck to deliver fuel to ships in need. I'll give this some serious thought. Any ideas what the pirates would actually do? Steal cargo from ships that were lured to a star system perhaps?

Comparisons to Star Control II: This game is very much inspired by Star Control II/Ur Quan masters, one of my favourite games of all time (a side shout out to Senor Quack for porting UQM to GP2X). One of the very first things I implemented was the "Galaxy Zoom", which smoothly slides from one scale to another. Basically this game is like traveling through hyperspace a lot. I had actually started implementation of a planetary system view, where you actually had to find the planet or moon in a star system, but it totally wrecked the game flow. A full galaxy with planets and moons will have to wait for another game.

Font size: The fonts right now suck. I'm using the default fonts in SDL_gfx, and they're not the prettiest. I actually asked about font size in the dev forums a few weeks back. The very smallest fonts on the screen right now, SDL_gfx's default 8x8 font, in the overview area (star types, etc) and the words "minimap" and "cargo" will NOT be used. It's totally unreadable on a screen the size and resolution of the Pandora. They'll be replaced with graphics. The other fonts, the 9x15B font on the Alien Interface screen likely will be the smallest used. All that being said there's still a fair amount to cram in there. I've been told the smallest font I plan on using is still readable, but I'll have to check myself. My eyesight isn't the best either and if it's not readable I'll have to go with something else. I'm hoping to move to SDL_ttf and get different fonts, but readability is a top concern.

Uniquely named stars (and artifacts) isn't as hard as it sounds. There are on the order of 100,000,000 stars (10^8). My star names are all four syllables presently of the form CONSONANT VOWEL. 20 consonants (excluding q) and 5 vowels give 100 combinations per syllable, four syllables give 10^8 combinations. It was a hokey interim solution at first, but it's kind of growing on me. The consonant/vowel thing gives the names a bit of a Japanese sound. There's a possibility of expanding the syllables to something else, but the names will be longer. The artifacts are similar... three types of artifacts, three words to describe (*adjective* *noun* of the *noun*)... I need 143 words for each field... so 143^3 unique artifact names. Multiply that all by 3 for each artifact. My wife has been working on the 9*143 descriptive nouns/adjectives and is enjoying the job... something creative to think of when she gets bored at work.

Painting Aliens: I *DO* need help with this. I was trying to figure out how to do it myself as I'm not too artistically inclined. Basically I need frames similar to an animated gif at 160x160... just a few to create an illusion of motion (and perhaps better yet if only one portion of the frame is animated like a mouth, as Blitting animation takes up valuable CPU cycles!). The thing is, I'm not yet convinced the aliens should actually be aliens! I'm thinking they may be different factions of humans who have colonized the galaxy.. The Ancients are interested in ancient artifacts, but are also computer experts (need advanced computers to detect non metallic-futuristic things from afar). The industrialists pine for the days when you could travel far and wide as you want, and specialize in faster ships with bigger fuel tanks (think SUVs). The futurists are the hippy eco-car driving types who improve fuel efficiency and miniaturize cargo space. As for painting other things, my cargo icons presently stink, and I need to work on some graphical "framework" for the right hand side of the screen... a frame for cargo items, new cargo icons, a better frame for the ship interface (fuel, cash, ugprades) that I can draw on, pictures of stars, animations on zooming into stars, animations of aliens... some sort of graphic framework for the zoomed out sector overview... I think that's the list.

You guys are showing a lot of enthusiasm... I'm thinking I'm going to get a good reception even if the game is in an unfinished and (slightly) buggy state. If the game was more unfinished I would fear that the negative reviews would drain my enthusiasm for working on the thing.. but everything here is driving me forward!

Lemme whip up a Windows/Linux shared zip file and share. Better to get the cool ideas now that totally smash the architecture of what I'm doing than later when I can't change it. Should be up in an hour or so.

 

[Tobriand]

Well, for pirates, I was thinking of two possibilities.

The first would be some method of ambushing the player. Pirates might lure them in with false clues to artifacts or resources or whatever you're trying to find and then attack - leaving the player options of either running away (probable if you want to preserve non-violence) or of facing off with them using some kind of ship-to-ship combat mechanism (if you're being non-violent just because that's how it turned out rather than because you want the game to be non-violent).

In terms of realism, I don't consider the first that likely, because unlike with trading games, there's no good reason for the player to have a full hold worth looting at that stage.

Alternatively, and more realistically, if players arrange potential deals via radio-transmissions, maybe pirates simply listen in to where the exchange is likely to take place and then ambush the ship near there, before proceeding to sell the artifact to - probably - the very same dealer the player was planning to for much less work. After all, if you're an intergalactic art dealer in a space so big no-one can police it, you're probably just happy you found what you were looking for, and aren't too bothered about who sold it to you or what they did with the bodies.

There is also, of course, the option left open for either a gameplay mechanic extension here or a different game entirely based on roughly the same engine where the player controls a pirate instead and does precisely what I've described - listens in for prospective deals, ambushes one of the participants, and then closes the deal themselves. If you want to avoid pirate-players attacking real-players, then making it a sister-game might be the way to go with every astroarcheologist being a computer.

To continue in thoughts about underhand extensions, incidentally, what about faking artifacts? They'd seem to have two uses.
First: you could jettison them if attacked by pirates - they might be fooled into thinking you'd given them your cargo and escaped.
Second: you could sell to more than one buyer (if the artifact is especially desirable) at a cost to reputation, and possibly, life (if the one who gets the fake decides to put a bounty on your head).

And of course, if you like looking at a big collection of hard-found artifacts, then maybe you'll sell the fake just so your own set will get bigger.

Speaking of which, theming artifacts might make that a more attractive proposal.

As you can tell, this is one of those things where ideas could *easily* spiral out of possibility and proportion (I've already mentioned pirates, reputation, fakes, multiplicity of buyers and weaponry) so I'll stop there for now. Take on, or ignore, as appropriate .

 

[TrevorBradley]

I've released the alpha binary... have a look and you'll get a quick idea of what fits and what doesn't.

The ships eventually travel so fast that any concept of "chasing" doesn't make sense unless it's in the very early game when the player is already pretty crippled. False information, as you'll see, would be completely evil, as the game and its excluded zone mapping relies on multiple sets of 100% accurate information... anything false would totally throw you off and leave you completely frustrated.

Having the pirates luring you in with a false alien/artifact signal and then chasing or stealing from your ship might be a possibility. I'm uncertain how this would fit in with the present game flow.

I'll give that pirate idea some serious thoughts though. Thanks!

 

[atomicthumbs]

Neat!

 

[PokeParadox]

Seems like a neat idea/project. Good luck with it

 

[Frogboy]

Looks awesome!

You should call it Trevor's Game and then throw a hissy fit when Nintendo snubs you.