Hello, it's Wes again. In my last post, I explained that I wanted to make a multiplayer space trading game. Now it's time to show off what I have accomplished so far. The Universal, which is the game that has inspired me to make this one, was a full 3d space experience. I don't think I could replicate that myself and I want to see some progress so I opted for another approach. I'll refer to this as subspace mode. The game will be played from a topdown view. Maybe in the future if I can put together a dev team, I can do a full 3D experience. Another factor that made me decide to do this is that subspace mode would make things easier to setup for mobile devices. I want to give players a chance to play on whatever platform they want.
What have I accomplished?
The first thing I did was make a ship sprite in Inkscape. It's a very basic placeholder for a ship. I also made a lazer sprite for later on when I add weapons. Then I opened Unity, set things up for how I want them, and I added the sprites to the project. I setup some basic rotational controls and I used Unity's built in UI system to make on screen sliders as input for thrust and steering. It took a bit of trickery to get it working how I wanted and now I'm happy with it. I made a script so the camera will follow the player and I threw in a temporary background so I could confirm that everything is working as I want. I also added a "Fire" button to the bottom right of the screen and linked it to the playership's Fire() function. Here's a screenshot of me flying around using the on-screen controls. The forest background is just to show movement because a solid colored background won't.
What's next?
The next thing I will be working on is a weapon firing system. I want weapons to be swappable and even though I'm only going to have two different weapons(red and green lazers) to start with, I want to ensure that I can add and swap weapons easily in the future. Lazer weapons will deplete a rechargable energy bar, so there's that to consider aswell. Also, I need to add a healthbar to the ship. Then, it will be a good time to start making this space game actually look like it is in space. I'll either make a parallaxing starfield or I'll use a 3D skybox and some programming magic to make it look nice. Once I get a little further into development, I'll upload some videos.
Anyways, it's time for me to get back to work. I hope you've enjoyed reading. Thank you for your support!
In case you missed it, here's my previous post about the game.
https://steemit.com/gaming/@wes773/join-me-on-my-game-making-adventure
great work
Thank you.
Interesting. It's been awhile since I've seen a spectacular space game. There were some decent space combat simulators, but they were basically just flight combat in space.
I remember a very old pc game (came on 3.5" diskettes) called "Nomad." that I really enjoyed back in the day. It was primarily resource management, with some combat and inter-planetary politics. The best part was that it was based on actual science. It's old, but it might be an inspiration, as well.
Good luck with your endeavor. I hope it's a success!
Thank you! I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this, but I know that I want players to figure things out themselves. Alliances will form between players and they will be left to sort the politics out themselves. For me the player interaction is what is going to make this a great space game.