Just wanted to introduce myself to the group. I’m the lead designer / developer of our game named “Galactic Usurper”. The game concept started about 2 years ago over when myself and a group of friends were playing some board games. One of the people was fondly remembering a game he used to play on a BBS called “Dominion”. He described the game concept and I was hooked.
If I had to put the game into a single sentence, it would be “Conquer the galaxy and claim the empire for yourself.”
It took me a while to get it to work (thanks DosBOX!) and I managed to play around with it a bit. The game was a bit limiting, but it had some great concepts.
We immediately decided to try to do a “reboot” of the game. I spent about a year working on it as a pure HTML game, but in the end we decided that the original concept was just a bit too limiting for the modern age.
Thus, we come to now. We are in the process of taking the first attempt, and porting it to unity3d and expanding the game design quite a bit. The result is “Galactic Usurper”.
The main features planned for the game:
Simultaneous Turn Based Game - During the “turn”, you can play your actions. They all happen for all players at the same time. No one has any advantage based on when they decide to play.
True fog of war - you won’t know what’s out there without exploring and spying.
Actual travel time. If you want to invade another star system, it’s going to take multiple turns to get there…will what you were trying to do still work?
Star ship class customization - We hope this will get in, but we want the ability for people to craft their own “classes” of star ships so that you can customize how your fleet feels / works.
Please note that the game is VERY early in development, so there isn’t much there yet other than the login process. I’m starting to port more and more of the original code base every week. Also, it’s on Heroku as a free dyno right now, so if it takes a few seconds to boot up it just means that the dyno was spun down due to inactivity…it will come up.
Hello,
I click on the button to see the webplayer. Saw it wanted me to register/login. Then I left. You really should have a “play as guest” button. Also, I don’t want to register unless I see first what I’m getting as a reward for registering (more screenshots, etc.)
The idea sounds good so far but does not really offer something new in the "Turn Based Ship Game " field but if these mechanics are solid and pays well you will have enough to draw players in, i’m not one for the hole “Turn Based Combate” but i will be keeping my eyes on this project and can’t wait to see what you guys do with it.
Playing as a guest is a good idea, but I’m not sure how to handle it since the entire game rotates around “multiplayer games” (think board games that you are going to play over a long time - maybe a month or more).
I’d love to offer the ability to play as a guest, but I’m not sure how to make that work. Any ideas?
I agree that it doesn’t offer too much “new in the genre”. I’m mostly interested in building something and then taking in suggestions to make it better and more fun. We are very early on, so there is a lot of time to mutate ideas and design as players make suggestions.
I will say this - there won’t be much “turn based combat” in the game. Combat will be simulated. This isn’t a tactics game, it’s more of a higher level war simulation (think Risk: The Boardgame).
I’ve updated the game to have a “guest” login now. I thought of a way to handle it. Not 100% sure I like it, but it should remove that obstacle for anyone that feels like they don’t want to log in.
In addition, I’ve added auto login, so the game will remember you on your next visit.
That model kind of works. However, by taking a slot in a game you are altering the game itself. So if I let you into a live game, and you decide not to play you’ve made the game less fun for the other players. Multiply that by the number of guests and we have a ton of mostly empty games.
What about playing as a guest allows you to create a new game and if you want that game to be playable by others you have to convert to a real player?
The other alternative is to dump guests into a tutorial mode where they get a feel for the game?
Other ideas are welcome! I certainly don’t want to trick people into playing the game. I want to make it easy to get started and convert a % into loyal fans.
Not too much has changed yet, but I added the ports of the final 3 generators to our game creation screen. You can now create galaxies that are based on a sine wave, the Mandelbrot fractal, and the Julia fractal.
There is a bit more added to the game at this point. We’ve added a game selection screen and the basic parts of the “game join” logic so that you can become a player in the game. (Not that you can yet play the game - but at least you can be a player!)
I’ve also been working on the game generation logic on the server side. There is a more detailed post on our indiedb page about what we’ve been doing. I tend to post there more often than here, so if you want to track the game’s progress it’s probably the best place to watch.
