(Star Trek) Broken Mirror 3: Rise of The Empire

Hey all! I’m here to expose a project that’s being made by me and a few friends. It’s a sci-fi simulation/strategy game based on the Star Trek Mirror Universe that’s the backbone of the Flash Trek: Broken Mirror universe. Having already 2 games made in Flash (2D), for the third instance we decided to use the Unity 3D game engine.

Here’s a small description:

“Having the Earth Empire (the federations counter-part in this mirror universe) and the remaining Alpha Quadrant been subdued under the Dominion, small pockets of resistance begun the fight to recover the quadrant. An alliance between the Klingons, Humans and Romulans remaining’s, begun the war to retake their previous empires. After twenty years of war, they finally succeeded in sending the Dominion back to the Gamma Quadrant, however at great cost. In Broken Mirror III, you’ll take the place of a Starfleet Captain, a KDF Officer, an RSE Captain, among others, in order to rebuild your civilization.

In your quest to unite the Alpha Quadrant and rebuild society as you know it, you’ll have the opportunity to explore star systems, execute missions and fight your enemies!”

And now a few screenshots too:
(The GUI design is still a concept and it’s not implemented yet)



And a few movies:

We’ve now a handfull more of feature implemented, but we’re still looking forward to implement:

  • a combat system capable of handling several factions in the same system;
  • a economic and production system based on imperial management;
  • several trade and combat mission;
  • a ranking system to unlock features and certain technologies;
  • others

So based on what I showed you guys here, do you have any recomendation that could help us improve our project?

EDIT: Forgot to add this is gonna be a full freeware game…

Well, someone needs to ask the obvious question, so you have the rights to Star Trek?
And if not, what are you planing to do with the game?

Of course we don’t… That’s why it will be a fan based game, with no monetary objctive at all… Pretty much a 100% free-to-play game…

I’d at least send an email to them and tell them your plans. Nobodys wants to see you get sued for $10 million! If they have a problem with it, you can always just have a different space-type game similar to your original concept. It looks pretty good!

Paramount allows non-commercial entities to use Star Trek. HOWEVER that does mean 100% noncommercial - that means no selling the game, no ads on the game website, no donation button, nothing.

And those conditions are met…

Thanks… The concept itself it’s already old, since the first Broken Mirror, almost 8 years ago… However, in Broken Mirror II it was improved, and now, we’re repeating the feat, by adding new stuff, like combat missions, gradual fleet building (if you wanna build, you have to wait x days, instead of an instantaneous purchase (still available if you buy ships to foreign powers though)), and some other stuff…

And yes, we wouldn’t want that! Fortunatelly CBS and Paramount use to ignore those cases where there’s no profit involved at all…

It’s really not that silly of a question. There are LOTS of games made with Unity that use approved ip’s. I would just make it and let the pieces fall. Most IP wranglers have enough common sense to recognize free publicity when they see it. So long as you don’t turn a buck that is. The only people who stomp on projects are Fox, Sony and Tolkien’s benificiaries.

EDIT: used to be Disney too, but they tried to sue a children’s shelter and learned thier lesson.

No, it isn’t a silly question at all! And yeah, indeed, CBS and Paramount have been benevolent towards non-profitable fan works… Lets hope they keep it that way :stuck_out_tongue:

More news: here’s a new concept GUI for the “hail station” dialog:

On the left side, you have the station name, the faction logo, and four buttons that allow you to toggle the buttons between ships, stations, weapons and technologies. On the right side, you can pick a Ship from a list and several options that allow you to trade your current ship with a new one (with a small price reduction, something like 40% of your ship initial cost), buy that ship for the fleet (with no cost reduction), or buy the blueprints so you can build the ship on your own stations (costing raw material instead of credits though)…

This looks fun. I only have one lament: no LCARS style GUI. :frowning:

It’s a shame Paramount holds LCARS by the throat, I always loved that GUI style…

Oh yeah, I also love that GUI style. However, this is a mirror verse (you know, the Terran Empire one), and we’re trying to go for a darker design. Also, there is a lot of projects (for example Star Trek: Excalibur, a game based on the NanoFX Evolved Engine, that’s currently in development) who use the LCARS, and we’re trying to do a different thing here.

Looks really nice. Reminds me of Star Trek Online, which is pretty much my favorite game right now.

I have like 3 LCARS apps for my ipad/iphone. There’s no way they are “holding it by the throat”

I guess it’s mostly for paid apps… Still that proves the point that the LCARS is getting too much common out there, so, we’re trying to do something different…

Thanks for the compliment!

EDIT: Also, one thing I forgot to add! Our facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/bm.rise

And here’s the newest Development Log, starring Chris Cameron (my partner)! Hope you guys enjoy it! :smile:

And, after a few months, we’ve a new Development Log… This time starring me (João Borrego):

Here’s the video description:

And here’s the 5th Development Log, this time more oriented towards the design part of the project, starring Chris and Tristan Cameron:

Greetings everyone! I’m Chris Cameron, the project director of BM3 (now known as STBM). You’ve already met my partner in crime and ace coder Joao Borrego (he’s been doing incredible work, no seriously!).

It looks like it’s been a while since anyone posted any updates on the project in this thread here and seeing as I’ve been spending the week on an exposure rampage, I’ve made my way here to update and clarify some things! Firstly, to re-address some of the copyright concerns of making something under the guise of Star Trek, CBS is, like Joao said, usually quite benevolent towards fan productions. The main reason being that at one point in time they tried to stop them, but it sort of spiralled out of control and just couldn’t be stopped so I guess they took a “if you can’t beat em, join em” stance. They do have some stipulations (such as not being able to make something from the JJverse) and of course not selling the product (which we are not). You can ask for donations, but only if it can be proven that the donations were solely for specific needs (in the case of fan films, electric bills for example) and that a receipt for such things could be furnished upon request. What’s going on there is that you’re not asking for donations to make money for Star Trek per se, but you’re asking donations for things that you physically require. For example, we just purchased web hosting (which cost more than I’d hoped) and technically, we could ask for donations to pay for the web server (but I believe we’d have to cut the donations off if we reached what it cost for the server, meaning no profits.) As a whole though, we’re pretty much staying away from asking for money because we don’t want to really get into those technicalities and grey areas. There are certain things we’re looking at that we’d love to have (the Space Construction Kit for example) so it’s possible that we might ask for some donations down the road for that (cause it’s 85 bucks per license and we’d need two of them!). We’re also making STBM with Unity Free and of course that has already presented certain limitations. We keep working around them and re-adapting (which usually means scaling back the original vision) but that’s what’s going to have to happen because it’s a lot more viable to scale back than to try and purchase two Unity Pro licenses for a game that we won’t see a cent from. We can justify a 170 dollar expense in the Space Construction Kit, but not a 3000 dollar expense for Unity Pro!

Okeydokeys, and with all of that preamble out of the way, onto what we’ve accomplished since the last update here!

The last thing it looks like you folks had posted was Development Log #5. There have been three more devlogs in that time, but instead of posting each individual one, I’ll just post the playlist. Our most recent devlogs focused on our Unity workflow, the GUI and creating shields for the starships.

We’ve also posted a couple quick clips of gameplay (mostly just combat and collision stuff) but still pretty neat to watch, especially if you don’t get to see the game in action every day like Joao and I do!

We’re still only really working on the mechanics side of things. So it’s pretty much just fly around, shoot at the (stationary) enemy ship and burn up if you get too close to earth. We’ve not really been doing much to make it look good graphically yet, simply because things are in such flux that it’s better to have the mechanics and code locked down. Fortunately, once the mechanics are in place, that will essentially be most of the groundwork for the game in general.

We plan to release the game as a smaller core version, that way the public can have something to play instead waiting endless years and losing interest. Once the core version is released, we’ll continue to expand upon it and release the expansions until it is “complete.”

This past week of spent a great deal of time trying to beef up and “rebrand” the game’s audience some. I put a lot of focus into the social networking side of things and created a new website, blog and Twitter profile. We still have our Facebook page and Youtube channel too and we post to those quite regularly.

I almost forgot, pretty much the entire project’s pre-production and whatnot can be found on Google Drive and some stuff is even open for the public to help edit if they should choose too.

And finally, to alleviate the big blocks of text, I shall end this post with some images!

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Looks fun! Maybe add rift support as well just for giggles.

Looks a really good game at the moment. If it were out right now , I would download it!
After watching the first 2 dev posts, a couple quick thoughts:

  • When you’re targeting a enemy , will you get a GUI targeting right to tell you who you’re targeting?(In the case of slightly larger battles).
    *Any different camera views?(Cockpit , undercarriage).
    *Enterprise health and ray cool-down time GUI?

But as I said , I would download this game if it were out now. Good progress , looking forward to future developments.

Hawx