Screenshot, progress, idea
Screenshot

So yeah here is first screen shot I am posting.You can see sun, two colonized planets, and 3 other planets that are not yet colonized + many moons
Progress
Unfortunately I am bit tired from long week + have many other things piled up from week so I had only some 8 hours to work on the idea… And it progresses very slowly
Also some technical parts of it gave me problems as I have pretty large maps that should be zoomed out/in a lot and still look well and do not lag… Ending up with pretty simple representation in vectors because of it. Also fog of war without lags took some time and looks very simplistic… Ahh… Anyways I almost finished minimalistic part and will probably switch to doing interface/start menu/game over/help screens soon.
Idea
As I wrote yesterday I went with space exploration theme based on my older idea for a game. It basically is based on single game mechanic of lunching rockets in a solar system with more or less real gravitation physics.
I picked this theme because it scales well and seemed as minimal part of it would not be that technically complicated. Well I was little bit wrong… Anyways at max this idea would give me kind of civilization+rocket physics combo. You have mother planet from which you can lunch satellites to find new planets and explore their environment and territories, then prepare colony ship for some territory on planet surface (say ocean or mountains or something) and start lunching probes trying to land them on the territory you want. When successful you lunch colony ship on the same trajectory, if you miss you loose the ship, if you hit you get new colony which you can then expand getting new lunch site + resources + experience etc etc. You can expand the idea in any direction like adding meteorites, aliens, etc…
And idea minimum would be some more casual game where you need in short period of time to colonize as many planets as possible without any resources/ship types/experience and level up complications. Well in the end I am going for this minimum
Other things to do and damn how slow and unproductive I am this time
Spending hours on some things worth 15 minutes…. Well at least I will have something playable this time.
Well back to work.
Tags: idea, progress, screenshot
Interesting, we had a Gravity Wars revival discussion a while back on #ld. Hope to see some funky rocket trails!
Ahh… So far all my tries to make it look fancier failed… Kills performance pretty fast and I need a lot of things on the screen (5 solar systems x 9 planets x 0-3 moons + 30 or more rockets/satellites and all that on a map that scales from planet size(300×300) to whole map size (40k x 40k). May be after the compo when I will have time I will try to add some effect again and not ruining performance…