I’m aware it’s not the best etiquette to not show something even if it’s unfinished, but hear me out.

I planned the entry to be based on my fully-fledged game as a prequel — perhaps to introduce would-be players to the universe of SoL and as such title it SoL: Plutocracy, where you play a dirty space pirate/merchant/hippy in the early years of Stardrive travel, before the war with the Stygians broke out and when Earth was still mostly a hegemonic plutocracy.  “Yes,” I thought, “that is brilliant!  The story meshes so well and considering the topic IS story-based, it’d be perfect.”

However, after building the game itself, I realised one thing: designing something entirely around dialogue in a game mostly derived from action is kinda difficult.  I wanted the meta-gameplay to be at least moderately fun or act as a diversion, but this would’ve taken longer than the 48 hours given.  I quickly realised all I had was really just graphical eye candy.  I can’t have that.

Regardless, I found this thoroughly interesting and challenging to give myself such constraints, as the last time I did a timed game challenge was well over a decade ago in the ZZT/Megazeux days (which a very select number of you might remember).

But I won’t leave you with nothing.  Here are a couple of screenshots:

The planets were textured with a Perlin noise generator that my team and I developed for SoL.  Almost all the graphics you see was procedurally generated.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2011 at 4:32 am and is filed under MiniLD #27. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.