This game idea spans back from the 80's from a demo effect I used to do on the Amiga. Back then the Amiga didn't have the power to do the game idea I had spinning around my tiny brain but now there is no reason not to make it. So, when IV broke up for the Xmas holidays I sat back and gave myself the challenge to see how much of it I could get done before the 5th of Jan. I had to get permission from the Grande Fromage before blogging about it here but this is a screenshot of how far I have got to date:
Getting to that stage was murder. You can read up on the exact details here: www.xiotexstudios.com but in short it involved one Mac that decided to die on me at a very crucial point on New Years eve and tonight a chair that decided that my mass far out-weighed it's upper weight limit and promptly decided to meet the great chair maker in the sky. Still, the chair kicking the bucket prompted me to go on a diet so not all bad.
So far everything is a work-in-progress which means that the graphics you see there are likely to change drastically before I reach the final version - especially the HUD. I kind of like the style of rendering I have the AI units - which is currently represented by a Torus but like the rest of the game I am working on a procedural system to provide the form of the final AI units. Like Chris has mentioned in the past lots of content can kill a game and it's just myself working on this in my spare time so everything that can be procedurally generated is procedurally generated - even the gameplay to a certain extent. This is especially important in this game because the gameplay takes place across unlimited number of infinite 'planes' and obviously I can't produce enough content to fill that lot up. There will be a certain amount of pre-generated stuff in there to allow me to drive the main gameplay element of the game and to avoid the obvious balancing issues that a procedurally generated game can raise.
As can be seen from the screenshot the viewpoint of the player is similar to an FPS game and to a degree this game has a 'feel' of FPS about it but at its core is strategy mixed with a free-roaming 'do what you want' exploratory aspect. I basically want a vast world the player can get lost in. Each plane has it's own set of rules about how it looks and behaves and also the type of AI that you can encounter. As I mentioned above I have been playing with a procedural system for generating the form of AI, how it looks rather than how it behaves but that may be way off being in a form that can be demonstrated but my hopes are high!
- CW09
Ironically, the guys who were Assembly Line later became SN Systems - who I used to work for.
