Brainfold

Christmas was nice. I finally got a new monitor (Samsung 2232BW) to replace my old CRT with a horrible picture, so that was good. Actually I didn’t get it yet because I’m still at my parents’, so I’ll have to wait until next week when I get back to my place. This is relevant for game development because until then, I’m stuck with writing code on my laptop, which tends to go much slower than on my desktop computer. On the other hand, I’ve been reading a lot on various subjects, so that counts as progress too even if there aren’t much concrete results.

I also bought Fundamentals of Game Design by Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings for myself, and so far it looks good. Inspired by the book, I finally wrote a very rough concept for Red Nebula and its first milestone:

Red Nebula is a sci-fi strategy game of the 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate) genre.

Notable features include:
- A procedurally generated, dynamic world
- Emphasis on exploration, as I feel it’s an aspect of the genre that’s been seriously neglected
- Try to avoid some ugly cliches of the genre, such as “Star Trek” aliens and implausible combat

Milestone 1 implements the procedurally generated world in some degree. Main gameplay content are various scenarios, such as “eight colonization fleets were sent from Earth to an unexplored star cluster, let each player control one fleet”. These scenarios can vary in scale, and contain static elements in addition to the procedurally generated world. The milestone concentrates on playing as humans; no sentient alien species will be included. The exact scale and scope of this milestone haven’t been decided yet, though most likely it will be on fleet level rather than individual ship level.

Now, Milestone 1 is really a full game in itself, so there will definitely be sub-milestones. After Milestone 1 is complete (or abandoned ), I will review the situation and decide if I want to continue with expanding the concept or doing something else altogether.

For now, I’m still working on getting rendering working again. I fully switched from Pygame to Pyglet as my main “platform” library, and I’m glad I did, since it’s much easier to work with. Basic resource management also works again, and now I’m working on scene management and the OpenGL rendering plugin simultaneously. As soon as I get some really basic rendering working, I’m going to start working on the game, and let that fully drive development on the engine side.

Tags: game design, Pyglet, Red Nebula