Stellar Expansion

Community Forums/Showcase/Stellar Expansion

-Rick-(Posted 2014) [#1]
Working on a 4x game and have given myself the challenge of completing it to playability by the end of the year. At this point I've been working for about 2 months.

Single player game against AI opponents (up to 7). The environment consists of 50 to 150 Stars arranged in various "Galaxy Patterns" such as Spiral, Clumped, Ringed, and Evenly Dispersed. Each star has 1 to 10 planets.

While the pace of the game is time oriented with variable speed and pause, it still plays much like a turn based game. There are a lot of features that I would like to describe, but I'm still in the early Alpha stages and much has not yet been implemented so those features might change.

I wanted to get a few images out there because I've been getting some greatly appreciated help on a couple issues and thought seeing what I'm doing might give a better understanding of the things I describe.

I really have no place other than facebook to post images to so am hoping that there aren't any issues with people having access to see them. Let me know if there are.

Click here to see a couple screenshots

Little disappointed out how bad the images look. Their original size is 1024x768. Between the the jpg conversion and the reduced size from facebook they came out pretty crappy. Probably should also point out that all the images currently in there are just placeholder images. Intend to sexy things up a lot more once I have the code stabilized and running more completely.


feeble1(Posted 2014) [#2]
I really like the look of your gui.


-Rick-(Posted 2014) [#3]
Added in a few more screenshots to better display the different galaxy shapes in game generation.


*(Posted 2014) [#4]
Nice kinda the same route I'm going with Star Rogue :)


-Rick-(Posted 2014) [#5]
Worked up a technology Tree Creator that I'll be using to create my various game technologies. It creates a .dat file that can then be used by another program.

If no .dat file exists it starts off with a few basic technologies. The "Save File" turns red if it detects that there have been changes as a reminder to save and update the file.

It has 12 technology fields ranging from propulsion to materials to spying. Each field can track up to 5 levels of a technology. You can tie technologies together to become available only after other technologies have been researched and even mark those older technologies as becoming 'obsolete' once the new technology has completed researching. Clicking on a technology shows its specifics.

Each tech also lets you set 64 modifiers that are color coded to specific tasks. For example, gray is used for over-all values like the cost to build the technology, if it can go on ships or planets, cost, etc while black fields are related to spying modifiers.

I also put in a tech tree viewer to display what technology paths are required to reach that technology - however that part is a little buggy and needs more work. It lists all required techs for each branch and doesn't optimize by taking out duplicate techs. And I think its not entirely accurate in how it connects them together. Its just something I wanted to take a stab at but felt wasn't critical enough to perfect at this time in my own program using this.

Just thought this might be interesting or useful for some people.