Discovery Gaming Community

Greetings ladies and gentlemen.

I'm a Unity3D developer and I've been working on an arcade space sandbox game for four months. I've decided to wait until I have some content to show before I started marketing the game. So I figured, where else could I find a potentially interested crowd than here?


How it all started

Discovery Freelancer brought me and my friends many hours of fun and memories from simpler times. Motivated by my love for space games and with the knowledge of game development at my disposal, I've decided to start my own little project. I want this project to revive that feeling I've had when I played Freelancer as a kid, the curiosity and the amazement with what I'd seen and what I'd been a part of.
So before you ask; no, this is not a Freelancer clone or successor. The game (which still has no title apart from the working name, SpaceSim) is inspired by the best aspects of some of the games I've played, most notably Freelancer and the X series. Having said that, it has certain unique features that none of the mentioned games have. In the past several months I've implemented quite a number of features, but much more is still to come. I enjoy working on this project and I hope to one day (rather soon hopefully) release the game for everyone. Do keep in mind that I have a zero budget for the entire game, so I'm either creating the content myself or using free content. Also, I have a day job so I work on the game in my free time, which is only about 2 to 3 hours per day. Therefore please curb your expectations.

Development videos

On the following Youtube account I post development previews of the project every two to three weeks, so you can see how the game has progressed since its earliest days and all the features that were added. Sincress Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUThNkm...p6RExi3lpg
Please subscribe if you want to stay up to date with the development. This is the latest dev preview:


I need your help!

Your feedback and ideas are very welcome and appreciated, however I also need your help! Since I haven't been able to reach any audience so far, I'd be thankful if you guys spread the news and told about this project to your friends and anyone who is interested, if you find my work interesting and see the potential in this project. I also work on this project completely alone, I do the development alone, the art, and the modelling too. If anyone wishes to contribute to the project, that would be welcome too (want to see your ship in the game?).

Features

Currently I've implemented the ability to own and command multiple ships (like in X games) with basic autopilot commands (dock, move, attack, follow, patrol, etc). The current development build has five ships, of which some are small ships (which dock to stations internally) and some are large ships (which use mooring points and dock externally). There are also jumpgates which, apart from changing systems, serve as ship spawnpoints. I'm planning to make a system editor which will enable me to make and deploy several sectors per hour. The game will feature two main factions which will fight for territorial domination, and a number of smaller factions (pirates, civilian and merchant factions). The player will be able to pick a side and battle for conflicted sectors. Additionally, as a reward for serving for each of the main factions, it will be possible to unlock special faction-specific ships in the form of a tech tree. Multiplayer is not planned (it's a lot of work and I don't want to make promises I can't keep) however since it's Unity, nothing is out of the question.

The full feature list is in the attachments. Thank you Discovery Freelancer!

looking good so far

looking pretty decent, but man change that annoying dubstep music to something more immersive

I like it! Especially those things:
- overall Freelancer-esque feeling of flight and POV;
- LOVING the turret controls (auto-fire, manual, hold fire);
- nice and clear starmap with scanner tracking contacts & relative positions;
- of course Unity is a great choice of engine;
- dynamic asteroids;
- loving the overal vibe of it all;

I wonder if you would be willing to share some code for certain features to aid Ichiru's Librelancer project: https://librelancer.github.io/
We would be very grateful if a sort of "collab" could ensue so both projects may benefit from eachother!

I like what i see so far, keep it up and good luck.

Thanks for the comments so far. I hope you people will keep following the project!

Sturmwind, I pick the music from my library to match the video length once I've finished editing it. Sorry about that heh.

Eigos, thank you so much, and yes, I'd certainly love to collaborate, it's mutually beneficial!
I'm familiar with the Librelancer project, the work done is more than amazing.

looks wonderful, i like the moving big asteroids. turret view is interesting

great work! May I ask how you developed the AI?

(01-24-2018, 06:21 PM)Rotorist Wrote: [ -> ]great work! May I ask how you developed the AI?

Well the first step was designing a PID controller which controlled ship's steering actions. Throttle is controlled depending on the distance to target.

Ships have an AI controller which takes orders. Each order has an Update method which computes the current step depending on the environment and the ship status.
I've currently got Move, Idle, Dock At, Patrol waypoints, Attack Target and Attack All Hostiles orders. The player can command their own ships and the other factions' ships are given commands automatically when spawned.

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&...dl6mpHY-QW
Keep the pictures within the rules. ~Inferno

I'd love to see a more popular game revolving around FULL-orbit capabilities like Hellion and Kerbal Space.

Thoughts on how to begin work on a good space game would be:

1. More thinking == more time spent and frustration on the project.
2. Address common space-sim problems, like full dampeners, fuel, energy, O2, and general maintenance.
3. Keep in mind that more you work on a system more data it will need to process.
4. Suggest which orbit style you prefer, static = FL feel, or dynamic, Kerbal feel.
5. Finally. The most important thing is balance, especially when it comes to MP.

I like the 3rd person concept, I personally gravitate to 1st person flight though, and reserve 3rd person to a 'tactical' view like for turrets, engineering, & maintenance.