update 04-02-08:my spaceship game

[pathfinder]

The game

Heres a little update on how I see the game working. This part of the game will be demoted in time as a tutorial, or perhaps even dissolved into generating missions.

You own a small ship yard as well as being known to be one of the best pilots in the system (with a unique service). Clients come to you to provide custom ship/fleet solutions. Then you are commissioned to pilot them into the mission.

The starting mission will likely be to design a scout ship to survey a few planets for a mining company. Bonuses will be applied for various mini goals, time taken, quality of survey etc.

The current mission (demo im writing atm) is against a 'Drone fighter carrier'. However this is more to do with wanting to sort drone/battleship to battleship combat out first off. I am considering a Flagship system where you play the main ship. it is also possible to use previous designs (and create a fleet) though your control of these is limited to who to attack who to protect over the battlefield. Old school wargame points will likely apply.

please note graphics suck atm! They are only temp.

basic concept is somthing akin to defender/rampart, its long range combat, except for drone attacks. This will turn out to be a fire fight, still you will have too make sure that shield is covering the enemys big guns though. You design your own ship, then take it into combat. I hope to convert this into a more free roaming game in the future. However best to take little steps as im not known for finishing anything lol!

this is the designer, building certain items next to each other will give bonuses (much like supreme commander if youve played it). Im not sure if i will offer the full grid, or shape it for the player, depending on the ship. I sort of like the huge possibilites but then I will have to do some code to stop building parts seperate from the main ship lol.



this is the combat screen. The main enemy is the red dot. You pick the blue shield dot and rotate it. The yellow dot rotates the world about the ship. trying to rotate up to 225 ship parts was a little ugly ^^. every part can be hit.



ed/ drones have waypoints now. Probably will adapt movements depending on how good other captain is. Design waypoints using cad, rather than on the fly.

[pathfinder]

Okay, as this project is also doubling up as a learning tool for playbasic commands .... Ive been considering using shapes for the hull, this will get rid of the lego land look.

So I think I am going the route of Hard points that are near each other grouped into 1 shape. All other units grouped up as hull, hardpoints on top. Hits to hull will cause damage, too much damage causes random system failure (you dont want shields/power down)

Then weapons, radar, thrusters etc will be sprites outside and destructible.

update 20/02/08

okay things are getting serious now, So I have the ship taking damage. The thing is I dont want to create the shooting back routines/ rotation etc without considering how im going to display the ship. Currently the ship is displayed as ... well there are speccy games that look better :) Fair enough though i wanted my code up and running first.

I can write the shooting back code while I work on the graphics, i may need to code a few examples separate from the main project.

I think im going for an isometric view (no perspective) cutish anime style. I like mecha so im thinking of changing drones into mecha. Ship combat is going to be like starship operators (anime series) terrible name, must be the translation lol. Actually quite good though, the 3D bits make me wince a bit mind! But the series does show the kind of ship combat im looking for  :-*

http://www.anime.com/Starship_Operators/

Im temped to model parts in 3D and prerender the parts, especially the animation parts. However I will have to be careful, pre render can look awful Oo. Maybe ill black pen, texture the 3d parts, render it and put it into the game .. my head hurts.