Exploration: Dyson Sphere

One of the main goals for this game, besides exciting spaceship combat, is a sense of exploration and discovery. Our real universe is full of amazing, bizarre and mind-blowing stuff. A science fiction universe should be double so. Besides encountering bizarre celestial phenomena like black holes, pulsars and strange planets, there's the possibility of stuff that we've only dreamed of, like ancient derelict craft, wormholes, and artifacts terrible and wondrous.

In this latest concept art piece for a player ship design, I asked the artist to show it in the context of a Dyson Sphere. The player, having discovered the signal necessary to unlock its portal, prepares to descend into its interior. What will you find inside?

Dialog System

I spent about half of this week working on the dialog system. Rather than fall into the Not Invented Here trap and rolling my own, I investigated some existing solutions and eventually decided on ChatMapper to create the dialog trees (technically graphs, but everyone calls them trees) and Pixel Crusher's Dialogue System to handle the interaction in game.

Both products work well and are certainly have more features than anything I would have come up with in a reasonable time frame. I encountered several quirks that slowed me down and their documentation could be better organized, but Pixel Crusher's support has been very responsive-- I reported a bug and a question and a patch was posted within 12 hours.

This is not the final UI, but I now have a working in-game dialog. In my current prototype, when the player approaches the Saurid station a dialog appears and the player can converse with the commander.

In-game dialog window on top of the ChatMapper tool I'm using.

The next step is to add hooks into the dialog system's variables and logic, so that I can tie the interaction with the game-- e.g., the if the player discovers something that the Saurid might know about, this would appear as an option in the response menu. Or in the other direction, an interaction in the dialog might trigger some game change, such as starting a mission or adding information to the player's map.

Btw, if anyone knows of any good resources for dialog tree design, let me know!

Game Website

Another quick post to say that the game now has its own website: http://www.starcomnexus.com/

There's a new 60-second video up there, showing the current state of development.

Giogio is starting a fresh round of concept art to illustrate some more aliens, ships and other game features. I'm pretty excited about these!

Concept Art

Just a quick post to show off some concept art that Giorgio Grecu has done for the game.

Small, fast player ship.

Saurid Commander. The Saurid will be one of the first alien races you encounter in the game.

Alien capital ship