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Supernova 2: resources allocation

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Today I was playing with the resources screen. It will be one of the 3 main screen of the management part of the game. They are: Resources, Galaxy Map and Build.

In resources you have to distribute your resources to the various field, in percentage. The total percentage will be 100%, and leaving unused resources give no advantage.

I thought about using a finite-resource system. I did some experiments though and doesn’t seem a good idea because it could lead to bad gameover and frustration for the player. So the resources will be unlimited, but will have a rate per turn.

For example if you control 1 starsystem you’ll have 15million of minerals and 20million of population grow each turn (just random numbers), while if you control 2 you’ll have a higher amount. So conquering new starsystem will only increase the production/research/population growth each turn – but you won’t be forced to conquer new ones because your resources are about to end.

In any case in terms of gameplay won’t change much – the more starsystem you own, the stronger you become. So the only difference is that you won’t run out of raw materials to produce units or out of space to grow population, that would be a bit strange since we talk about whole starsystems and not even just “one planet” 😀

The game will be more about balancing between research, military, production and population. I need more powerful military units, or more population? I need more scientist to research or more engineers to increase production? that sums up the core of the management part of the game.

Supernova 2: Select your faction!

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The select you faction screen is done 🙂 not much work, but had to render nice backgrounds for the 2 factions (Blue Army and Blood Legion) and their leader. Sometimes coding is like paiting. When you had the inspiration, you make very big steps in so few time!!! today I’ll finish the game setup screen. You can see an almost finished screenshot below:

If you click to enlarge it, you can see the main options that will be in the game. You’ll have 3 winning conditions:

  1. Galaxy Conquest: the factions that controls more than 75% of the whole galaxy wins the game.
  2. Kill Leader: it is possible to kill the enemy leader in battle to win the game. If disabled, the enemy leader will always be able to escape from battles.
  3. Technology Race: first one to discover the “Secret of Omniscience” technology wins the game.

Of course, if you completely destroy all the enemies you win anyway 🙂 but that was obvious.

The galaxy settings on the rights instead:

Galaxy Size: A larger galaxy will have increased travels costs thus delaying your encounter with enemy’s forces and will make the match last longer.
Planets Density: Planets density reflects how many planets each star system has. Lots of planets means bigger resources, few planets means less resources.
Minerals Planets: A high percentage of minerals planets will reduce your military and building costs.
Habitable Planets: A high percentage of habitable planets will help your population grow faster and increase your technology research speed.

I’m very happy with the results. As I said, this will not be a ultra-complex strategy game, but not a simplistic one either. Those settings should be enough for a long replayability of the title!

Now I’m off programming the main game interface. This will take more than a couple of days to finish!!

New game on development: Supernova 2

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The picture above is the main title of another game I started to develop in the last few days. Don’t worry, Tower Of Destiny is still in production, but since I am making the editor, will take surely much more time so I thought to alternate it with the development of another kind of game (to take a break from long rpg-coding session!).

It will be the sequel to Supernova: Galactic Wars, but this time will be a 100% strategy game (more like a wargame to be honest). It is a “galaxy conquest” kind of game, but the simulation part will use a macromanagement system, so you don’t have to deal to every single planet, even if you’ll have the data of every planet accessible.

For those of you brave enough to have played Master Of Orion 3 – the game won’t have all that depth of data. Instead will let you take “global” decisions, using all your resources at once, using percentage distributions. I’m still defining the storyboard right now, but that’s the idea.

The game will then switch to a old-style wargame once you have a battle to do. For now, only space battles even if in a future datadisk I could add even ground-level battles (conquest of bases, etc). The spacewar battle will be turn-based and strategic only – no real-time arcade combat sequences this time. This will let me concentrate on what I’m really good at -making good strategy/simulation games 😉

More info coming soon.

TOD: skills

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TOD skills screen

Took a break from the map, and finished the skills screen. As you can see, there are plenty of skills to choose from 🙂 You can re-roll the starting values, then fine-tune the skills you are more interested in, by spending the skill points available (this process will be identic also in the game everytime you level up).

You’ll add skill clicking on the + icons next to the values. Notice some skills are in red: this because the class I’ve choose in that screenshot (healer) is forbidden from learning some skills (like Dual Wield, or Black Magic!).

I’ll go back on the editor now. Will take quite some time. For sure making an editor will delay the game release after Christmas. But, on the other hand, will make me able to release episode 2-3 much faster than without it, and most importantly people will be able to modify in practice almost everything in the game.

Going to make the spells editor now 😀

TOD: map done

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I finally managed to make the map work! Everything seems to work fine. Zoom, pathfinding, fog of war. You can see a development screenshot below:

TOD map

you can see the fog of war in action. The icon in the center of the screen represent your party. Ok the rest is just walls and the floor, and on bottom you can spot a door 🙂 Not much else, the room is a bit empty now but I haven’t implemented items and monsters yet. I need first to make an editor for them and will take a while!!

Now that I have “visualized” the map, I’m going to resume and finish the character creation, and in particular the spells system. I don’t think I can have 180 different spells, so I’m probably going to:

1 – have some “common” spells between the various deities, and a few “special” ones that are reserved for each deity.

2 – reduce the number of spells you get each level. Now I reduced the maximum reachable level for episode 1 to level 5, so in theory I should have a new spell for each magic school (six) for each level (five) for a total of 30 spells for each deity, so 180 different spells total. I could reduce so that you get a new spells at level 1-3-5 so I would cut down the total number of spells to 108 (not that is easy anyway to come up with 108 unique spells!!).

I’m thinking to use method 1. I never seen a rpg with 108 spells anyway, and also as I previously saisd, I don’t want to just rename the spells but recycle old effects. Fewer spells but really different, this is the way I want to go 🙂