Category Archives: tycoongames

Games that are or will be available on my newsite tycoongames.eu

Supernova 2: taxation!

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I’m almost done with the empire resource allocation screen, which is the macro-management core of the game, but I am encountering a problem… take a look at the screenshot below (click to enlarge it):

supernova 2 resources allocation

every “social class” has a PRIMARY and SECONDARY impact on the game, from the officers improving your ship accuracy and view in the fog of war, to the engineers extracting more raw materials and increasing production speed.

The problem is population now. What it should do? ok increase the current population size up to the max population cap – but I can’t make it have an influence on all the other categories as I thought originally. That would make a mess I think, and also would unbalance the game – once one of the two faction had conquered more than 60-70% of the stars they would surely win, if the other categories performance is influenced by the population amount… in practice there won’t be any chances to reverse the situation once one faction starts to have more population than the other.

I could make the influence on other categories smaller than what I thought, but I think I found another way, a better one – taxation 😀

Population = taxes = more money to the empire. That’s what happened in whole human history so far… the government always want more population, to increase the amount of taxation. But what would be money spent in? It could be a sort of bonus like in Civilization game. Spend 100 gold/credit to instantly discover a new technology, or build a new ship blueprint, and so on. Since my game will use macro-management, I have to think well about how to implement the whole money feature. For example if you go in red, what happens? since both faction are empires, there could be population revolts, and some starsystem could turn neutral!

Yes, I think I’ll go this way. With this system also you can’t conquer quickly all the starsystem. You must first populate the existing ones to increase your empire economic growth, sustaining its expansion on the space 🙂

Supernova 2: resolution change

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So I “converted” Supernova 2 into 800×600 and now I must admit that looks much better. You have also to scroll less in the galaxy map screen, which is another positive effect. Now that I think about it, was stupid to start a new game in 2007 using a low resolution like 640×480, expecially for a strategy game. I’m able to put much more information on each single screen now!

A quick update also about my future projects: even if my last post about Tower of Destiny is dated 30th june, I’m still working on that game but a very slow pace, because I’m currently moving from my region to another… anyway, my plan is still to release Supernova 2 before Christmas and TOD before next summer. I really hope to respect those deadlines! 🙂

New server and introducing Tycoon Games!

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In past 2 days I upgraded to a new server (again)… actually was like a forced upgrade since my hosting changed datacenter, anyway now I got a even slightly more powerful server so I’m happy. I’m not too happy about the fact that on the new one I have troubles with some php scripts, like the contact form on my main site… so if you had problems, just email me directly (the email is on the same page as contact form anyway!).

I also thought a bit about the future of my games, and decided to start a new site called “Tycoon Games“. Why that decision? For several reason. First of all, originally I made Winter Wolves only with sports / simulation games in mind (UBM, The Goalkeeper, USM1-2). Then I slowly moved to rpg games like Magic Stones, but all are quite “casual” oriented.

Instead I felt the need to create another site, featuring really niche games. Like the upcoming Supernova 2, that will be put on that site (even if I am making it as always, without any external help). And I plan to make more wargames or complex strategy/simulation games.

Another difference is that on that site I’ll sell using as base currency the eur instead of the usd. Before you scream in horror, it’s actually a good news because I’ll keep prices lower, so even people buying in USD will find the games there not more expensive than usual.

That’s all for now – I’m still working on both Supernova 2 and Tower of Destiny, even if during summer I’m a bit less productive… 😉

Supernova 2: starsystem and resources

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I’ve implemented the starmap, with nice animations of the stars blinking, and dotted lines to show the possible route you can take to conquer the neutral or enemy starsystems. It turned out quite nicely I think, it is still quite easy to look at but also dynamic, flashy 🙂

I made my decision about resources: it will be based on only one value that is population limit. Every starsystem will have N planets, and each one of them will have a max population capacity, depending on the type (I’ll have various planets like arid/desert, gas, barren, etc). So how it will work? you’ll be able to assign a certain percentage of the population to specific task/jobs. Like recruiting soldiers, officers, scientist, engineers, etc. The more you have in a particular job, the greater is the effects. For example lot of population allocated to be scientist, and your research will go faster, and so on.

Then you can use engineers to extract material from minerals. I thought to make it limited, but wouldn’t make much sense, so that resource will be unlimited, but in some way constrained by the max population/amount of % you have assigned to engineers.

So let’s say that 15billion are engineers, and each billion extract 10 tons of material. Then you’ll go in the build menu and there you can build stuff with the material. A new unit type factory could cost 150 tons for example, a new kind of civilian building another 50 tons, and so on. It will be all global, so you don’t actually build single starships, but more like you build research lab or prototypes. The once the ship is working, you can use it on the battlefield.

Then in the battlefield part there will be a way of building single ships of all types directly on the battle, but I’ll think about it later when it’s time to program the fight itself. I have already everything planned though 🙂

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.