I need an asbolutely terrible but endearing name for a space game

[Baaja]

Sub: A Space Endeavour of Galactic Proportions

 

[Renyori]

Powerful Exploring Nomads In Space

 

[Deverz]

Special
Permit
Astronaut
Circus
Exploration

 

[Baaja]

Space Hermit - Alone

 

[sg2]

How about you take the name literally? " "

 

[Grega]

How about you take the name literally? " "

Wouldnt that be white space and not space.

 

[Spunky]

Cosmic Sheen: Vacuum Plunderers

 

[sub]

I'm considering calling it PixelSpace, or Pixelspace. Not really sure.

I sat down and wrote out what I wanted the game to be to get a better idea of what I need to make. I figure I'll post that here, because why not. What I wrote would be what I want to do. I don't actually expect to accomplish all of it, since there's a lot of shit in there, and I don't have a good track record of finishing much simpler projects, let alone something huge like this.

--

The game pitch is that you’re a starship captain out to explore the unknown universe.

It's going to be a real time 2D space exploration game where the player is in control of a starship. Inspiration taken from Sid Meier’s Pirates, Mount and Blade, Minecraft, and a hint of the Total War series. It would be set on a randomly generated map of a galaxy, with the goal of making the player feel like he’s playing out an episode of Star Trek or Firefly.

The way I picture the game at the moment is that there are two areas you interact with the game. The first is on an overview map of the galaxy, and the player can move his ship around and see other ships moving about this space. When the player enters a solar system or is attacked by / attacks another ship out in the vastness of space, the game transfers to a zoomed in area of that local section of space.

In this zoomed in map, you’d be able to fight with other ships, talk to / trade with local inhabitants of a planet, mine for material (more on this in a moment), conduct spaceship races, things of that nature. The physics in this area will be newtonian and the players ship will be effected by gravity from the sun / planets. The play area would be pretty massive, too; I want the scale to feel like that of a real solar system. So in real life, the Earth is about 100 times smaller than the Sun, which is pretty crazy. So yeah, I'm not doing that, but I think I can make it feel like that. In the game, I'm going to try to get away with making the stars a mere 10 times larger than planets, and keeping this scale consistent throughout. I think this is sufficient enough to induce a sense of wonder and awe about how huge these things are, while still accommodating gameplay and computer performance.

The thing that makes this game a bit more unique than other games like it is that it is influenced ever so gently by Minecraft. What I mean by that is the entire world will be built out of square blocks. The planets, the sun, the asteroids, the spaceships, all built out of different types of blocks. The game will feature a ship editor, and you quite literally build and customize your ship out of the blocks that are found in the galaxy / that you make by combining different block types.

These blocks would be mined from planets or asteroids, with better blocks being rarer / harder to get to. For example, perhaps there’s a lot of really great material on a planet, but it’s inhabited by a population of 8 billion -- you’d have to make the moral choice of killing some of those people to get to the blocks. Or maybe that planet has a strong armada orbiting its planet and you’d have to defeat the armada to get to the material.

The thing that excites me about this block idea is not only the thought that building and customizing one's ship will play a big role in the game, but environmental destruction can be pulled off and pulled off quite well, I think. Want to blow that planet to pieces? No problem, provided your ship is powerful enough. This also helps in terms of modeling the gravity forces out in the universe. Blocks could be assigned a mass, and a blocks mass could determine the gravity field it generates. So for a starship, if you have a ton of blocks on it, the mass will be huge and it will take longer to get it up to speed / slow down, maneuver it around, that sort of thing. I like the concept of simple ideas creating complex results, and this would be a great example of that.

Another thing that excites me about the idea of building the world out of blocks is that it makes content creation extremely easy. This will free me from the pressure of producing art assets, which is not my strong point. In theory I'd be able to focus my effort on adding content to the game. I said in the beginning that I wanted to make the player feel like he was playing out an episode of Star Trek or Firefly, and I think this will help me achieve that goal. In addition to a main story, I want there to be a massive assortment of missions that the player can embark on. Each mission would be roughly equivalent to an episode of one of those shows.

The idea I have in my head is similar to that of Skyrim's quest system. Something happens to set you upon a quest, and then that quest will set you down a story / path to complete the quest. For example, perhaps you'll witness a wormhole open up, and you'll get the quest to investigate the wormhole. Except doing so leads you to be sucked in and you're now on the other side of the galaxy and are tasked with getting home.

Ship crew. The amount of crew you can have is dependent on how big your ship is. The skill of your crew would effect the performance of your ship. I said in the beginning that the game is influenced ever so slightly by the Total War series, and this is where that comes into play. My favorite part about that game was the general system it had, and I want to try to capture that magic in this game. Your ship would have several key positions for you to fill, and this would be done by recruiting special crewmen. For example, there'd be a chief tactical officer who could improve performance during combat, or a chief engineer who occasionally comes up with something that you can put to use in improving your ship. That sort of thing. These guys would be all over the galaxy, and it'd be up to you to find and recruit the best crew.

Finally, the game must have the option to become the emperor / ruler of a nation in the galaxy. This would function similar to how being King does in Mount and Blade.

I'm still trying to get an idea of what I want the final game to look like. I know I want to generate the background sky from code, and I know that I want it to look a bit blocky / pixely. I googled around a bit to find something that I can aim for, and I think I found what that something might be. I think this picture gives a good idea of the scale of the ship and planets that I want, and maybe even the camera zoom level. Ideally attacks would be attached to a ship, though, and come out of a specific weapon you place on your ship.

I have no idea if I can generate a picture like that from code, and I have no idea if it would be feasible in terms of load times even if I could manage to generate something like this. Maybe I'll make an external program that only generates images of pixely skies and simply add them in with the game like normal. Still though, it looks cool.

 

[Specht]

Jebediah Kerman: Suicidal Space Madness

 

[Baaja]

I love it Sub! Sounds great, and I would gladly play something like that! Good ideas, I just hope you can practically implement them!

 

[Deverz]

I'm considering calling it PixelSpace, or Pixelspace. Not really sure.

I sat down and wrote out what I wanted the game to be to get a better idea of what I need to make. I figure I'll post that here, because why not. What I wrote would be what I want to do. I don't actually expect to accomplish all of it, since there's a lot of shit in there, and I don't have a good track record of finishing much simpler projects, let alone something huge like this.

--

The game pitch is that you’re a starship captain out to explore the unknown universe.

It's going to be a real time 2D space exploration game where the player is in control of a starship. Inspiration taken from Sid Meier’s Pirates, Mount and Blade, Minecraft, and a hint of the Total War series. It would be set on a randomly generated map of a galaxy, with the goal of making the player feel like he’s playing out an episode of Star Trek or Firefly.

The way I picture the game at the moment is that there are two areas you interact with the game. The first is on an overview map of the galaxy, and the player can move his ship around and see other ships moving about this space. When the player enters a solar system or is attacked by / attacks another ship out in the vastness of space, the game transfers to a zoomed in area of that local section of space.

In this zoomed in map, you’d be able to fight with other ships, talk to / trade with local inhabitants of a planet, mine for material (more on this in a moment), conduct spaceship races, things of that nature. The physics in this area will be newtonian and the players ship will be effected by gravity from the sun / planets. The play area would be pretty massive, too; I want the scale to feel like that of a real solar system. So in real life, the Earth is about 100 times smaller than the Sun, which is pretty crazy. So yeah, I'm not doing that, but I think I can make it feel like that. In the game, I'm going to try to get away with making the stars a mere 10 times larger than planets, and keeping this scale consistent throughout. I think this is sufficient enough to induce a sense of wonder and awe about how huge these things are, while still accommodating gameplay and computer performance.

The thing that makes this game a bit more unique than other games like it is that it is influenced ever so gently by Minecraft. What I mean by that is the entire world will be built out of square blocks. The planets, the sun, the asteroids, the spaceships, all built out of different types of blocks. The game will feature a ship editor, and you quite literally build and customize your ship out of the blocks that are found in the galaxy / that you make by combining different block types.

These blocks would be mined from planets or asteroids, with better blocks being rarer / harder to get to. For example, perhaps there’s a lot of really great material on a planet, but it’s inhabited by a population of 8 billion -- you’d have to make the moral choice of killing some of those people to get to the blocks. Or maybe that planet has a strong armada orbiting its planet and you’d have to defeat the armada to get to the material.

The thing that excites me about this block idea is not only the thought that building and customizing one's ship will play a big role in the game, but environmental destruction can be pulled off and pulled off quite well, I think. Want to blow that planet to pieces? No problem, provided your ship is powerful enough. This also helps in terms of modeling the gravity forces out in the universe. Blocks could be assigned a mass, and a blocks mass could determine the gravity field it generates. So for a starship, if you have a ton of blocks on it, the mass will be huge and it will take longer to get it up to speed / slow down, maneuver it around, that sort of thing. I like the concept of simple ideas creating complex results, and this would be a great example of that.

Another thing that excites me about the idea of building the world out of blocks is that it makes content creation extremely easy. This will free me from the pressure of producing art assets, which is not my strong point. In theory I'd be able to focus my effort on adding content to the game. I said in the beginning that I wanted to make the player feel like he was playing out an episode of Star Trek or Firefly, and I think this will help me achieve that goal. In addition to a main story, I want there to be a massive assortment of missions that the player can embark on. Each mission would be roughly equivalent to an episode of one of those shows.

The idea I have in my head is similar to that of Skyrim's quest system. Something happens to set you upon a quest, and then that quest will set you down a story / path to complete the quest. For example, perhaps you'll witness a wormhole open up, and you'll get the quest to investigate the wormhole. Except doing so leads you to be sucked in and you're now on the other side of the galaxy and are tasked with getting home.

Ship crew. The amount of crew you can have is dependent on how big your ship is. The skill of your crew would effect the performance of your ship. I said in the beginning that the game is influenced ever so slightly by the Total War series, and this is where that comes into play. My favorite part about that game was the general system it had, and I want to try to capture that magic in this game. Your ship would have several key positions for you to fill, and this would be done by recruiting special crewmen. For example, there'd be a chief tactical officer who could improve performance during combat, or a chief engineer who occasionally comes up with something that you can put to use in improving your ship. That sort of thing. These guys would be all over the galaxy, and it'd be up to you to find and recruit the best crew.

Finally, the game must have the option to become the emperor / ruler of a nation in the galaxy. This would function similar to how being King does in Mount and Blade.

I'm still trying to get an idea of what I want the final game to look like. I know I want to generate the background sky from code, and I know that I want it to look a bit blocky / pixely. I googled around a bit to find something that I can aim for, and I think I found what that something might be. I think this picture gives a good idea of the scale of the ship and planets that I want, and maybe even the camera zoom level. Ideally attacks would be attached to a ship, though, and come out of a specific weapon you place on your ship.

http://i.imgur.com/1KoA5.png

I have no idea if I can generate a picture like that from code, and I have no idea if it would be feasible in terms of load times even if I could manage to generate something like this. Maybe I'll make an external program that only generates images of pixely skies and simply add them in with the game like normal. Still though, it looks cool.

Sounds great. Has a tune of SPAZ in it too (Cheap on steam, Give it a go)

I'm excited for this keep it coming Sub

 

[Shonnie]

Cool, even that kind of graphics are beyond me. I totally suck at drawing anything but using the filters in photoshop <3.
Anyway, can't wait to test the game. I'm sure it will be something entirely new

 

[Eon]

Space in the hole.

Get Spaced.
The Trek in the Stars
Quasarticles of Confederation
That's My Space!
Galacticles.
Baseball.