Dominance (work title) - spaceship war game

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#1

Hi JGO

This is the game that I have been working on for a bit more than half a year now…
It is still untitled It’s title is still not entirely fix, so any good suggestions are welcome…

It is a game about being a single drone in an army of interstellar spaceships fighting for dominance in the galaxy.
You construct your own ship out of modules such as weapons, thrusters or shields to give your personal ship exactly the fight and flight behaviour you need it to have in combat to optimize your efficiency;
every module has its own mass to slow you down, but also makes you move, based on position turn or shoot faster or simply increases your resistance against enemy fire.
If you don’t want to spend your time on configuration and just want to get back into battle as quickly as possible,
you can also just pick one of your allies’ improving designs.

The controls are simply the ASDW or arrow keys to accelerate/turn and spacebar to fire.
Your goal is to destroy as many hostile (not blue) ships as possible and ultimately to take every
other teams’ spawn portal by firing at them until they change their affiliation.

Currently this is a prototype, so this version only consists of one level that’s difficulty (spawn rate) is configurable in the options menu. This will likely change later…

Download Alpha 1.2

Any feedback would be great!

Some illustration:

813×586 23.7 KB

Trying (being invincible) to capture a spawn portal as mentioned above:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/05xcgxuhc36j7wv/spawn_lights.gif(image larger than 102400KB)

Respawning:

878×652 1.61 MB

#2

Just finished capturing my first system with the default difficulty! Took a few iterations on my ship design to manage it.
Ended up going with a T shape with a short tail. Top row all guns, shield layer, minimal shielding around core, and thrusters all along the bottom layer. Fragile but lots of spread for capturing portals quickly and decent maneuverability.

Overall I really enjoyed it. Ship design was simple yet allowed for quite a few options. I only wish there was a reset button of sorts. Deleting the four parts surrounding the core achieves this, so it’s not that big a deal.

The default resolution was a bit too big for my system’s settings(I could change my own quite easily, I just prefer 1280 x 720). Thanks to the fullscreen option, it wasn’t that big an issue for me.

Radar seemed like mass chaos at first, but the bars are really helpful with making sense of the battlefield.

I don’t feel like the player is rewarded for choosing a smaller ship design, the small increase in agility isn’t enough to compensate for the massive spread of bigger ships. I tried my best to get around them and disable their engines(which works very well), however I usually ended up dying due to an enemy shooting at an ally ship somewhere offscreen.

It’s an early version, so I know the current A.I. isn’t likely to remain, but I found myself wishing that my allies would work with me more. While trying to capture a spawn, they usually just flew right into the darn thing(Wheee!! Is what I imagined them saying.)

I say again, I really enjoyed it. The art is beautiful in its simplicity. Just enough to convey information to the player while allowing custom ships to look presentable, no matter what strange design they create(A small ship needs two thrusters, unless you want to look like Homer Simpson).

#3

Weird… the reset button is pretty much the one most asked-for feature so far…
Gonna need to add it :slight_smile:

The window should be maximized by default but also be freely resizable. The default size is too high and/or weird right now though, forgot to set it to something more user-friendly like 800x600…

About the AI… well… it was designed quite early back when the game still had a different focus than it has now, and until now I always got around remaking it by modyfying it just enough so it kinda does what it’s supposed to… :slight_smile:

Thank you for your feedback!

#4

Okay, made the mentioned minor changes now:

  • the window now still starts maximized, but at 800x600 windowed size, still being freely resizable
  • “reset” button in the editor :slight_smile:
  • it also has at least a temporary title now: “Dominance”

So there we have alpha 1.0.1!

#5

The game is really fun, and has some sweet visual effects.

I can’t wait to see how the game progresses!

Though, when building your ship I feel like it should be explained why you can’t place something in a certain spot, and have descriptions of what each little piece does.

Once multiplayer comes it’ll be extra exciting :P.

#6

The game play is fun, and the menu is nicely organized. Cool being able to build your own ships. If you can, I think some sort of alien or mother ship would be cool as well.

#7

Major update, alpha 1.1 !
Basically a complete rewrite of the AI system.

The ships are less likely to go into single dogfights now but are generally fighting en masse in the central battlefield.
Also they are more aggressively trying to prevent you from just pushing through to their portal to take it by leaving the main battle aside for a moment to fully concentrate on destroying you!

The most relevant aspect though is that those suicides ryukujinishi mentioned before should not be as much of an issue anymore, because ships are now always trying to keep security distance to enemy portals when approaching them. :slight_smile:

#8

Just finished three system captures, I did notice all ships seemed to have priorities. Capturing with the new A.I. was initially difficult, but after altering my design to a roughly M shape(Yay side shielding to protect my thrusters!) it was mostly smooth sailing.

I’m happy to report that they’re not treating enemy portals like an amusement ride anymore. However on my third attempt at a system capture, on the last portal I had three ally ships attacking(Very effectively) the last green ship. Unfortunately they did not realize how close they were drifting to the green portal(Flush!). Still a vast improvement over the former A.I. I really liked how defensive the enemies were.

I kind of agree with Soul Foam. I mean, it’s obvious that you can’t place something in front of your gun, lest it be turned into swiss cheese. Or blocking thrusters with shielding. I’m still not sure what Connectors do versus having more shielding. I do incorporate them into my build however, since I might need them. I tend to attach cannons to connectors.

I’m guessing you plan on having more options down the road, judging from the UI. If you’re not sure about keeping the parts in their current state, I wouldn’t put too much effort into a description. I can imagine more varied shielding types and cannon types. Possibly side-thrusters to allow strafing(or front to counter the pull of a portal).

I enjoyed this latest build, keep up the good work Drenius!

And yay for reset button and resolution changes!

#9

Actually where you place your shield emitter does’nt matter, every single one you add reduces the chance that a shot hitting you causes damage, no matter where it hits.

The connector blocks at the other hand are that kind of protection; they are light dummy blocks that allow you to increase your size without having to become heavy and slow too quickly, so they are a good additional way to protect your core by being a physical barrier.

This and -what they are named after- connecting are their only purpose in the game; I should indeed find a way to make that more clear somehow, was so far hoping to make it all as obvious as possible to get away without adding another GUI component…

Anyway, thanks for testing!

#10

That was a lot of fun ;D

Is all of the art generated with standard drawing functions? It all looks really good (especially the radar and spawn portal)!

I encountered one little problem though, which needed a Ctrl+Alt+Del since I played fullscreen:
The game crashed when a red enemy ship got swallowed by my portal. (It was really small when the game crashed at least)
Your program probably doesn’t generate output error messages since I couldn’t find a log from your game, so I am sorry for not being able to provide you more information than this.

#11

Herjan, nice to see you are still there!
Yes, the style is indeed supposed to only consist of the simplest shapes possible.
But your crash… what? Are you absolutely sure there was absolutely no kind of output in the console?
Or were you looking for a file being created on crash? I don’t do that…

#12

Thanks for your concern, I still am active on the forum indeed but in peace and silence!

And admirable to be able to make such a game without even one drawing, creativity does not rest within paint skills but in solvability and innovativity I suppose.
Well, about the crash… I was actually searching for a file, I didn’t launch it from the terminal since I’m on Windows. I had to do some work…

#13

Nice! This game has a lot of polish. Nice UI, concept, fast paced. Can’t wait until the introduction is finished! There are a lot of bullets bouncing around, and rotation of the ships and their respective pieces. Was there anything you did in particular to make sure the game ran smoothly? I know in python those calculations would have brought a game to a stand-still, so I’m curious if you did something differently, or if java wass simply fast enough to handle what you threw at it.

#14

Thank you! Currently trying to implement network multiplayer though.

Well… obviously not everything does interact with everything else even far away, that would quickly let the complexity exceed the bounds, but other than that no. Maybe you are indeed underestimating the JVM…

#15

This reminds me of Reassembly. Good luck!

swxfEZJtZAk

-wes

#16

a really solid base for a great game. I suffer lack of music and effects, could help a lot.

Looking for updates!

#17

So after taking more than half a year off yet another time, I finally have another update! :slight_smile:

Alpha 1.2

This update is mainly about adding multiplayer to the game, since it is a highly competitional game, I think it is a good game to play against other actual people.
The multiplayer (using Kryonet) is host- and joinable from within the game’s GUI and requires the ports 4097 and 4098 for TCP and UDP connections.

Also there is a little level map in the singleplayer menu now, which is only in it’s prototypical form right now.
It is supposed to be the base for a singleplayer system to keep the game more interesting beyond a few games in the future.

So now, it’s finally time to get back to some of the game’s other issues. :slight_smile: