iPhone DemoCrytus: An upcoming 4x space strategy game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X

4X stands for "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate" and usually represents a genre of turn-based strategy games although the more modern games may have real-time elements as well.

4X games are often open-ended, where the player manages their entire empire however they wish instead of playing through campaign missions in storyline order.

It is the difference between Civilization (the most popular 4X game) to something like Battle of Wesnoth (also turn-based strategy, but with campaign missions instead)

Sins of a solar empire is probably the most modern take on the genre, even though it is completely real-time.

 

That's an interesting point. Originally I decided to have 3 grades of habitable planets, red green and amber instead of the complex 3 variables (gravity, temperature and radiation). Now that you mention it, these colours seem a bit meaningless, and there's no reason why we can't categorize planets by describing them. Eg, waterworld, gas giant, rocky etc...

That way the habitability becomes more meaningful, and I will definitely add racial traits to fit in with these. Thank you very much for your suggestion.

I have not given research/techs a huge amount of thought but I like the way Stars! does it. Do you have any suggestions?

 

Hi there!

Thank you for your interest in my game. I will try to answer your questions as best I can.

1. Normally I have access to designers for client work, but as this is a personal project I decided to do the graphics on my own. All the UI graphics (except for the text and vector lines such as waypoint lines) are bitmaps designed in Photoshop CS3 and saved as PNG textures. I'm not a professional designer by any means, so a lot of the UI effects, colour schemes and styles were painstakingly replicated from similar UI's in other games and software. Nothing is directly copied however, all made from scratch by myself.

2. Again, the stars are bitmaps. They have an applied tint, and then drawn onto the scrolling background. The actual background art is just a starry night photo taken from Hubble, with a few blue Photoshop clouds rendered onto a translucent layer to give an impression of nebulas. The star positions are procedurally generated, some random, some taking shapes such as spiral galaxies etc.. If you think about it, they should be quite straightforward, for example, a spiral galaxy has lots of randomly distributed clusters of stars in the centre, and then becoming more sparse as they reach outwards to form the arms.

3 + 4. I am currently evaluating graphics frameworks such as using Apple's UIKit directly (and see how the performance turns out), Quartz for drawing, Sparrow iPhone Framework for an easy to use OpenGL abstraction etc.. I tend to stay away from the more heavyweight game-specific engines such as Cocos2D or Unity. What I'm looking for is a high-performance graphics framework that is flexible and powerful and yet easy to use so I don't have to delve to deep into the specifics of OpenGL.

5. For a game like this, the AI is all about defining a list of strategic goals. Then prioritizing these goals based on observation of the universe at the time, and then allocating resources to these goals appropriately.

This article/interview is a good starting point to set the scene:
http://aigamedev.com/insider/interviews/europa-universalis/

This is also useful:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1535/designing_ai_algorithms_for_.php?page=1

6. It will be done when's its done! I don't work on this full-time as I work as a software developer for a large company in London as well doing client work in the evenings and weekends... What's left of my time is spent on this!

7. I generally stick to the Agile software methodology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development

Of course in a one man team you can't follow all of these guidelines (like team scrums) but the philosophy is to complete a fully-working, tested, polished version every iteration, even if the feature set is very limited. This is opposed to having a huge project scope with hundreds of planned features lasting months of development. My personal philosophy is that at the end of every iteration (eg. a month) I'd have a polished product, with graphics and sounds, bug-free and releasable. Even for the first iteration this will be the case, though in terms of gameplay you might be able to do very little (eg. You can only build ships, no exploration or combat or even AI)

 

@wrightfun Sorry I don't use twitter, but I'll PM you when I release.

@whitefang It's difficult to know where to start, do you have any programming experience at all? If not, I would NOT recommend ObjC/C/C++ (iPhone/iPad languages) as the first to learn. I started with Java, but that was at university and with a good teacher. I don't know what else to say, there are no easy roads to development. If you really want to get started with minimal effort, perhaps look at GameSalad or Unity or something like that.

Good luck

 

I've been working on a galaxy generator for random new games
3 sliders controlling number of planets, shape and size, with instant animated preview.



Coming up is the race screen...

 

Hey guys,

Something a little bit different this time.
Before one starts spending significant time and resources coding an application, it is often ideal to prototype the various tricky features in isolation, a proof-of-concept if you will. At this stage I often use Flash/Flex to do this, as it's quick to develop in and easy to pass around to testers.

Here's a functional prototype of the galaxy designer screen.


Have a play and see what you think:
http://www.phidinh.com/4xspace/stars/GenerateTest.html

Once I am happy with the prototype, I can implement it on the iPad with all the fancy GUI bells and whistles.

Also, I can further develop this tool to allow me to quickly generate single-player scenario maps

 

Hi Godzgift,

Thanks for asking, not quite yet as I'm currently working on tactical AI which doesn't have much visual impact. What I can show soon is a proof-of-concept of battles being resolved in real-time, stay tuned.

 

Hey guys,

So turn-based strategy elements aside, I've been working on several ideas I have for tactical battles.

For the first idea, I'm imagining a top-down 2D RTS style, swarms of ships (hundreds or more in a fleet), attacking and defending each other. Each squadron or individual ship would have its own assigned AI, and the battle would play out in realtime. Perhaps the player would be able to change tactics for each squadron or capital ship as the battle progresses.

I've begun prototyping ship movements and swarming, here I'm using the Box2D physics engine.

http://www.phidinh.com/4xspace/stars/BattleTestPhysics.html

What I've found interesting, is that although it is very visually simple (just placeholder graphics after all), I think the blue and red triangles have their own distinct personality if you know what I mean... kind of like a command center radar. Think Galcon-style?

So the question is, I'm tempted to go with this abstract style, rather than detailed ship sprites or even pseudo-3d models... what do you think?

 

Absolutely!
The question is whether to take the art direction into more detailed sprites, or abstract Galcon style or go for 3D models... All is possible and feasible, but I'm inclined to go with abstract.

Regarding ship types, yes, the triangles would be for more light fighter craft style. For larger frigates, cruisers, battleships etc they would all be very distinct and not to mention much larger!

Note that the above prototype is very much placeholder graphics, even if I were to use triangles, they would definitely be more detailed and polished. But based on the graphics of the UI you have seen so far, I hope you can see the kind of quality I will be aiming for.

So of course, not just boring generic triangles for sure!

Getting serious inspirational vibes from this game:

Gratuitous Space Battles, 2009, Positech Games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuitous_Space_Battles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44vWgyoMF64

(I especially like the deployment/planning stage of this video, how all of the ships are very simple and abstract, solid shades of colour etc... but each ship is very distinct. That is the art style I'm going for)