As a fan of No Man's Sky I've always wanted to make a space exploration game with a massive universe. I began to explore this recently and have made amazing progress. The game I'm working on is called Super Starship. You are in control of a starship in a massive universe - 900,000 stars and over 5 million planets! It is a completely persistent universe with discovered stars and planets cataloged on a backend server and retrieved as needed for all players. The game will be multiplayer as well, explore the universe with your friends (or make new ones). How many simultaneous players is yet to be determined but I hope for at least 32, that’s my goal, but might have to settle for 16. Either way all players are exploring the same universe. I tweeted about some progress here (videos): https://twitter.com/lestopher13/status/1363152223371411458?s=20 https://twitter.com/lestopher13/status/1365731883456344068?s=20 In the included screen shots: Every dot on the screen is a star system with a random number of planets to explore. Use short range scans to view locations of planets when you’re in a star system. Use long range scan to view nearby star systems when in the universe. Galactic Map shows all discovered stars along with locations of all players. Along with discovering new stars and planets I plan to add multiple missions, still making a list of what these will be but along the lines of checking out space anomalies and scanning for unknown objects and finding a few Easter eggs. All of this running at 60 fps on iPhone (tested on 7 Plus and 11 Pro)/iPad. Multiple Game Center leaderboards. Game controllers supported but not required - screen swipes to steer ship works very well. More to come… release date is yet to be determined but hopefully in the next month or two.
Looks good. Remember a game on the Amiga. But like a basic Elite but when you docked at a space station it was like a basic Ultima. Go round chatting to people about missions or buy stuff etc. Was amazing
I played just about every space related Amiga game when I had my 1000. Loved Elite. Not sure of the game you're talking about though. Oh man, remember Arctic Fox? What an amazing game. Also, I ported an old Amiga classic to iOS called Emerald Mine (using the Rocks N Diamonds game engine). If you haven't tried it yet, it's in the App Store. Les
This is awesome mate! I am also a great fan of nms! I would like to have a cockpit view in your game, or at least a first person view... good work. Can’t wait to play it!
https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/space-rogue Space Rogue on the Amiga. Someone told me on the retro gamer forum
Super Starship updates. Added a cockpit ( thanks @Truncana ) and a new video posted on my twitter. https://twitter.com/lestopher13/status/1366911470311768066
New updates to Super Starship. Massive persistent universe with 900,000 stars, each one its own solar system. Zoom through the universe and claim and explore star systems. Almost 6,000,000 planets in the universe! - Beautiful planets (over 50 types) - Some with breathable atmospheres, some with poisonous atmospheres, some with no atmosphere - Some with a ring system - Star bases for refueling and for uploading your scanned planets and receiving credits as payment. - Credits can be used to buy fuel for your ship. - Cloaking device if you want to explore in private (no other players can see you). - Send greetings to nearby players and send fuel to each other. - Call for help if you run out of fuel - players can come rescue you by giving you fuel and getting bonus credits in return. - Teleport to nearest star base if you run out of fuel (cost credits). Running at 60 fps on iPhone 7 Plus and newer devices. Game Center leaderboards. Game controllers supported. PUN2+ multiplayer! Release date soon!
For the initial release there will be only one ship and one cockpit. In future updates I may add more. -Les
Yes, that is correct. Out of curiosity, if you could land on the planets what would you want to do? -Les
Perhaps you could land at bases to buy goods to trade or even ship parts to enhance ship speed , cargo hold capacity , fuel capacity, fuel efficiency and maybe scanner upgrades. You could really have fun with the goods bought and sold. An out of the way space restaurant may pay well for the tentacles of an extremely rare aquatic Grey Stalker. A hidden lab, only found by scanning a planet with an upgraded scanner, will pay dearly for the genetic material used to clone creatures thought to be extinct. A trillionaire will pay top dollar for cybernetic legs to be able to walk again. Just a thought.
exactly @Thedrawguy!!! have all of that could be really awesome. a question @Lesbird: you mentioned about iPhone 7 and above, does this mean it won't work on a 6S?
I have not been able to test it on anything older than an iPhone 7 Plus. It's quite possible it'll run on a 6s without much lag but I know on 7 Plus it runs at 60 fps.
You mean keyboard/mouse on iPad? Not planning on it but I'll add that to the list of features for future updates. -Les
These are all interesting ideas but it's one thing to show hi-def spherical planets and another thing to be able to smoothly transition down to the surface. I'll explore this in the future. For now you can do trades at star bases but only to upload your scanned planets to the "galactic database" which in return you get credits for. Each star base has its own pricing per planet and cost to refuel so you might find one star base gives more credits for scanned planet data than another star base. I like the idea of upgrading the scanner though. Maybe if you have an upgraded scanner you can offer more data in exchange for higher pay. I'm in feature freeze at the moment fixing bugs and preparing for release so I'll jot down these ideas for a future update. Thanks for the feedback. -Les
