[MMc] Starlight

For the hackathon I'm revisiting a game that I wrote in a month two years ago but never released because the original version became too large to maintain.

Title: Starlight
Platform: Windows
Players: 1 (maybe)
Concept: An RTS where your "empire" is a spaceship that you can fly. Add new rooms, upgrade the hull, trade and battle with other ships.

Related Games:  Galaxy Trucker, Minecraft, FTL, The Ur Quan Masters, Age of Empires, tower defense and RTS games

Technology Plan: 

• Use G3D, 3DS Max, Photoshop, SVN, Audacity, CFXR
• Spaceships are made from hex tiles, with math from my codeheart.js example
• Minimize state and assets, e.g., 
• Procedural generation of the galaxy and visual elements
• Dervive all ship data directly from an single image of the ship
• Rely heavily on emergence

Art Plan: 

• Procedural starfield for tactical and navigation view
• Ships are sprites pre-rendered in 3DS Max from TurboSquid models
• UI is drawn in monochrome and then noised and bloomed, using tech developed on A Thousand Moonlit Seas

Design Plan:

• Straight RTS mechanics, except components are found and bought instead of built directly to avoid players having to learn a tech tree and recipies
• No "units"
• Emphasis should be on building and configuring the ship, with flying, combat, trading, etc. forming increasingly tighter reward cycles.
• AI is (as always) a risk.  Multiplayer?

Early Asset Tests:

Procedural Starfield

Spaceship Rendered in 3DS Max

Spaceship Hexified on Load

Screenshots of Old Prototypes:

Fully 3D Prototype Emphasizing Flying

Another 3D Prototype

2.5D Minecraft-like Prototype with Intricate Wiring Mechanics

2.5D Prototype with UI

Combat in the 2.5D Prototype