DarkSoul

Planet Menu and Other Graphics

Well these last few day's I have been working on some graphics in Photoshop for the game, I am doing a presentation of some work I have done over the last couple months and wanted to have more graphical things to highlight what I have been doing.

Keep in mind right now there are a few things I have simplified in the game, like the number of different tech attributes. During these early stages I think its more important to get all the different aspects of the game working before expanding on them into how I want them to be.

I am not sure if I have said something else elsewhere but the next functionality I will be implementing in my game is allowing players to upgrade their ship and real space travel, they are intertwined and while testing real space I want to be able to include tests with different engines levels.

Post Date: Apr 3, 2009 - 12:29 pm

Trading and Warp Travel

Well so far I have gotten warp travel and manual trading working, I am pretty happy with myself. The most annoying part is I don't have my own server, so to test it I have to open up a path to my computer which I really dont like doing. Anyways, here is what the main screen is looking like now, and how the manual trading window looks.

Post Date: Mar 28, 2009 - 4:40 pm

Continued Work on my Game

I'm not sure if anyone cares or not, but I am hacing an interesting time working on it. I finally got the networking between client and server working properly, and then the last couple of days were spent making some graphics for the game, if I do say so myself, its starting to look pretty cool. Heres some images of the display, and some other images that will be in the game.

The space port I like the least, but Id rather get a working game then get lose time making graphics for a nonworking one.


I guess I will explain a bit about the gui obviously its taking a few elements from the AAT with a similiar panel style layout, the warp links on the bottom right, and left and right corner showing player and sector information. The biggest difference in my game from a navigational standpoint is going to be the 3D map, depending on engine size this 3d map in the bottom centre will show a certain amount of sectors you are closest to and allow you to travel to them.






Entry Edited 2 times - Edited on Mar 18, 2009 - 8:53 pm

Post Date: Mar 18, 2009 - 8:40 pm

Out of the Woodwork

Alright, this is probably jumping the gun a bit but where else should such news go down. Ive been studying programming, IT and game development for now 4 years. This being my last year before getting a degree, in fact I have just over a month of school left before the real world starts. I've been building a bunch of flash games, working on iphone development, and now in my spare time been working on one special little project I have dubbed ATA. This project as you probably quickly realize is a new AAT type game. Though, as it has gone in the past most people would fork off the code of a past game to make their own my project is a bit different.

What I have been working on, is recreating the game free from the web browser. I have enjoyed AAT for years and this is my way of keeping that enjoyment going. I'll try to keep posting blogs as I move forward with programming this project, and once I get something online, maybe even see if anyone is interested in testing different features. The first milestone will simply allow players to create a new account and travel around the universe, though since this is nearly ready I have etched that the second milestone allow players to trade resources with ports and earn credits with which they can upgrade their ship. I hope this turns out well, so far its really renewed my interest in the game, except on a very different level than I was ever interested before.

To end it off I would just like to elobarate on my name decision and an introduction to my game.

ATA stands for Advanced Trade Alliance, I of course started with the acronym, it seemed like a nice way to show where my game and interest came from. It also incorporates the first major change I will be making; that being the Federation is renamed Trade Alliance. I am taking away the distinction of good or evil in the hopes that this will emerge through RPG aspects as the game progresses and as a result the inset division between Federation and Alliance needed to be removed. This Trade Alliance will exist in a pocket of the universe their space similiar to AAT as the startoff location for new players. As players learn to play the game they will be able to set off into open space and make a name for themselves. In which way, will be up to them.

Entry Edited 2 times - Edited on Mar 8, 2009 - 11:00 pm

Post Date: Mar 8, 2009 - 10:58 pm

Still Hoppin; despite the energy requirements for SD

Well, it?s been a couple weeks now I think and I am still alive in the main game, I think I?ve been lucky but hopefully that remains for another week because I seem to have a thousand things going on with school.

Anyways, there seems to be a lot of little details that I am slowly learning again. It?s not that bad though just a bit tricky some of the time. Sure it?s easy to say each fighter of sector defence uses 2.5 energy units but I think that has to be put into context better for some people. If you have 10 million fighters of SD you are going to use 30million energy in one attack and run. So if you want to be able to sustain at least 30 of those attacks you?re going to need upwards of 900 million energy on the planets in the sector. So it really does get high really fast. Some people have over 70 million fighters. If someone were to take out 2million each attack and run; that would be 35 attacks, and around 6 billion energy would be needed to sustain those fighters for the entire session.

Well, I need to get back to work; hopefully later I'll post again.

Post Date: Nov 8, 2008 - 8:02 pm