Hey there,
This year is almost at an end. We had an eventful 2012, with much stuff going on in Star Apocalypse in real life. I will give a view on things from my point of view. I'd like ZeroSeconds to tell his side of things also sometime soon.
For me, Star Apocalypse started as a rough concept back in 2004. Back then, the concept was way different as it was now, but the core idea the same: A realistical in-depth strategy game about interstellar warfare. Development got very far during 2007-2008, but just before having a playable prototype the team fell apart.
It was that moment that I started rethinking the concept. I started working with XNA, which I found too limiting in the end. An experiment there after was the combat prototype, nothing else than a pilot for making a very simple game in OpenGL. This was done in a very short time. Results were promising.
After a few months planning, ZeroSeconds and me started working on an alpha. We made huge leaps of progress in just short moments of time. We spent 3 days a week coding together in the late evenings. The universe generation was mostly working within 2 weeks. Gameplay elements progressed very quickly there after. By the end of june, we were close to getting the first parts interconnected (which was the only thing needed to be done for a first real Alpha, next to cleaning a lot of code up).
Unfortunately, both coders got stuck with real life stuff, causing endless delays. ZeroSeconds got a job as IT Consultant in Poland, making me not able to meet him in real life. And I got caught up in the parliamentary elections (I got 404 votes, which is a funny number for me as an IT person. 'Candidate not found' ;) Anyways this amount of votes was high for me as I had little time due to my job to campaign and I was quite low on the list (the party got in total 30.000 votes, of which 20.000 went to the 1st on the list. I was 7th out of 11).
Currently, I have a fulltime job as Junior .NET Engineer at a small local company. I enjoy working there a lot, and I can't say I had gotten here without Star Apocalypse. So yes, even if a project like this doesn't exactly go as planned, you can still get benefit from it.
As a hint to what's coming up soon, see an image posted in our image gallery today. It's a very longterm project, but progressing quite well lately due to more spare time during the holidays. Still, we can't give any ETA or anything.
If you have any questions, ask them! And feel free to comment!
hey your game has much potential, so if you can't work on a steady base that's not too bad. As long as you still work on it.
we still do some work on the code from time to time. But we also opensourced it without purpose: To not let our work be forgotten. People can at least learn from it.
I'm currently rewriting the rendering code to SharpDX code, which performs way better than this (and with some extra libs is completely cross-platform as far C# can get).
It's a lot of effort to rewrite, but progress is going well. But time is extremely sparse for me.
sorry made an error there: We opensourced it /with/ reason