My Fellow Humans news

So with things smoothly in motion on all fronts I'm back on the game in earnest while I wait for a few particulars for the Kickstarter. Creating this title is actually quite draining, hampered by the fact I have a full time job - 8 hours sleep a night? A distant memory but thankfully Enryoki is far better than just his sounds and his sounds are more than good enough.

We welcome John Harper on board to the team, he has taken my flat and derogatory backstory and established a timeline full of characters and events, I suspect if we fast forwarded 500 years and compared Earth's history to his storyline it wouldn't be far removed and the complexity of his work, the subtle hints, the delicate position of emotion in his words; it all gets a big thumbs up from me so I pass the story mantle completely to him leaving me with more time to work on the game itself. Here's a short story snippet from the start of the exodus:

The passengers applauded as the UES Halifax broke its mooring, the first step of a hundred year journey. Their shouts rose and fell like waves upon an old Earth beach, grating against the pain in my own heart.

The drydock drifted across my targeting port, a sparse tangle of girders and power conduits. Inside, blue arcs danced across the half built Ajax, scheduled to depart in six months.

Then I saw Earth, fierce dark clouds racing through its skies, large rings and other shapes forming before my eyes.

Our cradle, our home, our mother. Ma, Pa and the twins were still down there, waiting for their turn. It was Pa who had forced me to join the navy. To guarantee early departure he said, but I had still hated him for it.

That was when I realised that the circular cloud surrounding Australia wasn’t just a ring.

It was a Mega-hurricane.

I had always thought that in desperate times I would think first of the people I love, but it turned out I was too much of a coward. In that moment all I could think about was myself. Thank God we left when we did.

Private Log, Gunnery Cadet Charlton Leeds, April 23^rd, 2276

For me those are potent words, I almost shed a tear as I realised I'd found my man to help me with that; for decent programmer and devote visionary I am, but witty sci-fi writer I am not. If the words didn't convince you it might interest you to know John has written an official tie in novel for Elite:Dangerous being published by Fantastic Books Publishing and will be available for pre-order in a few days. You can read more about the novel 'and Here the Wheel' here and there's another story snippet awaiting you on the blog.

Back to the game itself, I've been playing the bejesus out of it now, noting down bugs, Enry's music in the background, letting the experience wash over me and picturing the next move. One thing that annoyed me was waiting for the ships to arrive to the battle, sometimes by the time they had got there the enemy had moved on: Not fun. So all ships now have short range FTL as an ability, it's difficult to show this in an image so here's a very WIP GIF, look out for the BC arriving quickly guns blazing. This code is a fork of the main project in which I'm testing things out so you might see a few discrepancies.

I've also decided that if we're going to let the player advance characters, design weapons and fit modules then they need to be rewarded with stats, lots of them in fact. So in a bold step distinguishing ourselves from other similar games of the genre is the RPG-like nature of damage totals and statuses - immediately it got me excited because I do love DPS stats and instantly some of that underlying maths was exposed, very exciting stuff.

The Greenlight campaign has started with the idea being that in a few weeks time when the immediate attention has died down we can prop it up with new attention received from the Kickstarter campaign. In the 3 days it's been up the game has received hundreds of happy comments most of which eluding to the game feeling a lot like Homeworld. I make no apologies for that, one game clones another, it's the nature of the beast and looking at the game as it stands I too can see it. But I look forward to the time I can add in some of the other planned gameplay components steering it away from that assumption - still, at the moment it appears to be working in our favour.

So if you haven't already head over to the Greenlight page and vote, even if you don't like the game why? Because my fellow humans; I forsee that in five years time that other than war games, 'Strategy' through the main gamers eye will be little more than the waiting for the next release of Tropico or draining your wallet on the DLC of the next SimCity title, strategy space games could be few and far between; a token effort from the big games house's promising much with delivery short, Vote because expressing your interest in Shallow Space is a sign to other developers that the genre isn't dead and i'll say this; that for me is worth more than the success of this project alone.

So say we all! :)

James