Drifting in the Stellar Winds
(working title)
I’ve decided in a game that is essentially, way too complex for someone who hasn’t made any working games recently. The basics are:
-Top Down 2D: Simpleish topdown 2d movement, 4 directions with a giant seamless map loaded in the background
–Space Exploration: You are in a smallish space ship powered by solar sails .
-Persistent Endless Universe: The ‘map’ is procedurally generated on my server and streamed to the flash client. The universe limits are essentially limitless as any time a player approaches the existing ‘end’ of the map, it will generate new data for that area.
-Psuedo Physics: simplified game physics basing ship speed off of ‘solar winds’ and gravitational pulls. Certain solar bodies like different star types, black holes etc will have different and potentially deadly affects on the ship
-Planet Exploration: All planets that are generated will have different environmental variables. Once that the player is able to approach will generate their own procedural based data that the player can explore via small landing craft. Exploring will be 2d topdown and streamed as well.
-Planet Interaction: ideas for what the player can find on a planet
-primitive life forms
-resources (fuel, alien artifacts, food, tradeable resources)
-civilized non space-faring life forms ( limited interaction available)
-environmental hazards
-empire building? (at some point allow players to build their own settlements)
-AI Civilizations: Randomly generated civilizations with their own ships, planets and space stations. Will react to player differently with various options for trading, missions, diplomacy and aggression, and various technology levels
The game portion will not have an actual objective. The player data can be saved to the server, so it is essentially a single player online game, with the potential of adding mmo support. You can however upgrade your ship and your technology, collect map data (allowing faster access with the ability to bookmark areas), increase reputation with alien civilizations and also collect warp points.
Since this is a 48 hour game competition, I’m aiming for an extremely simplified version of the above. Art assets are going to be tough for me, so maybe just a handful of different classes of planets,stars and other solar bodies. A very small tech tree and ship part list, and maybe two civilizations with variable personalities.
Within 24 hours I want playable streaming map support for both space and individual planets

TimeLapse Running
I got timelapse running with Chronolapse about an hour before the comp and will capture cam and screenshots all weekend!