Mudtato
Well, I tried
Finally time to share about the aforementioned game project. Like I said, it was a space game.
The initial concept was for a small scoped game about first contact with alien species and how those interactions may play out.
It evolved into a procedurally generated space exploration, crew management sim as well.
At the start of this year I came across the opportunity to apply for grant funding to see the project through to a significant milestone (I was aiming for early access). I had two months to get a game demo ready, as well as all of the grant application documents.
A week after starting the process I had a significant family medical situation come up which meant that I basically gave up on applying for the grant.
About a month later, and with only a few weeks left I decided that I needed to try my best to apply. So I pushed very hard, got some help with finalising the application and was able to submit.
Three months later I learned that I wasn’t successful. Unfortunately I don’t know why.
I’m disappointed about not getting the grant. It means I won’t be able to spend much, if any, time working on games, as I need to make a living. Oh well.
Over that three month period I wasn’t able to put a significant amount of time towards the game, but I was always thinking about it and I decided I wanted to change parts of it, or the concept completely. So not getting the grant wasn’t all bad, as now I’m able to take the game in a different direction.
The overview of the game is that you played as the captain of a ship that was travelling through space on various missions. You interact with the ship and crew through screens.
I used MonoGame which means that everything is basically done from scratch. Sure, Unity or Godot would make life easier, but since when was life easy…
I wanted it to appear that you were looking at screens, so there was a lot of R&D into interacting with the screens with the mouse as if they were in 3D space. That was fun, but would have been far easier if I’d used ChatGPT. I don’t know how I feel about that, but it is what it is.
I’m super proud of what I achieved with it. There are proper crew AI and movement systems. Crew members have roles, tasks, personalities. There are fire systems, a ship builder, interactive screens and maps. There’s so much going on under the hood, but it’s hard to show that.
Here’s a bunch of screenshots and gifs of the game as it progressed through development.
