Hey,
So it's my first time here, I'm an Elite: Dangerous player myself (and Elite: Frontier as well actually but that a different story!) But I've had to take a break because I've decided to make a game...
Me and the team are making a 3D RTS called 'Shallow Space: Insurgency,' RPS wrote about us a while ago now but a lot has changed since then. We cite 'Homeworld' and 'Nexus: The Jupiter Incident' as our sources of inspiration but when we looked at both of them; Nexus as an RTT game with absolute control over each ship and systems; vs. Homeworld as an amazing RTS that quickly devolves into 'stack-em-high selection-box warfare' we think that the ideal command experience lies somewhere in-between.
So the idea behind Shallow Space is that all ships large and small are grouped into Wings and then Flotilla, these formations are reinforced in the UI and perks and attribute bonuses earned by Officers and equipment alike will influence ship attributes and abilities in those respective formations.
As the alpha evolves (available as a free demo currently) you'll quickly get where we are heading, it's shaping up to be a game where you can pre-stage your orders and fly around marvelling at your forethought or get stuck in activating abilities and tweaking battlefronts. Abilities such as 'Short Range Jump' will allow you to instantly withdraw your forces from battle, cycling the Flotillas acting on the front lines pulling them back to recharge shields (and abilities) with the relief effort going in - rinse and repeat as appropriate.
Other examples of diverse tactical choice would include:
The intended field of play will be an entire planetary system, the demo represents an 'instance' of combat - with a very very small tactical bound at that. We've prototyped the planetary system and it works, but whether we see it now or in future depends on funding (and there will be multi-player restrictions.) If not, it'll be big instances much like Homeworld.
Anyway, with all this in mind you can play the game in two ways, lots of cheap ships as cannon fodder OR spend your points developing hulls with load-outs suitable for certain tasks and crush your enemy cleverly (or even just remove their ability to fight.) You'll configure these hulls by spending points and fitting modules much the same as you would in a 4X game such as Endless Space.
The enemy AI is acting dumb at the moment, soon you'll see a change of tactics in the demo - when the flotilla leader gets destroyed the ships will route towards the edge of the tactical bound. When reinforcement Flotilla arrive the wings will join up with the reinforcement body and co-ordinate their assaults.
The wings/flotilla system allows us to do some very clever things with the AI and the planned Officer/Crew RPG features. It'll all make more sense once 'Astrometrics' has been sorted, abstract representations of fleets or portion of a fleet in a beautiful fully-realised planetarium - you'll collect incidental missions here, hunt out enemy fortifications and progress the main quest-line set by TCN HQ.
The game is a single player, campaign driven type with skirmishes, multiplayer planned for the skirmish modes at the least. We're going indie on this one so expect Early Access around August, if it peaks your interest the latest version of the demo is now live, click here to be directed to a set of notes highlighting improvements, a link to the goods is at the bottom of the page.
Here's the latest development video, hope you enjoy!
For more info:
Visit the website
or the IndieDB page
[video=youtube;MuF1QicDkzQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuF1QicDkzQ[/video]
So it's my first time here, I'm an Elite: Dangerous player myself (and Elite: Frontier as well actually but that a different story!) But I've had to take a break because I've decided to make a game...
Me and the team are making a 3D RTS called 'Shallow Space: Insurgency,' RPS wrote about us a while ago now but a lot has changed since then. We cite 'Homeworld' and 'Nexus: The Jupiter Incident' as our sources of inspiration but when we looked at both of them; Nexus as an RTT game with absolute control over each ship and systems; vs. Homeworld as an amazing RTS that quickly devolves into 'stack-em-high selection-box warfare' we think that the ideal command experience lies somewhere in-between.
So the idea behind Shallow Space is that all ships large and small are grouped into Wings and then Flotilla, these formations are reinforced in the UI and perks and attribute bonuses earned by Officers and equipment alike will influence ship attributes and abilities in those respective formations.
As the alpha evolves (available as a free demo currently) you'll quickly get where we are heading, it's shaping up to be a game where you can pre-stage your orders and fly around marvelling at your forethought or get stuck in activating abilities and tweaking battlefronts. Abilities such as 'Short Range Jump' will allow you to instantly withdraw your forces from battle, cycling the Flotillas acting on the front lines pulling them back to recharge shields (and abilities) with the relief effort going in - rinse and repeat as appropriate.
Other examples of diverse tactical choice would include:
- Missile's will come in different types for different jobs
- Ships can be rigged with different type of weapons (Energy, Kinetic, Precise and Artillery[AOE])
- Ships can be rigged with hull modules kinda like Eve Online
- Abilities will be by default auto-activated, but you can control them (think about activating those Battlecruiser spinal mount weapons when an enemy Capital Ships shields are down)
The intended field of play will be an entire planetary system, the demo represents an 'instance' of combat - with a very very small tactical bound at that. We've prototyped the planetary system and it works, but whether we see it now or in future depends on funding (and there will be multi-player restrictions.) If not, it'll be big instances much like Homeworld.
Anyway, with all this in mind you can play the game in two ways, lots of cheap ships as cannon fodder OR spend your points developing hulls with load-outs suitable for certain tasks and crush your enemy cleverly (or even just remove their ability to fight.) You'll configure these hulls by spending points and fitting modules much the same as you would in a 4X game such as Endless Space.
The enemy AI is acting dumb at the moment, soon you'll see a change of tactics in the demo - when the flotilla leader gets destroyed the ships will route towards the edge of the tactical bound. When reinforcement Flotilla arrive the wings will join up with the reinforcement body and co-ordinate their assaults.
The wings/flotilla system allows us to do some very clever things with the AI and the planned Officer/Crew RPG features. It'll all make more sense once 'Astrometrics' has been sorted, abstract representations of fleets or portion of a fleet in a beautiful fully-realised planetarium - you'll collect incidental missions here, hunt out enemy fortifications and progress the main quest-line set by TCN HQ.
The game is a single player, campaign driven type with skirmishes, multiplayer planned for the skirmish modes at the least. We're going indie on this one so expect Early Access around August, if it peaks your interest the latest version of the demo is now live, click here to be directed to a set of notes highlighting improvements, a link to the goods is at the bottom of the page.
Here's the latest development video, hope you enjoy!
For more info:
Visit the website
or the IndieDB page
[video=youtube;MuF1QicDkzQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuF1QicDkzQ[/video]
