Intro and FAQ

What's the purpose of this blog?

Glad you asked. This is the dev blog of an indie game in development, tentatively named Project Space Engineer.  It's just me for now; designing and developing using Blender, Photoshop, and Unity with C#.

I will be keeping track of my progress here, updating as soon as I have something worth sharing (I already have one YouTube video I'll link shortly.)  Partially it's to help solidify the ideas I have in my head - a place for notes and thoughts. Also, I hope anyone interested in the game can comment here and make suggestions. I already have too many ideas, and will definitely appreciate feedback to determine which ones to build first!  Lastly, I know how much I like following dev blogs - it's just interesting to learn new tricks and understand the thought process of other developers. I'll be describing the challenges I'm facing as well as little tricks I learn along the way - so new and aspiring game developers might learn something!

Of course, I will post any Alpha/Beta releases here as well, and get some early feedback from fans.

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What's the game about?

Project Space Engineer is primarily a futuristic, 3D space exploration/sandbox game. Here are a few ideas I am working through as I go:

Planet and Space exploration

Primary focus is exploring planets, mining for resources, and leveling up your character. I want players to be genuinely curious as to what awaits them at any given planet.  Each will have a different environment, with different optimal ways of traversing and mining it.

Open World

Each planet (and the rest of space) is an open world you can freely travel through. However, just like in real life, it costs money and resources to travel, so you can't instantly teleport anywhere you want in space. You need a powerful enough warp drive and enough energy to get where you're going, or enough money to pay for a worm hole trip.  Of course, you can acquire any or all of these things by spending time in the game.

Programming

The main character will be a "Space Engineer",  so I already have a fully working Javascript interpreter within the game, and plan to have the players actually automate their world. Things like resource gathering, traveling, or protection. I want the player to be able to control the spaceship (engines, life support, etc), and even worker drones on the surface of a planet. However, the programming should be optional, and only an enhancement of the experience. The more time you want to spend writing your programs, the more sophisticated should be your benefits (like complex resource gathering algorithms).

Multiplayer

I'm tentatively planning to make this a multiplayer experience, but really want to focus on making the single player experience good first. Space is a big place, and anyone exploring a random planet shouldn't be very likely to run into someone else on the server. Of course, there would also need to be hubs where players meet, but I'm still trying to figure out how it fits into the rest of the game. The main thing I can think of for now is the ability for players to showcase the things they've acquired in the game - or work together on mining expeditions.

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What's the motivation?

Minecraft has shown that the whole open world creative game can work really well when done right, so I hope to have my game elicit similar emotions.  I've wanted to make a futuristic space exploration game for a long time, but until recently, really haven't had the skills to pull it off.  Since then I've learned a lot about 3D modeling, texturing, rigging, and animating - so I'm ready to take a stab at it. My background is in software engineering, so the coding is the easy part. The hard part will be not trying to put a million things in the game, and above all, making it actually fun to play.

Like I hinted at above, I already have some working code for the game! It's nothing close to playable yet, but I certainly have at least one video to upload and share here. Stay tuned!