Falling into Outer Space

Autumn is around the corner and Lost Astronaut wants to thank recent purchasers of Fringes over the summer, without whose support this project would not be possible! Also, here is an update for the entire Lost Astronaut gamer community as to what's in store for Q3 and Q4 of 2016.

Dev Diary: Making a game on your own is difficult and a lot of other things get in the way -- like your day job -- however I've found a little extra time over the next few weeks to take a look into the growing number of editor features.

Basically, to build a game like this, you have to make the editors first, as a sort of plan or basic outline. Later, when developing the engine, the game itself, and its content, you can exploit data provided in the editors in predictable or unpredictable ways that allow for an interesting experience. My goal for 2016 is still firmly in developing additional features for these editors.

There hasn't been an update to the actual game in a while, mostly because there is no reason to release a half-baked set of new features. However, I assure you, the project is coming along nicely. Here are some recently added features which are shaping up to be pretty cool! By the way you can see little teasers of new features on our Twitter profile, @LAGameStudio

- Presentations

We've added a way to do "2D presentations" -- sort of like power point, but for doing plot and other animations. You've probably seen them before in other games. A visual editor allows us to create linear gameplay elements that can appear behind menus and in places where the player can make important choices that effect the outcome of a mission, script dialogs with aliens, and create cut scenes. At first, I was using legacy work done for Empire in the Sky, another project that Lost Astronaut has on the back burner. However, I took stock of what I found and made a next gen version that is far easier to use, and packs more features into a single "element" that pretty much sums up all of that other work. While not as optimized, it is still pretty fast and should be fine on newer systems. I think this system could go on and on forever with new animation things etc., but you have to call it a day or else the project never gets done.

- Vehicles

Vehicle features are about 70% complete in the editor. What's left to do is mainly in the test apparatus (that lets you play with a vehicle while making it) and in working out some sort of deep bug that causes problems in that area, probably to do with the Vehicle Blueprint editor. This became a bit complicated. I've realized that just the data entry portion -- tweaking the buttons so to speak -- takes an awful long time, but that's because there are just so many great details you can add to Vehicles. When I say Vehicles, I mean all of the systems that go into a Vehicle such as weapons, hulls, airlocks/hangers, space cars (fighters), and much more in the way of animated elements (rotating dishes, spotlights, blinky lights, etc).



What's next?

Before I move on to wrapping things up with Space Cars and Vehicles, I want to take a step away from this end of things and focus on the more organic elements. Now we're talking about Lifeforms, Nature (Asteroids, Comets and such), Planetary Systems and Stars.

After I develop a nice Lifeform animation system, I plan to fold it back into the "2D presentation" system, so you can script cool dialogs with the aliens!

Finally, I want to spend time on Quests (missions), which allow you to move forward on various plot lines in the game. Once we've got all of these editors complete, it is just a matter of developing the game engine that uses all that rich content.

I'm hoping by early 2017 that I am just working on the engine portion of the game. Once we've got all of the editors available, the game engine complete in later 2017, I can focus primarily on creating the main game campaign which I hope to have done by 2018. I've got a few artists in tow that want to create DLC packs, so I'll be working with them next year as I work out the game's core and finalize all of the features that are going to make Fringes of the Empire so great.

One thing I wanted to throw out there is that I'm looking for testers, who are modders or have some experience making games, who want to join the team as a credited alpha and beta tester. Unlike other projects, I want to do this old school, where testers are not just the general player population, but rather are closely related to the project and communicate with me about their thoughts and desires, as well as test out the technical aspects of the game. If you are interested in this, please reach out to us at the contact information available at the LostAstronaut.com website. Of course, anyone is welcome to ask questions or request information if something doesn't work or is confusing.