Hello all-
I've been browsing some of the recent threads here on newer citybuilder games- I particularly like the look of Ancient Cities- so I thought I might throw my hat in the ring, and maybe get some opinions on directions to take.
This is Stratos, a sci-fi themed settlement-simulation that I was working on intermittently for a couple of years:
https://github.com/Morgan-Allen/Presidium-Graphics-Overhaul
There should be playable releases for Win/Mac in the downloads section, and a gameplay tutorial linked from the home page. As you can see, I got reasonably far, but I ultimately decided to shelve the project, partly due to the lack of any particular marketing reach on my part, and partly due to the internal complexity of the engine reaching the limits of what I could maintain.
Lately, however, I've been grappling with TDD and automated-testing techniques, which have allowed me to cut down drastically on the pain and hassle of other development projects. So I recently rewrote the Stratos engine over the span of about a month, purely as a backend-simulation (bare-bones graphics, but with most of the gameplay intact), just to see how much effort was involved. I'm tentatively optimistic that I might be able to revive the project going forward.
I am, however, also somewhat conflicted on what todo with the engine, exactly. I'm a pretty strong programmer, but only a middling artist, so coming up with sprite art and models/animations was either expensive or time-consuming (depending on whether I outsourced or not.)
So... one thought I had was to re-use the art assets from Caesar 3 (which the OpenCaesar3 project was good enough to extract), and use those to provide a version of the game with updated gameplay, borrowing from later installments of the impressions/tilted mill series and other simulation games- e.g, intelligent walkers, flexible cropland, wood-from-deforestation, specialised trading posts and get quotas, et cetera. (A separate 'planning mode' that let you lay out road networks and infrastructures before committing to pay for them would also be nice, and I'd quite like to experiment with Caesar 2's strategy-map 'AI governor', where you have to compete to secure provinces before a rival, for example.)
What are the feelings of folks here on the subject? I recall that a number of players were unhappy with Caesar 4 due to, e.g, paradoxically unreliable walker performance, but are you largely happy with C3 as is? Would there be any interest in such an overhaul? Or do you think sticking with Stratos is the best plan? Any other thoughts?
Cheers, MA
.
I've been browsing some of the recent threads here on newer citybuilder games- I particularly like the look of Ancient Cities- so I thought I might throw my hat in the ring, and maybe get some opinions on directions to take.
This is Stratos, a sci-fi themed settlement-simulation that I was working on intermittently for a couple of years:
There should be playable releases for Win/Mac in the downloads section, and a gameplay tutorial linked from the home page. As you can see, I got reasonably far, but I ultimately decided to shelve the project, partly due to the lack of any particular marketing reach on my part, and partly due to the internal complexity of the engine reaching the limits of what I could maintain.
Lately, however, I've been grappling with TDD and automated-testing techniques, which have allowed me to cut down drastically on the pain and hassle of other development projects. So I recently rewrote the Stratos engine over the span of about a month, purely as a backend-simulation (bare-bones graphics, but with most of the gameplay intact), just to see how much effort was involved. I'm tentatively optimistic that I might be able to revive the project going forward.
I am, however, also somewhat conflicted on what to
So... one thought I had was to re-use the art assets from Caesar 3 (which the OpenCaesar3 project was good enough to extract), and use those to provide a version of the game with updated gameplay, borrowing from later installments of the impressions/tilted mill series and other simulation games- e.g, intelligent walkers, flexible cropland, wood-from-deforestation, specialised trading posts and get quotas, et cetera. (A separate 'planning mode' that let you lay out road networks and infrastructures before committing to pay for them would also be nice, and I'd quite like to experiment with Caesar 2's strategy-map 'AI governor', where you have to compete to secure provinces before a rival, for example.)
What are the feelings of folks here on the subject? I recall that a number of players were unhappy with Caesar 4 due to, e.g, paradoxically unreliable walker performance, but are you largely happy with C3 as is? Would there be any interest in such an overhaul? Or do you think sticking with Stratos is the best plan? Any other thoughts?
Cheers, MA
.
[This message has been edited by Pelagius_II (edited 10-26-2017 @ 07:21 PM).]