Welcome to SpaceSlog, a game i have been developing in Godot for around 4 years now, mostly in my spare time.
Build your ship, manage your crew and explore the cosmos whilst trying your best to keep your crew alive and your ship fully functioning. This game utilises an events driven AI and simulated ship systems to ensure gameplay is kept challenging and every game you play has a different story to tell.
I have made heavy use of the RenderingServer API and currently only use GDScript. One reason for using the RenderingServer, other than performance, is to have full mod support via JSON files.
Wow, looks so polished. Heavily inspired by Rimworld, right?
Which is not a bad thing, I love Rimworld and would gladly play something similar in a different setting, theme, etc.
What navigation algo are You using? I heard Rimword had problems with many pawns navigation. It is still junky, even in recent versions.
Thanks. Yeah, it’s definitely heavily inspired by Rimworld!
I use the built in Astar2D, which tbh still needs a little work as the pawns dont always take the path i would expect. But it works for the most part and is so far fairly performant.
Your project looks very promising! I think the rim world style nowadays communicates that your game is going to be feature rich instead of action-packed and beautiful. That connection also raises a high bar to reach quality wise but since you’ve already 4 years deep I can tell you’re serious about it!
I also make heavy use of Godot’s built-in AStar. A human being would consider the time it would take to path to all potential jobs before choosing which job to perform next. Rimworld I suspect gets slogged down (especially on large maps) largely due to evaluating a large number of potential jobs before choosing one. There’s a ton of ways to optimize that process- one obvious one would be to have pawns reconsider work objectives after an event (such as the ship changing) instead of just on a timer.
Currently i am using Utility Ai, although its pretty primitive at the moment but there are plenty of optimisations i can play around with for that.
I know Rimworld split the map into separate sections to assist with pathfinding. This does end up leading to some funky pathfinding though. More info on that can be found here.
Working mostly part time, i expect this game to take a while to complete and currently i don’t mind working on it for the long term. Especially if i can manage to draw a wage from it. I don’t expect to become rich, but enough to sustain a healthy lifestyle would be nice. For comparison, my last project i worked on for 10 years (and still going).
Guess Rimworld has more problems with that, because of the larger maps.
How does resource acquisition designed in SpaceSlog? Are there some asteroids to mine? Would You be able to travel between planets?
About AWOIAF, I always wondered who make those huge overhaul mods.
I can imagine how much work is it and how much of it consist of wrestling with original game code and design.
Hats off to your dedication!
I’m not really sure how we would work asteroid mining but you will be able to send away teams to planets. You will also encounter derelict ships/stations plus other ships and factions to trade/battle. I’m not quite up to that point yet though but i hope to be able to have some kind of infinite galaxy with an events based system that dictates what you actually encounter, including a limited galaxy map.
Heh, yeah. I always get people asking me to add stuff to the modification without taking those constraints into consideration. It’s also one of the reasons i decided to create my own game. Not to mention the mod has had over 750k downloads with well over 350k people still playing. I hope i can leverage that and increase the chances of success of SpaceSlog.
Unfortunately though, it seems not many people who play a free modification are actually interested in helping with a paid game. I think something like 0.001% of people have potentially helped or shown an interest. But there is no way to actually add links within the mod itself, so its hard to try and reach these people.
I think asteroids are basically ships, but with different tiles and maybe some environmental effects, etc.)
So it seems to be much easier to implement than a whole planet.
But planets, of course, are much more interesting to explore!
It’s such feel of freedom to work with Your own game after that)
Yeap, 350k playerbase is definitely an advantage!
Of course, most of those people won’t be interested, because, as You already said, it’s a different format, but also different game in a different genre.
But thats quite normal and even 2k converted from those 350k is a great start for a new game without big names or publishers behind.
Maybe You can at least add promo image or shortened link as text to mod?
Asteroids are awkward because they currently need to move whilst on the grid. This makes it hard to track and to get the pawns to mine them. So I’m not really sure how to approach this yet from a gameplay perspective.
Planets I don’t think should be too hard to implement, at least technically. The hardest part is the assets required - ie textures for on the planets and textures/shaders for the planets themselves.
I didn’t think of adding a promo image. I guess I could, though I don’t like to distract from the immersion when inside the mod. Maybe I can add one to the exit menu screen or something. That way they only see it when exiting the game and not during the game.
Steam tells me the app is only 32-bit which is incompatible with my system.
But I don’t really believe that … Is that a Steam issue of the system specs?
That’s a good question. There’s no option for me to select if its for 32bit or 64bit so i guess its a Steam issue.
Though regarding Mac, i have never actually released anything on Mac, so that’s all pretty new to me. I also don’t currently have one or have ever used one, so it’s something i need to investigate further. In other words, i do plan on supporting Mac but the info currently on the Steam page are just arbitrary figures.
I am hoping that i will be in a position to have more people testing in a couple of months, so i shall know more then. Which incidentally, if you are interested in testing the game to ensure everything works correctly on a Mac, then please let me know.
Here’s a couple more images showcasing some of the menus. You can see in the second screenshot we have progenerated factions. Eventually these will probably be hidden from the player and they will need to explore the galaxy the find them and interact with them. Or maybe they will find you first…
