Shallow Space is a 3D Real Time Strategy game inspired by Nexus: The Jupiter incident and Homeworld. Shallow Space focuses on organised mass RTS space combat in a fully 3D environment. Ships in Shallow Space are nearly always grouped into Flotillas and Wings, and orders issued to these structures cascade to the subordinate members. Rather than stressing out clicking on the units or dragging selection boxes during the heat of battle, standing orders are issued in advance leaving you to zoom around, activating abilities and arranging support and reinforcements. Should the tide turn in battle traditional control is still available.
Now the rocks are looking where I want them, a bit of special re-factoring has been done, I'm ready to start injecting life into space. Pretty soon these asteroid fields will be teaming with life, exciting stuff!
The asteroids look great, but are they big enough to hide your ships behind to block some incoming fire? Also, will there be micro-meteoroids? Would be interesting to see ship systems take damage from a (third-party source :P)
That is if there's going to be ship systems that you can target?
The asteroids will play a huge part in the game, masking sensor readings, collisions (complete with mesh deformation and fragmenting) and full use of the physics package - performance permitting.
Targeting ship systems, well i've toyed with the idea but it's going to be too complicated to add in. Instead the various weapons will have random and perk initiated status effects such as 'Shields harmonics matched' and 'Capacitor overload.' The game will be unwieldy with sub-system targeting, the player would struggle to navigate the ships to hit the various hotspots, the GUI would be a nightmare and I would have to rewrite the AI so it is less flexible and it will detract from the overall cinematic experience i'm trying to generate.
Fear not however, there will be plenty to be getting on with elsewhere!
Oh and yes the asteroids will block incoming fire :) in fact, engaging the enemy in the clear from the cover of asteroid is a very obvious and cool tactic. ;)