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Hi. My name is Alex. I'm an artist, and independent game developer. Nice to meet you. Do you like Space? I do. let's be friends.

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Spckd
Spckd @ Star Villains and Space Heroes

Hey! Right now we've capped it at 8 ships per team, ie. 16 ships in a battle. We may increase that number however. We did some stress testing earlier on and found that the game ran fine with >5 times that many ships onscreen at once.

And yes, we're planning to include carriers and escort ships which carry fighters in future updates. You can see some concept art for fighters and carriers in the images section.

Thanks!
-SpcKd

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Spckd
Spckd @ SVSH on Space Game Junkie Podcast!

Hey there! SVSH will have three main modes:
-Skirmish, where you can set up a battle against ais
-Multiplier
-And single player mode, which is going to be like a sandbox rpg mode with persistent story arcs, mission, and a map.

Skirmish mode will be available first. Our upcoming beta release will have the skirmish editor and a bunch of ships and maps to choose from. Then in subsequent updates you'll get MP mode and sandbox mode. The final release will have five playable factions each with about 10 ships including carriers, and a bunch of other neat stuff too. We talk about a lot of that in the podcast above.

As for your question about Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight, we're still investigating. Kickstarter actually JUST came to Canada, so we're interested for sure. What I can tell you is that we'll be making a big deal about it if/when we end up doing our first kickstarter or submitting SVSH to services like Steam Green light or Desura. So keep an eye out!

Thanks for the questions!

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Spckd
Spckd @ Star Villains and Space Heroes

Thanks so much! I think Star Citizen is so exciting because it proves that people are interested in the genre. I don't see them as competition at all. SC looks great, and SVSH is different in so many ways that I expect people to enjoy both of them.

To answer your question[s], you won't be able to build your own ships. Chris and I have been have been hammering out the details for ship upgrades in single player however, which will allow you to do a lot of customization. There's also a lot of ships to choose from, and variants of each class.

We'll totally let you know if/when we announce our Kickstarter. KS is coming to Canada in September, which saves us a big headache we've been avoiding until now. And I'm afraid we're not looking to expand the team atm.

Thanks again!

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Spckd
Spckd @ Star Villains and Space Heroes

Yeah. Chris can tell you all about how annoying it is to have me spamming him with ideas about a sandbox mode. We've still got a lot to do before that though. I invite you to keep it in the back of your mind just like I do! I think you'll like what's coming in the mean time.

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Spckd
Spckd @ Star Villains and Space Heroes

Ah I see what you mean. Yeah, radar mode is less useful for maneuvering when you're right in the thick of battle. make sure you've always got enough energy for an engine boost saved up. It's really useful for avoiding collisions, and it will take bad guys a while to shore up their target lock on you after you speed away.

Indeed the Humans do have ships which are longer range in the beta! Their battleship and frigate, for example. But you can also use fly Aiad ships if you want to use those long range rail guns yourself ;)

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Spckd
Spckd @ Star Villains and Space Heroes

Oh hey, I'm sorry to hear that! I hope you'll try it again when the beta comes out. The difficulty system is going to be a lot more versatile.

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Spckd
Spckd @ Star Villains and Space Heroes

You can stop a little easier by switching to radar mode. There's a bold green line indicating your momentum. You can line up with it and reverse engines. But I do take your point!

Right now we're trying out ways to give you more tools to control maneuvering, rather than making things happen automatically. For example we were experimenting with a key that lines your ship up with the direction it's drifting so you can fire your engines against it more easily.

Thanks for bringing that up! I'm really glad you're enjoying the game, and we're defiantly keeping going :)

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Spckd
Spckd @ How to Design a Starship (Part 1)

Thanks man! Keep an eye out next week.

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Spckd
Spckd @ Star Villains and Space Heroes

Thanks! 'Fraid we don't have any plans for a ship editor, though the current ship list for the full version is sitting at ~40-50 ships, between five factions. Each ship will have several variants, with different weapons. Hopefully there'll be a good amount of variety there.

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Spckd
Spckd @ Carrier Has Arrived!

That's a great question. We're still actually a little ways away from doing performance testing under full combat conditions to determine what the general upper limit for fighters in a given battle will be. We're designing the fighter mechanics as efficiently as possible for lots of fighters though, and since carriers have fewer weapons than other ships, they also use less computation, leaving more room for lots of fighters.

Another limiting factor may stem from trying to command very large numbers of fighter squadrons individually. For that reason carriers and the like will each be assigned a manageable number of fighter squadrons, 4-6 for example. But When multiple carriers are involved in battles, the actual number of fighters on screen can be quite high. We'll be sure to post more details about this as we gather more data through testing, and begin to implement fully functional carriers!

I think it's safe to say you can have lots of fighters in a battle if you want. I know we do.

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Spckd
Spckd @ The Future of the Game

Carriers will generally have limited anti fighter and anti ship weapons, but when you're flying them, you reply primarily on your fighter squadrons for defense and attack.

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Spckd
Spckd @ Star Villains and Space Heroes Demo - Linux

I just gave it a try now, it seems to be working again. Maybe try it again now.

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Spckd
Spckd @ Star Villains and Space Heroes

Thanks, Bellino! Glad you like it.

We do have a button for that actually, but it's not in the demo. If you ever need to stop, you can switch to sensors view to see a big bold line pointing in your direction of travel. If you line up with it and fire reverse Thrusters, you'll come to a stop.

Good hunting.

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Spckd
Spckd @ This small news update will BLOW your MINDS!

This is fantastic. The dynamic music is really impressive, and the game itself looks amazing. Good job, guys!

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Spckd
Spckd @ Star Villains and Space Heroes

The Demo is out now! Glad you like what you see :)

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Spckd
Spckd @ Faction Feature #1: EMPOL

6) The AIAD See guided weapons as a poor answer to insufficiently advanced target prediction. They also see projectiles containing computers as an exploitable weakness. If you try to use missiles against them, they’ll usually send them back to you.

7) Yes, nano tech has existed in their ‘biosphere’ for a long time. Everyone has Nano tech to varying extents.

8) The demo we’re releasing features missions which take place at various times in the vicinity of the 2380s/90s. The full game takes place a few years after the EMPOL-AIAD War, which ended in 2389.

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Spckd
Spckd @ Faction Feature #1: EMPOL

1) It stands for Planetary Galactic Co-ordinate index. The number is the parent star's entry in the index. The letter refers to the planet.

2) We evolved without understanding our source code at all, until very recently. They started out totally non-sentient, reproducing based on blueprints. Heuristic algorithms could analyze data gathered, and incorporate minor revision to the blueprints for subsequent iterations. This process eventually gave rise to complex and sentient beings.

I don't believe I ever referenced a 10,000 year timescale, but the issue isn't their inability to access the information contained within the relics, they just have no idea what it means for the most part. Like, if the voyager probe turned into a sentient machine, it probably wouldn't be able to read the English on its golden record.

3) EMP is a by-product of any old nuclear explosion, and is actually really easy to shield against. Most modern day military tech is hardened against EMP effects. And like I said, cities affected were prepared, and they were able to restore power grids.

4) I can't quite tell if you're concerned that that's too much time, or not enough time. But to answer your question, humans spent a long time with only a few outposts inside The Solar System. FTL travel is new enough for humanity that most of their population still resides on Earth, and a handful of habitable worlds. Other colonies are as small as dome colonies with like ~100,000 people. 250 years refers to the time humanity has had deep space travel.

5) Being around for longer doesn't equate to continual expansion. Damascus is the oldest continuously inhabited city on Earth, yet Syria does not rule the world. And yes, most of them have been in space longer than Humanity. Humans also benefited from technology sharing after contact, which brought them up to relative parity with their neighbors.

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Spckd
Spckd @ Faction Feature #1: EMPOL

Sure.
1) AIAD has all kinds of killer robots as well

2) It's how they evolved.

3) That's interesting, though I feel like the robots might have had trouble burying bombs on Earth during a battle.

4) Most AIAD worlds are already really inhospitable to Humans, and humans are capable of waging ground battles in many environments, including biological warzones. AIAD wasn't taking planets from EMPOL, but rather, from allies of EMPOL. EMPOL took the AIAD homeworld hostage via a fleet in orbit, not a ground force, so bio weapons wouldn't have done much good.

5) You can find the human population numbers in the full EMPOL feature on our site, there's a link at the bottom of this article. It was about 31 billion before the war.

6) That's a lot of assumptions about a civilization we haven't even described yet in detail. For your reference, the Solonar and AIAD are also rivals, and would be unlikely to ally. The Solonar empire is so called by EMPOL, they describe themselves as the "Solonar Federation." They prefer to expand by subversion and cultural absorption, so they'd be unlikely to be very interested in joining the AIAD in a war just for fun.

Thanks for your questions!

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Spckd
Spckd @ Faction Feature #1: EMPOL

1) But a supercomputer isn't omnipotent. It was wrong. At a certain point predicting the future is impossible, even for a really good computer. Since their goal was only to seize a few systems, they expected EMPOL to Capitulate. Turns out they're bad at predicting human behavior. See: The Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein thought he could seize tiny Kuwait without starting a war, and was wrong.

2) I'm pretty sure it's impossible to cause Yellowstone to erupt using a couple nukes. Even so, if they just wanted to kill humans, a couple cobalt 60 bombs would irradiate and kill everyone on Earth. They may be robots but they're not... dare I say, inhuman ;) Their goal was to force a surrender, not to exterminate humanity.

3) See above answer. Eradicating the biospheres of entire planets, not to mention whole civilizations is also seen by most other groups as a sort of galactic war crime. Humanity had powerful allies, like the Integrated Group, who chose to remain neutral. Something like that might have changed their minds.

4) You do, actually. Cities are centers of industry, finance, communications, markets, and government in most civilizations. During the cold war cities like London were targeted by dozens of nuclear weapons. Each weapon was usually reserved for a single target, like a factory, an air port, or a center of communication.

5) The Human forces held their home planet hostage to force a surrender. If they had simply bombed the Robot Homeworld into submission, the Robots would have kept fighting, as they had a distributed enough civilization to do so. But they really revered that supercomputer, and didn’t want it harmed. Being sentient, sometimes illogical robots, they also probably have some sentimental value for the planet their race evolved on, and which houses all the feats of their civilization. If the supercomputer (which by the way is not mobile) had been able to move, the Humans would have destroyed it, if it tried to leave.

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Spckd
Spckd @ Faction Feature #1: EMPOL

The humans don't use any centralized cybernetic controller for all of their forces. While the Robots proficiency at computer science was difficult to deal with in the context of electronics warfare, their ability to simply take over computer systems was limited by differences is computer architecture.

Regarding telepathy, Lots of species in our universe have developed to the point where they've integrated themselves with technology in some way, or uploaded themselves into machines. After fighting wars with beings like this, most Humans see their biological nature as a point of pride. Still, while they don't really use telepathy, they do have a lot of technology which lets them interface with technology better, and many medical treatments involve cybernetic implants.

Thanks for the questions!

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Spckd
Spckd @ Faction Feature #1: EMPOL

* I missed your point about nuking The Moon. I like the idea, but The Robots were near Earth during the battle, meaning that warheads fired towards the moon would take several hours to get there, since it's about 2.5 light seconds away. This would give EMPOL plenty of time to intercept them.

Additionally, The Moon is the fifth largest moon in the solar system. I just did some Googling to see if anyone had run the numbers on this, because I feel like it would take many bombs. One estimate arrives at a minimum of ~592.6 billion of the most powerful hydrogen bombs, and that's if we could distribute them throughout The Moon with tunnels.

The Robots attacking the system were composed of two main battle groups, armed with a standard load-out of tactical nuclear weapons, as well as two ships armed with strategic weapons. This means that they fell short of having almost 10 million times more nuclear weapons than humanity has built to date ;)

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Spckd
Spckd @ Faction Feature #1: EMPOL

Hi! Thanks for you interest, and bringing up those points. I hope I can clarify some things:

-The robots actually targeted lots of cities and things in the battle. Their targets were dictated by the hemisphere they were facing during the points in the battle when they had an opportunity to attack the planet. Defenses against orbital attacks exist on Earth, and were able to intercept some incoming weapons.

-Those weapons which hit the targets listed did not kill everybody in those cities. Some warheads air-burst short of their targets, after being hit by defensive fire. Humanity had also been fighting this war for years, and was reasonably prepared. Not all of the cities were attacked with nuclear weapons, as it said in the text.

The numbers are meant to reflect that things don't always go as planned during war. The idea is that the robots were fighting an uphill battle against the entirety of Earth's defenses, and took what shots they could. Even successful hits aren't always as damaging as planned. I defiantly remember people projecting that as many as 50,000 people could have been killed during 9/11. The actual number was far lower, due to mitigating factors.

-The numbers aren't made up on the spot! Growth projections for 2080 are fine and good, but the story takes place many hundreds of years from now. We alluded to regional wars, and resource scarcity between now and then, all of which can influence population distribution. Look at Detroit, or Syria.

-The robots are defiantly logical, but we also just posted an article about them. You might find some interesting info about some factors which make them act illogically as well. Feel free to check it out.
I hope that clears some things up. There's only so much space we can devote to this kind of thing on indie db. We have plans to create a wiki in the future though, We'll be happy to go into this kind of detail there!

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