What is it?
Battle of Tau Ceti is a team-based multiplayer space combat game (in case you hadn't read the game summary above!). It features two teams equipped with a flagship and player piloted ships of all sizes battling it out in a series of randomly generated sectors to compete for control over resources and to destroy the enemy's flagship. Ships range from small one-man fighters to large six-man battleships all player controlled to fight for control of sectors which are the source of all resources. Any sectors under your teams control will cause your flagship to send out collectors (leave the boring jobs to the AI!) to harvest resources which upon returning are divided among the players.
Securing sectors and protecting your collecters are key to critical resources used to purchase bigger and more powerful ships. Different ships have different strengths and weakness, knowing your enemy and choosing the right ship is important! When purchasing a ship, you also get to choose a special ability that the pilot can use to customize your ship to play to your strengths or your enemy's weaknesses. You team wins when you've destroyed the enemy flagship which will require teamwork, no easy task!
Who is developing it?
Just me! My name is Pat but on the Internet I tend to go by Codestar. I'm currently employed full time as a software engineer in the DC metro area and work on this game in my spare time. This has been a passion project of mine for a little over a year and a half where my goal has been to realize my vision for this game as completely as possible on my own. The reasons for this are that 1) having a full time job, I didn't want to commit to any kind of schedule so I couldn't fail to deliver on it and 2) as a test of my own ability to produce something tangible that I could be proud of showing off (sorely lacking in my professional career).
The biggest catch is that I'm a developer so my art skills are poor. I've been able to make due with the big help of the Unity Asset Store but it's not a complete solution. How I go about acquiring the right art assets has always been an unanswered question that I've been putting off for as long as possible and I think I'm finally getting to the point where I can't put it off much longer!
I've made a couple attempts at building games over the past few years (privately) and either realized how in over my head I was or lost interest over time and through frustration. The idea for this game developed in my head, I discovered the Unity engine, and a year and a half later here I am and still going strong. This is the real deal!
Where is it now?
Since the game has been in development (however slow) for the past 1.5 years it's quite far along despite several feature rewrites. Currently, the game is built on the free version of the Unity Engine and is nearly feature complete. I do all of my testing locally running a 32 player server of mostly bots. So what's missing? Final arts assets, lots of polish, and tons of testing!
Where is it going?
Future unknown! With that said, the game will be completed and it will be released. When and in what form has yet to be decided. There are still many questions to answer as to graphic and network performance as well as its viability as a commercial game.
Luckily these are questions that can be answered! If you've made it this far down the post and have an interest in providing feedback, consider sending me a message or make a post in the forums telling me you'd be interested in playtesting. Very soon I'm going to need all the help I can get!
Also in the plans are a custom website/domain for game news/updates outside of indieDB but no ETA on this currently.
Thank you for reading and if you have any interest, consider 'tracking'/following my game and come back to get updates on its progress. See you soon!
