Build a home, build a community, build HOPE.
Hope is a first person, world and community building roleplaying game. Set in the junkpunk world of EverSky, where people live on flying structures known as "rigs". Your role is to help build the community on a rig called "Hope", using a wide variety of tools. You will build, enhance and maintain the rig, whilst trading, crafting and socializing with the rigs inhabitants.
EverSky is an alternate world where everything is made from salvage. The rules of physics and the laws of entropy work differently in EverSky, as you will learn as you master the physics-powered gravity gun, the remote control "build drone" and a whole array of other such tools, which allow you as a player the complete freedom to build out the rig to your own design.
You are not alone on the rig, nor is your rig alone in the world. Spend time socializing, or trading with other rigs in order to build up funds to buy new enhancements for your home. Win over the people on the rig and watch as their respect grows for your dedication to their home.
Hope is all about freedom. You are free to play as you like, the game will adapt itself to you as you play, offering new experiences and new inhabitants to interact with. We want you to really want to spend time aboard Hope!
Articles
Had a rough last few weeks. But before we get to that, here's an update video:
As you can probably tell by the tone of the video, things are at a bit of a low point right now. I had a Unity crash that took out some UI work I'd been doing for about a week, unfortunately my backup wasn't up to restoring that work (I've learnt a valuable lesson about doing backups of Unity projects and what doesn't work there). Luckily the code is all in source control, so its just a bunch of GUI setup and the like, but its fiddly as hell and kind of annoying work to do.
So I was demotivated a bit on working on the game because of that crash, figuring that it could do it again at any point (its not the crashing I mind, its the trashing of the scene file that loses me work I mind). I figured over Easter break I'd give myself a few weeks off and play with the new Unreal Engine 4 release.
I have a couple of what I think are good and compelling ideas for games I could make with Unreal, so I started shifting some assets into a test framework:
Unreal is a really VERY pretty rendering engine. It has some pretty cool features, but also has downsides compared to Unity in terms of gameplay iteration times. So I'm going to experiment with blueprints a bit, see how they hold up performance-wise.
Anyway, getting back to the downers of the last few weeks, the other major down in terms of HOPE is that the money I had hoped to secure for the procedural character system for the game isn't coming (if you recall I entered a "competition" for funding much like a dragons den kind of thing). Which means that I'm basically stuck. Unless I can find a good character artist I'm at a bit of an en-passe because without characters the game isn't going to work. Its about community after all.
So I'm going to step away from HOPE for a month or so. Give some thoughts to working with Unreal, hopefully giving Unity a chance to come out with better licensing terms or source availability, work on releasing my current inventory/crafting system on the Unity asset store and generally do something else before I get back into the swing of things.
Its been a bit of a crushing time, so hopefully a break will do me good, give me back some energy for the project and let me have some fun again. I really should look for an artist in the meantime though :)
I'll keep you posted anyway!
Latest dev news - adding mod support!
News 1 commentA quick update on the latest dev work, including mod support.
Developer Diary #25 - Is Unreal an option?
News 1 commentThe latest developer diary, showing the crafting in action, but also speculating about Unreal engine usage.
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Awesome looking game. Make it realistic tho. Let the realism and physics be the main part of it. Rig conflicts / wars perhaps? Make the world / rig evolving on its own, make the AI communities life like.
I'd like to see every AI as an individual with survival (food, sleep) needs and if possible, rig community (AI) trying to manage their rig on their own.
Looking forward for this game!
Yup, I own wind. But seriously f*** youtube's Content ID BS.
The worst bit is that I'd like to do some analysis of other games design aspects to show how I'm thinking of developing the gameplay, but I'm too scared to because of the Content ID, so no discussion of other games for me.
Probably unrealistic, but this would be fantastic as an MMO for a number of reasons. Still, looking forward to it.
Yeah, I think the world I envision would be good for MMO and other media, but honestly its one of those things you have to stop thinking about as you develop.
I've started to track this game, and even if its the bare bones of the game a alpha would be amazing so we could help you improve on it, because from the looks of it you have an amazing game forming under you. Keep at it and don't short change yourself!
Thanks, I keep thinking of doing an early release and I'm definitely going to do it, but its at the "just too broken" stage right now. Its almost like it makes me think its ready and then I notice it really isn't. I need it to be something you can actually play and have fun in. Which isn't far off, but its frustratingly slow to come together in that way.
Thats the worse XD. Just keep at it! Looks like it will be worth it, and think once you release it in a very rough form we all can help you improve it and all that nifty game testing stuff.
Yeah, absolutely want to get there. But feel like its not fair to release it currently, it literally wouldn't be playable to anyone but me right now (parts tend to block other parts etc). Will get it out as soon as I can though.
This game looks like it has potential. I would love to see this game finished! Speaking of which, do you have an idea as to when this will be released?
I'm going to maybe do something quite stupid and release it just as soon as I have enough mechanics in it to feel like a game you can play (trade, construction, crafting etc). Then I plan on developing it further with the social stuff while people play with the other parts and give feedback on how that should change.
I suspect "finished" will be a quite loose term. More like "released" in that I plan on developing it in quite a few directions (first phase is getting the rig working, next phase getting off the rig into the wider world etc).
So I can't honestly give you a date for when. But I'll release the work-in-progress builds as early as I can. Likely for free.