First and foremost, thank you for visiting this page. I finally took the courage to follow the steps to post my game on IndieDB and I will use this website to give you updates about this game's development. I would have waited a bit more to have better things to show but I think it might be better to share my development progress with others.
This game is the work of a one man army so far. I have friends who help me test the game and design blocks but I wrote the entire code by myself. I use JAVA as developing language and libraries such as LWJGL and JBOX2D. I have developed several tools to help me such as a UDP-only network library (no determinism, more like QUAKE network code) and a graphical engine that sits on top of LWJGL that gives me helper functions and paradigms such as screens, widgets and events. I plan to eventually release the source code of both my network library and my game engine. I really like my network engine :)
The artwork is a little bit dull and boring because I have no artist on this project at this time. This is a shame since my game exploits normal maps and animations. No sound so far, except for beeps and blips. I intend to purchase some tracks online or find an artist to produce an interesting sound track. The game itself, named Moon Fever is split in two parts, developed in this order:
Multiplayer:
This is the sand box itself, running 32 to 64 players. Divided in two teams, each team has a star base. The star bases are far apart and several outposts are sitting between them. Each team spawns their spaceships around their star base and attacks outposts (which fire back on you). When an outpost is destroyed, you can build a new one on the same spot which now belongs to you. Your team will now respawn their spaceships on the farthest outpost from your starbase (closest to the enemy's star base). The game ends when one of the two star bases gets destroyed.
A pure deathmatch version will also be available.
Single player:
It's a great challenge to write an interesting story with good characters and background. I have a very good idea of how I will develop it. The game will revolve against a mysterious plot in a near future. You will play as an humble garbage man who picks up waste from moon colonies (to be thrown out in the sun), from there you will start your adventure to money and glory :) I cannot tell much right now, the story is not fixed yet.
Eventually, the game will allow you to play in coop. In fact, the single player game mode will run as a local server with a special campaign/mod loaded, allowing even more choices than coop. (Ever wanted to play a bad guy?).
Why is this game is so different compared to other games?
Other games have spaceships too but they are not 100% made of destroyable blocks. I think this is the main reason. The game simulates every object in a real-time physics engine and funny behaviours can
occur. As an example, you can slice an enemy spaceship in two by colliding your own ship against him.
You can even build a spaceship designed to do just that, with the strongest HULL blocks on the nose of the ship and very strong reactors to slam the spaceship with more force. You can even build gimp ships, you know stupid spaceships, if you put thrusters on the left side but not on the right side for instance, the spaceship will spin on itself. It may fit your playing style :)
As I said, this is a one-man project, but I would be interested to work with other great minds too, if you have some interest in this project, please contact me.
Yanick Bourbeau
