Little Universe: Update 1
Announcement:
For the first time, I'm announcing a game to the public and it's quite an exciting feeling. The project, Little Universe, has been a labor of love for the past 2 years of on and off development in my spare time. Now, the game and I are ready.
The Concept: A open universe, where you can change everything from the little, to the massive
The concept for the game as it is now, is rather simple. A 2D open universe rpg where you can explore a massive randomly generated universe and all of it's planets. You can upgrade your player's space suit and weapon for on foot combat, or your spaceship for intergalactic travel and combat. Eventually being able to completely destroy and harvest planet cores to create your own planets. Allowing for an endless adventure. The game plays in a top down perspective both while in space exploration, and while exploring planets on foot. The main emphasis in the game is to collect new items and weapons for your ship and player to survive the universe.
While you can collect new items and loot from your surroundings, by defeating more powerful space pirates, aliens, or by exploring abandoned ruins and space stations on planets. There will also eventually be a crafting system where you can mod current items to create unique effects for them, as well as by changing your base ship. Currently there is only one playable ship however, but I plan to have to have at least 20 by release. The ships are all modeled in 3D to allow for barrel roll and turning animations to allow for a better sense of 3D movement.
The Sandbox Issue: repetition, repetition, repetition...
While I am a huge fan of sandbox games, they often have the same issue for me. Eventually it becomes repetitive and you're doing the same thing over and over again. To combat this issue I've been working on adding a large amount of random events for the player to do if they wish to, or they can ignore. Just to name a few while exploring space; a group of bandits can appear, or a treasure comet that you must destroy before it flies into the sun. Other events like strange SOS beacons, races, traders, rare elite monsters, and eventually more will be added in the future.
Unlimited Power: Create and destroy everything
All of the planets in the universe can also be destroyed, and you can create your own new planets. Once you have a powerful enough ship, you can destroy and harvest a planets core. Each planet has there own unique resources in the universe, from liquids to solids to gasses.
Harvesting a planet will give you a planet core with one of those planets resources, for example a Hydrogen Planet Core. When creating a new planet you can combine 3 cores to create new planets that will have the resources you would like. For example combining 3 of those Hydrogen Planet Cores will create a very dense hydrogen gas planet that you can harvest for a lot of hydrogen resources. This will allow the player to create there own unique universe that will eventually provide them all of the rarest resources in the end game. Each new planet you create will also have its own unique land surface to explore.
Planets: What makes them unique
Each planet in the game generates with a set physical look and fell, list of resources from common to rare, and a massive 5,000 square miles of land for you to explore on foot. While this is not the size of a real planet, it is large enough that it takes you over 12 hours to walk across the map on foot and 56 minutes to fly across with the fastest engine currently in the game. Planets will also eventually generate unique alien tombs and abandoned space stations for you to explore, and will also eventually have wildlife that can either be friendly or hostile. The photos below show a very early rendition of planet generation and I'm working on making the planets more interesting.
That's all for this announcement and I hope you are as interested as I am for the future of my project, spreading the project my word of mouth greatly helps!
- Cheers! Shawn Graves
DISCLAIMER: Almost all of the art you see is placeholder, and I will talk about the art style for the game in a future update.
