I thought it was about time I put down on my own monster project which has been going on for some time now and the new direction I’m taking for a while.
Life
Life is a game about life, set in the distant future (yes it’s scifi since I love scifi), life is about one persons struggle with humanities conflict with corrupt organisations, pirates and the general nastiness of space.
Some Features outlined for Life
- Infinite Universe
- Chance to play as Pilot. Merc, Pirate, Trader or Governor
- FPS, Strategic Play, RPG, Conquest modes
- Customise you ship as technology progresses
- Build your own empire (if you wish)
- Episodic Play
- On-Going background story and lots of in-game stories
Some of the ideas for Life have come from my gaming experience, from such games as System Shock, Independence War 2 – edge of chaos, Knights of the old republic (I liked it, some don’t), Imperium Galactica 1&2 and the MegaTraveller series (you’ll have to be pretty old to remember this one).
The project is very ambitious and I may not finish it alone but I’m not to bothered at the development time and I will likely break up the graphic releases into more simple interfaces as the background engine grows, providing more simple 2D graphics for each visual component (FPS, strategic, RPG etc)
The project will take a long time to mature at this point, the main focus of my development around this project of late has been the background engine which will run everything about the universe, this has come a long way since I started but no big graphical stuff as yet.
Until XNA came a long and my mind started to wander that is, recently I’ve had a slight change of focus (more to take a break with some of the complexities of the background engines).
I’ve now started work on one of the may sub game elements of Life which revolves around hacking (naughty me!)
The hacking sub game will feature on PC, XBOX and PDA’s and be finally included in my main game later.
Hack-1
(working title)
This will be a 2D game (may go 3D later) and is progressing well, once I’ve reached an alpha stage I’ll post the game onto Codeplex and future releases.
The title pretty much says it all, it’s a game about hacking, gaining entry to things you should not, the objective will always be the same (get it open/bypassed) although to achieve this there will be a lot of things in your way, getting harder all the time and introducing more challenges.
A lot of thoughts for this to be a separate game also come from my playing UPLINK, great game but I don’t intend to go as involved as uplink and focus more on the actual hacks.
Keep looking.
P.S, I should mention that with 3 Kids, Work and home life, I don’t usually get to spend as much time actually coding as I’d like but thanks to the PDA I got recently I can think on the move (its amazing how much thought you can get down while your walking the dog), would recommend a PDA for any small time developer so as not to let your good random thoughts get away!!!!
Simon (darkside) Jackson
Engineer, industry executive, research enthusiast. Avid learner with diverse interests in coding, game development, Mixed Reality (AR/VR/XR) and reinforcement learning. 25+ years of experience working in multinational corporations and startups.
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