Haven’t had the chance to start on Staturday, started today, at 10am, so planning to finish this some time tomorrow.

The game is an experiment to bring a three-act story where you can decide what to do each day and get an ending associated to your actions.

Let’s see what we can do.

I’m using this as an excuse to try MOAI. It’s been great so far.

I already have a resource cache, a scene manager and one scene with background, character and objects. Oh, and the character moves arround the screen.

A screenshot of the progress so far:

Yay! Aldi joined the game.
Welcome her.

The concept for my game is simple: Human race is known to be destructive and you need to avoid them get in contact with the rest of the universe.

I’ll be streaming the whole thing on twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/nastycloudgames

You can also follow me ( @franciscotufro ) and my team ( @nastycloud ) if you want!

Well.. this is the first update of the project’s progress…

Name

To honor the first alien known to humanity, the game is called Can you hear me Major Tom?

Gameplay

The goal of the game is avoid aliens to know about human race. For that to happen you need to avoid the awareness stats from growing.

The awareness stats are:

• Existence (increases when aliens find emissions)
• Position (increases when radio emissions get a successful position analysis)
• Language (increases when radio emissions get a successful language analysis)
• Culture (increases when space missions are captured and analyzed successfully)
• Contact (increases when ships land in earth)

As you may see the gameplay is based in emissions going out from earth and aliens intercepting those emissions.

For now I have implemented the base spawner, radio, mission and garbage emissions:

I’ve also implemented the base alien stations with a functioning listener that captures emissions with a specified range, analyze them and update the awareness stats.

You can see Earth and some mocked emissions in the screenshot:

Now I should start working in the resources (matter and energy) and the tools you use to influence emissions and avoid them to be noticed/analyzed by aliens.

Let’s see how far I get!

Well.. 24 hours have passed!

Since my last update I’ve been able to implement some mock ui to create tools, the garbage collector (the tool that gives you matter, not the one that frees memory).

Then I’ve added all the alien stuff:

• State-based reckon ships, radio telescopes and tripulated ships.
• Races send probes to the earth taking the position awareness stat into account.

I also added solar panels that collect energy.

With Garbage Collectors and Solar Panels now you’re able to collect resources (Energy and Matter) that will be used to create Tools.

Tools are used to affect emissions and try to avoid alien races to find them.

Since I don’t hace much time left for the gameplay side, I’ll just implement 4 tools:

• Bombs: Destroy ships and probes. Low Matter, High Energy.
• Noise emitter: Radio close transmissions get impossible to analyze. Low Matter, Low Energy.
• Beacon: Distract races during a certain amount of time generating lots of events. Low Matter, High Energy.
• Asteroids: Break stuff that find on their ways. High Matter, Low Energy.

After that I’ll try to level the economy, so gathering energy and matter is leveled with the amount of tools needed.

I also need to implement a good AI for the Garbage Collector.

I’ll try to finish all this stuff in the next couple of hours, go to sleep and focus on graphics, music and sound fx tomorrow.

We’ll see!