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[Anvilfolk]

== PLANET 5521 ==




Would you like to know more?

The war between Man and Bug has escalated over the past two decades. Increasingly desperate, the two races begin using weapons of mass destruction as fast as they can be produced. The conflict gets out of control... As the senior military cadres panic, all of the colonised or habitable planets in the galaxy are nuked within the space of a week, under the guise of "strategic interdiction". Billions die, and the civilian populations are all but wiped out.

Worst of all, the fallout covering the former colonies from both sides will last centuries. Only the Terran and Bug fleets in space survive the catastrophe. Low on fuel, air and food, both races focus on survival. They must resettle, and quickly... but where?

The remaining scientists pour over thousands of exploratory records are studied, desperately trying to find the key to their race's survival. They find a little planet, designated Planet 5521, barely able to sustain life. It had been overlooked as too small, too far away and with too poor an environment to be of strategic value. It is now the only asset of strategic value.

Every ship left in the galaxy, Terran and Bug alike, plots their course towards Planet5521.

Quick description and gameplay:
You will be fighting as the Terrans. As the last of humanity, you will be trying to keep the Bugs at bay until you become strong enough to exterminate them. You can harvest Bug corpses and study them. This research will allow you to upgrade your units' capabilities so you can gain the upper hand. Unfortunately, both their corpses and your own can provide the food needed to spawn more Bugs... so you'll be fighting for territory, and then to keep the rotten remains of the battle!

You'll need to build up your initial foothold, and then expand and create outposts. While you do this, the Bugs can tunnel underground and emerge at strategic locations, including near undefended engineers or right under your base! Your task is to expand over the entire planet and use beacons to scan it thoroughly. Wipe out every last tunnel and hive you can find!

Every skirmish will be important and provide interesting tactical decisions. You will have to micro these skirmishes to make sure you win that particular battle. Then you must maintain superiority until your engineers can bring the research back to base. If you fail, that's food for the Bugs. But if you use heavy weapons, such as grenades, flamers or nukes, you will destroy the corpses, and thus, the research potential. Do you guarantee survival and lose the upper hand, or risk annihilation but progressively grow stronger?


Technical information:
The game is open-source and available on GitHub. It is programmed in Python 3.3 and with PySFML.

We are using compositionality rather than OOP, with Entity/Systems. There is also quite a bit of Event-based communication rather than directly calling things. We are being particularly careful in maintaining the separation between Model and View. There's the usual game state framework, and a GUI system that needs more "widgets".


Modding
You can already mod graphics by editing PNG files, and units by editing XML files, though it is a little obtuse. If there's enough interest, it should be possible to get a system set up so that you can quickly test units so you can see what's happening with the XML. Some moddability is being ignored right now, so more features can be put in. However, things can be made easilly moddable down the line.


!!COLLABORATION!!
More collaboration = more good! Here's what the project needs right now, in order of importance:

• Graphics artist: looking for someone to take over visual direction of the project! You can already make new units and associated graphics by editing .png and .xml files.
• Game designer: lots of things need fleshing out: like Terran basic resources and buildings, Bug faction gameplay; possibly a meta-sandbox-campaign and/or meta-storyline-campaigns.
• Programmer: there's lots to do, including unit editor or making it easier to create new units, improving sound system, optimisations, etc etc.

If you are interested, drop by the community Google Doc, where you can add your ideas and join the real-time chat!


Playing it!
Go here, and on the bottom right, you should be able to "Download ZIP". Download and install Python 3.3 and PySFML. Then, just double-click Planet5521.py!

[acetech09]

Really cool. I'd be interested to help out but I'm just too busy right now. GL on the project. Watching with interest.

[My Name is Immaterial]

PTW.

[OREOSOME]

PTW. Do you have any plans on making it mac compatible? Or did I just miss any mention of that while looking through it.

[Anvilfolk]

Is it obvious that the "Would you like to know more?" is a video link or should I make it more explicit?

Thanks for expressing interest, and don't forget there's room for participating in this!


OREOSOME: unfortunately PySFML 1.3 does not work with mac. That is planned for version 1.4, but development appears to be fairly slow. However, you can contribute to this if you want, as they have a GitHub.


Not a lot of the gameplay is fixed, so I'd love to see some discussion going over here as to what you'd personally like to see in a game like this. Also, what mechanics could be interesting, and why, and would they be fun, etc.

For instance, I was planning on having two research-based buildings. One of them would be an observation outpost, which would gain very small amounts of research from Bug troops in the area. They wouldn't be too expensive to build, but would be nice to defend because they'd generate lots of research in massed battles. Perhaps the Bugs could simply bypass them by building tunnels under it and never really getting close. However, perhaps they house scientists, which could be extremely expensive and rare units, so losing one could be a major setback for the Terrans. This gives some interesting tactical decisions.

The second research building would be an actual laboratory, where the remains of the dead Bugs are taken. This produces a lot more research and requires more scientists, so that it's a major Bug target. However, of course, it's really hard to kill Bugs and actually bring their bodies back. And perhaps Bugs could stage ambushes, such as letting themselves be beaten so that lots of Engineers go grab the corpses, but then have a tunnel ready for the Engineers on the way back to base. They might be unprotected, so lots of Bugs would tunnel out, kill the helpless engineers, and bring the food back before the Terran player knows what's up.

But then, say, an expensive, temporary snooper could detect prepared Bug tunnels... so there's a counter to it, if you care to spend lots of money on it. And perhaps if you identify a prepared tunnel you can throw a nuke at it without the Bugs expecting it, killing all of the waiting Bugs. But of course, nukes vaporise corpses, so they're last resort, because you need the research.

Decisions decisions?

I mostly just want to give meaningful tactical decisions to the player. The mechanics themselves are still pretty open.

[Anvilfolk]

I had planned on trying to add engineers today (totally just gonna add a backpack with an antenna...), but focused instead on figuring out what was causing the gun glares to appear shifted from where they should be. Took me longer than I expected - graphics stuff is always the worst. During the debugging process I also optimised orders and commands a little bit.

I updated the video, and left the dead bodies in. That's what engineers and bug drones are going to carry back to base.

[mastahcheese]

Oh man I want to play this so bad.

[professorlamp]

Would loooove to contribute programming wise, let me think about it.

[Anvilfolk]

Feels great to see I'm not the only one that'd like to play a game like this!

Sweet! Feel free to have a look at the code in the meantime! And let me know if you have any questions!

[Anvilfolk]

Today I added engineers as a unit, which involved drawing some backpacks, fixing some more graphics bugs which are tough to track down. But that's fixed now!

I also added a base, which can get destroyed, and added a wee particle system to make building destruction moar pretty

Oh, and also added a different sound to Bug attacks (they were actually making machine gun sounds when they attacked, haha )

Here's today's pics!

Spoiler: The horde approaches! (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Final stages of the battle... (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Pretty particles go wee! (click to show/hide)

It's late today, but I'll try to keep making videos which showcase implemented features. This looks a lot better in video.

Hope you enjoy it!

[Xantalos]

Rico!
Aaaagh
You know what to do!

'Yes sir!'

PTW so hard.

[Mephansteras]

Posting to watch.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

watching to post, etc.

[Anvilfolk]

A quick video of the day before yesterday's progress: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBdZGq1D5cM

Next step is making bodies gatherable for research. Do you guys have any ideas in mind for what specifically research should give you? I am thinking incremental upgrades, like a little bit more damage, a little bit more range, faster movement, etc.

[Mephansteras]

Hmm. You're studying the bugs, so it'd make sense that you're working on ways to hurt them better.

How about the following (either in some order or maybe randomly):

Slight boost to damage for all troops, reflecting minor ammo modifications geared towards damaging the bugs specifically. (Ie, Hollow Point or Full Metal Jacket or whatever it is that works best against bugs)
A chance for troops to do a Critical Hit, reflecting better knowledge of Bug physiology and knowledge of weak points.
New Troop Type - Heavy Weapons - An experimental heavy weapon that does massive damage against the bugs. But expensive and slow to make.
Damage Reduction - Sturdier armor designed specifically against the types of attacks the Bugs do.
Base Health/Defense boost - Reflects better knowledge of what the bugs can and can not do.