derelict_

Overview

A hulking mass of metal drifts
effortlessly through space.
Once teeming with life,
now quiet like the dead of the night.
This is a derelict.
For the brave amongst you,
there are unbound treasures aboard
worth unimaginable fortunes,
with a wealth of information
just laying for the taking.
However.
This is a derelict for a reason.
Pray you never find out why.

Development Screenshots

Project Progress

This was created as an entry for Ludum Dare.

I did, however, bite off a bit much.. I was also, again, a bit ill at the time – fighting off some flu-like thing – so ended up sleeping as normal, which knocked off a good 14 hours at least!

While a lot of the structural stuff is in there, and there’s a lot of content, there’s also a lot of core elements sadly missing.

Crucially, there’s a distinct lack of feedback.. so although you can move and fire, you have no idea how many action points each costs, how much you’ve used, how much is left, or if you’ve even successfully fired and hit something!

This was due to a lack of design which I didn’t think would need much time, when in actual fact, is what really makes or breaks a game such as this – how information is relayed to the player, and how the player interacts with their units.

Added to the fact I basically coded the game twice, due to an idiot decision of adding in multiplayer hotseat support either too early, or too late. It was in the original plan, but I jerry-rigged it in at a bad time while I was implementing some core changes, which completely destroyed a lot of working code that had to be redone. As much as I was using SVN, I was not committing nearly as often as I should have, and this buggered me up further as I should’ve been able to just revert back a bit and continue on.

That said, I did get a lot done.. a lot of the unit types and characteristics are coded, although not linked up fully. There is also a fair amount of re-usable code, and some of the “five minute fillers” added a fair bit of polish to the front end.

It’s a shame that the core of the game is incomplete.

Future Work

Like Moons of Subterrane, derelict_ was an idea that I’ve had for a while and always wanted to do.

Now I have a functional base, I can go back to it and finish it off at my own pace.

Downloads

Full Source is available as part of the ludumdare github repo

Resources Used

SGZEngine.

GIMP for graphics.

KATE for Lua code editing.

CodeLite for C/C++ engine editing.