Well this is some kind of achievement right here. I’m going to try and avoid my usual rigmarole about timing or not doing work because it has gotten rather boring to write. More importantly, since WordPress is calling this “367” internally, I’ve discovered my last post’s name was, incredibly, a coincidence.

So, did I actually do stuff? Yes, for once I did. I’ve been working on something internally called MLD66, MD66, and MD67 for over a year now without ever really saying what it is in any detail. The project names sprout from the fact that this began as an idea for Mini Ludum Dare 66 (okay apparently almost two years), and then after I restarted it once I dropped the L to make sure the filename was different, then after restarting again I switched over to just incrementing the number. What the game was when it began and where it’s going now are… different, I suppose. I first thought of the idea watching a video by Quill18 of Aurora4x that started with his desktop background of the solar system in an art style that I liked. I looked at that, somehow my thoughts crossed over with what I can only assume to be Mini Metro based on the final outcome, and I said, “Hey, you could have little ships flying between those and moving resources and make a simple little strategy game out of it.”

I tried to make that, and it didn’t work. Then I tried it a different way, and it didn’t work.  It kept getting weirdly complicated, or I would forget what the actual gameplay was supposed to be, or I just wouldn’t like how it looked, but so far the current incarnation is surviving. I’ve started taking notes on my ideas so I don’t lose sight of the goal again, and in its current form MD67 is something like Sid Meier’s Pirates! in space. You are the captain of a spacecraft under the control of a megacorportation that now controls Earth, and it is your job to go around exploring the galaxy and expanding the company’s reach (and profit margins) with you. You can slowly climb your way up the corporate ladder while also upgrading your ship and meeting other interstellar empires (who you will probably end up killing, because video games). It’s basically nothing like the “Quill18 Desktop Wallpaper” idea it began as (that was how I referred to the idea before I started building it) and I may still make that, but for now this is my project.

So far I have a model of a Galaxy split into regions of around one solar system each, but they can contain more, and ships that move around and interact with the planets and starts. Lately I’ve been making it possible for the ships to get into fights, which involved learning how to calculate the collision of polygons, and now they can. The next step is to make it so you can actually control ships in battle, and so the computer will too. Then I just need to make the rest of the game and I’ll be done. I guess. That seems optimistic, but I try to be hopeful. Or I’ll go try and learn Aurora4x again because that game is awesome once you know how to read the interface.