Nice work there HugoRAS. I need to look at the download later on.

looking forward to your future additions.

Can't get into the site at the moment will have a try later.

Thanks. Yes, I've upgraded the server, so it should stay up this time, but it was down for a lot of today.

This all sounds fantastic, just my type of game. Can't wait to try it out.

 

The next few releases should see weather, animals, plants, biology, chemistry, and other things.

 This is sort of thing I always look for in these sort of game but it always seems to get neglected, I always think that developer need to spend more time looking at what makes a planet work rather than have thousands of barren lookalike planets. So when you do visit one or find one there should be a certain amount of awe at seeing it.

Yeah, that's something I am thinking about at the moment: The game actually contains all the stars within about 100 light years of us, but at the moment there's no way (except in debug) to get there --- and they are barren things at the moment. It might be better to just focus on one star system (or three, potentially, for the story line I'm considering), and put most effort into just those planets. If someone wants to wander off into an uninhabited procedural universe, I'd let them, but they would have to know that they would then be outside the focus of the game. It might be a good device that if you talk to the right people, then you get information about where the other (few) interesting star systems are --- letting you progress in the story. 

I also think that procedurally generated planets are only interesting the first or second time you see them, and the only challenge that each would bring to the game would be to land on them and take off again. 

Hi all, I've made a 3rd release today. I don't want to publicise it too much, since the game play isn't expanded that much, but there are now asteroids, clouds, wind and a few cosmetic changes.

http://www.iotapersei.com/

Nice one HugoRas.

Your vision for a game is an interesting one and a vision people usually don't put in the game. What use is a planet when there is nothing to do with it 🙂 There isn't too many games that allows you to explore a planet and you can actually see other things other than terrain. Keep up the good work and it will be fun watching you transform the engine into something special.

There is a 4th release up. I don't want to get everyone's hopes up: In terms of game play, it's quite minor, but I've added a chemistry system to the game and a better inventory.

I had a bit of reservation about putting in about 2 months of work into chemistry --- it's not something that would ever *have* to be in the game, but I wanted it to be in there, and I thought that since I'm in the lucky position to be able to work on a game without it having to make money, I should put things in that less independent people / companies would stay well clear of. Besides, I spent years of my life doing chemistry simulations, and it would be a shame not to use that here.

I like that I can set the elemental abundances for a planet, and it will automatically come up with mineral abundances, even if it throws up a few weird ones (like the solid hydroxide mineral which was fixed). It's not that accurate to what we actually have in real life, but it's internally consistent at least. Also, it paves the way to a whole load of new things: minerals have (in theory: it's not possible to actually get at the numbers or observe them yet) a strength, a melting point, temperatures at which they will conduct and more. When I need these to be incorporated into the game, they will be easy.

Anyway --- the next release will be more in terms of me adding more storyline and another planet, and hopefully more game content, so more to look forward to for people playing the game.

H

I've just released version 7. The final game should be a mixture of survival, trading, exploring and fighting. Since that last release, I've been pushing at the survival aspect of the game, so I've added hunger, poisoning, sleep, hunting, animals, plants and crafting. 

The informal aim for this game at the moment is to survive the night.

Enjoy.

www.iotapersei.com

Read your notes on release 7 and your adding some nice personal features with the sleepiness and weight etc... now you mention that things you do in the world stay until you logout. Will you be altering that later on? I am not sure what is destructible or not in the game but if you take down a building or farm resources from an area it would add realism to the game plus an added challenge that if you farm your resources too much that you could have to go farther out to get more. Having resources growing/forming over time would be ideal so those areas don't stay barren forever.

But nice release notes and look forward to finding time and sitting down with this eventually.

Oh one more question... in your screenshot you list air quality stats. Will those change depending on where you are at and can it effect you persons health or ability to complete actions?

Hi, I was considering making the world persistent from one game to the next: so if you start again, you'd have to go further. On the other hand, if there are exceptionally valuable locations, they might need to be protected. Then there's the possibility of having it persistent from one user to the next, not necessarily fully multiplayer, but so that if you build a base, the base is there for all players. 

I've just implemented save games, which'll be in the next release (future release 8), and the persistence will be per save game.

Yes, air quality stats do affect you. At the moment, the only relevant ones are the total pressure, the oxygen partial pressure and the CO2 partial pressure, but the atmosphere model is flexible enough to have toxic atmospheres, and to purify the air chemically.

I've put up release 8! It's now got savegames and a bit more on the asteroid civilisation. You now start off in orbit around a far out planet, but you can get back to the original planet.

It feels like there's still a long way to go. I originally decided to write my game with an engine inside it: it uses monogame, but fairly low level, so a lot my time was taken up with the engine. The advantage of that is that I have a lot more flexibility in a way, but the disadvantages are that it's very slow, and the graphics won't might not look as good as other games. However, now I'm starting to be able to write the actual game now. This release is the first one where the overall shape of the game is in place, although it's still lacking some challenge and purpose: trading doesn't quite work (the same prices everywhere, not enough loot), you have a lot of money at the start, and as yet there are few hidden gems to find.

But now I can work on those game play aspects, so it should start feeling complete in a month or so.

Enjoy. 

www.iotapersei.com

Impressive work HugoRAS.  :drinks:

I've put up release 9. I've put in a lot of work on the gameplay aspect of the game: things like buying and selling, space battles, and space stations. However, it's still a long way off being a complete game. 

Every aspect of the game takes longer than anticipated. It's weird how you can get something to 25% done in just a week or two, but getting to 50% done takes 6 months. The game has now been in development for over a year, and it's still got a fair way to go.

The game is still a release or two away from having the purpose for the player set (I've worked out what I want to drive the story, but not yet implemented), but for now, as an initial challenge, there are 4 codes hidden in the game: if you talk to the right ship / person, you will find them as text that just says "Code: ...". Consider the initial point of the game to be to find the four codes.

Release 10. 

I spent ages redoing the shaders. I was thinking that good graphics were secondary to content. I still think that, but graphics are quite fun, and it wasn't terribly difficult.

Also, there's more work done on civilizations, attacks, terrain.

Enjoy, and let me know how it goes.

Nice work there HugoRAS, yeah gfx isn't everything but its nice to look at and build hype for your game 🙂

Nice watching the progress to a completed game and seeing it go through its stages so thanks for the posting.

And just so people know you can download the beta here: http://www.iotapersei.com/beta.html

Give feedback if you can I am sure HugoRAS would love it.

And here's release 15. It's been a while since Iast posted here. It's very much work in progress still. I've done a lot behind the scenes on realistic chemistry and electricity, and planet generation --- and the planet graphics a bit too, but the gameplay is still basically "fly around and see stuff".

The next year will really build the game part, rather than the engine part, though, so hopefully it'll start being more playable.

http://www. iotapersei.com/beta.html

H