Monday 23 January 2012

Frequently Asked Questions


Q: What is this game?
A: Galaxial is a 2D space strategy game. It features a sandbox mode allowing the player to explore, colonize and conquer planets in a vast randomly generated galaxy.

Q: How many people are working on this game?
A: Just myself.

Q: What features will the game have?
A: The features include:
  • Thousands of ships and many hundreds of colonizable planets in a single game.
  • Colonize new planets with each type of world having unique strategic bonuses.
  • Explore the galaxy to discover valuable planets and asteroid resources.
  • Mine resources from asteroids to build planetary facilities and new spaceships.
  • Protect your empire from enemy factions and raiding pirates.
  • Diplomacy system to form alliances or declare war with other factions.
  • 13 unique classes of spaceship including: (Fighter, Frigate, Destroyer, Light Cruiser, Command Cruiser, Heavy Cruiser, Light Carrier, Transport, Battlecruiser, Battleship, Colonizer, Carrier, Dreadnaught)
  • Take direct control of any ship you own.
  • Assign ships to squadrons and wings so that they fly in formation working together to deal with threats.
  • Hundreds of individual ship modules including various weapon types, electronic warfare, shield/armor repair and propulsion upgrades to specialize each ship and enhance their abilities.
  • Research new technology to enable new ship designs, modules and empire bonuses.
  • Customizable ship, engine trail and turret colors to make your ships look unique.
  • Full modding support for user made ships, weapons, items, factions, colonies and research.
Q: What game modes will there be?
A. There wont be any campaign or story mode, just a huge sandbox galaxy with no set goals to build an empire in. I have plans to add further game modes once the game is released.

Q: What resources are there in the game?
A: The main resource for building are metals which is mined from asteroids. The asteroid ore must be processed at a refinery before they become useful to build with. Wreckage from destroyed ships can be salvaged using specialized ships for extra metal resources.

Credits are needed for most things in the game and are generated from high population colonies. Colonies require enough food to grow.



Research data is needed to build the most advanced ships and modules.
Ships will also require a crew and in some cases troops.

Q: Which games inspired you to make this?
A: EVE Online, X3, Sins of a Solar Empire, Total Annihilation

Q: Will it be moddable?
A:
Yes. Most things in the game can be added or modified very easily using XML files apart from certain parts that are hard coded such as the AI and user interface.

Q: Will there be multiplayer?
A: Multiplayer is not planned at this stage and would be very difficult, but it is something I would like to add in the future when I have more time and resources to try and implement it.

Q. What will the recommended system requirements be?
A. As the game is still heavily in development, I am not able to list exact system specifications just yet.

I have been developing the game on a fairly old (5 year) system: AMD Phenom X4 9950 (4 core), Geforce GTX 260, 2GB RAM so if you have anything close to or better than this, then it should run perfectly.

Q: How do you develop this game?
A:
Everything is programmed in C++ using my own OpenGL based engine. Third party libraries I use include:
  • Parallel Patterns Library (Concurrency)
  • FreeType (Fonts)
  • LibPNG (Images)
  • Expat (XML parser)
  • OpenAL (Audio)
  • LibOGG/Vorbis (Audio files)
For creating all the graphics I use Adobe Illustrator.

Q: What platforms are you going to release for?
A: Windows. I would also like to port the game to Linux and Mac shortly after the initial release.

Q. Are you still developing this game?
A. Yes, Galaxial will be released. You can also follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/stuart_morgan) where I post more regular updates about the games development.

Q: When will it be released?
A: It's hard to estimate as this is my first proper game and there is a lot of work to do. I hope to have a beta (pre-order) version ready shortly before the full release, but I don't have an estimate for when this will be yet.

Q: Will the game be free?
A: No

Q. How much will the game cost?
A: I dont know yet.