Skip to main content

Frontier Explorer

I've been thinking about, tinkering with and procrastinating over making a game for years. I have untold gigs worth of Unity projects clogging up, not only my desktop & laptop hard drives, but also our network storage drives! I sat down to do some serious thinking at the start of this decade and realised, the main reason I so often don't follow through (or get anywhere near even alpha stage) is because there is no actual story or driving idea behind my projects. Every few months I sit down to make a game. Once my prototype goes beyond the most bare bones mechanic, I eject like a boulder from a trebuchet. That or I spend several great night's working on getting a level designed, only to realise I have absolutely no clue what I'm going to do with it!

This time it's different! This time, I have an idea. An idea based on a game that has already been made and works really well. Yes that's right, I want to make a game very similar to and inspired by one that already exists! I want to make a space exploration game where each world you visit is unique, each solar system different from the next, a game where there is basically no end as it all gets generated on the fly as the player moves through the universe (except for maybe when the data needed to run the game gets so massive I/the game can't keep paying for hosting that much data). I am of course talking about a game very close to No Man's Sky.


If you've read this far, you're no doubt thinking, "But that game already exists?!", and that is a very valid thought! The best rebuttal would be, one is not enough. Call of Duty isn't the only military fps, Fortnite isn't the only battle royale, Destiny isn't the only looter shooter. More of a good thing, especially in gaming, is never a bad thing.

To be completely honest though, exploring space is the coolest damn thing ever, plus it's one hell of a challenge! The shear technical backend that will be needed to even get a tenth of the way to NMS would be a major feat for a single dev game! My goal is actually to do mobile first, because I want to cruise around space exploring new worlds on my phone when I'm on the porcelain throne. Obviously with the ability to port your account to PC at some point, and who knows maybe one day even console 🤣 

For now, watch this space 😉

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Worker Bee

Do what you're told, follow the rules, don't over step your bounds, stay in your lane. The true cornerstone of modern enslavement to work. "We can't all live our dreams", why is that? Because then we'd have to change, to collectively actually think and enact a way all people could realistically achieve a base standard of living & contentment. Allowing people's mind free reign on real questions rather than worrying where the next meal is coming from & keeping the lights on.  Bee animation by  Joe le Sale While I have no answers to life's great mysteries, I do know this about the meaning of life - it definitely isn't to toil & labour day in and day out to fill the wallet of our bosses or investors. So how is it that we find ourselves with that holding such a giant sway over our lives? This of course is rhetorical, we all know the answer, you don't bite the hand that feeds you. Which brings the problem in to sharp focus, we no longer ...

Galliventurer - Dreaming of a Universe

n. Galliventurer - one who adventures whilst gallivanting. We have a name. A compound of the words gallivanter & adventurer it fits the game quite nicely. It will also be the name of the player's ship (though, you may be able to have many ships throughout the game). Also trying something a little different for this project, practicing what I preach as it were. I'm actually going to plan this out a little bit before I ever actually write any code. Oddly I feel that most of my hair brain schemes of previous years have had a fast paced "rush to market before someone else thinks of this" attitude. So obviously there was no time to stop and take a moment to put any thought in before code went into editor. None of those projects ever made it out of the proof of concept phase oddly enough, no prizes for working out why. In the spirit of all this, things are different this time around. Having given it even two minutes of thought there are several issues....

Genetic Revert & Refresh

The premise is pretty simple, what if we could press the undo button for DNA related aflictions. It's a sound theory but whether it would actually work or not is questionable. The possibilities! This particular train of thought was mostly born from thinking about cancerous cells, which grow out of control due to a minute mutation in the DNA of a cell. The immune system doesn't identify the cancerous cells as something that is dangerous because they're near identical to any other healthy cell. The same could be said with aging, cells slowly mutating & loss of elasticity cause degradation in copying the genetic information to new cells. CRISPR gene editing theoretically allows us to alter DNA in a live organism. With this technique the ability to alter a DNA sequence needs only the desired information payload to be spliced in. This obviously raises rather large ethical concerns of being able to wildly alter people's DNA and fundamentally change the human genome. Whi...