Frontiers - sci fi RPG

[Sollthar]

Hi everyone

I just discovered these forums and would like to introduce myself and my project. I only just discovered the world of gamemaking and programming last year, but I've always been fascinated by the media and always wanted to create my own game. So last december or so, or started working on this dream and began creating my very first game in my spare time and I'm enjoying it very much so far.

"Frontiers" is a science fiction RPG that is developped all by myself so far - graphics, animation, code - in my spare time. I try to work on it as much as I can but I mainly get to it a few hours per week.

The game's layout is roughly like this:

- A completely open and non-linear universe with different planets, anomalies and 4 factions in control of those.
- An event script will keep creating new content and different storie arcs to keep the player progressing and gameplay unpredictable and unique. Meaning, even I don't exactly know how the world develops when playing.
- The player can walk about on planets, interact with the population, hire crewmembers for his own ship or eventually even fleet, do peaceful trading missions or even enslave entire planets.

Here's a first, very early alpha gameplay video and a couple of screenshots.

Youtube gameplay Video

















Looking forward to input from what appears to be a very experienced community!

[Sollthar]

Shame I'm not getting a single reply. But for those interested:

I did some more work and was able to implement some basic code for facial animation and mouth movement as well as a couple of interactive items. Also reworked a handful of textures to make certain parts come together more smoothly.

[Gilgamesh]

Do those guys purposely have really big heads?

[Sollthar]

Uhm, sure. They're holding their breath really hard to see who explodes first.

[airage]

Originally Posted by Sollthar

Uhm, sure. They're holding their breath really hard to see who explodes first.

lol

Gilgamesh got a point there, some of the anatomy looks a little weird/wrong.
But overall this is looking great so far. I'm really impressed that you've already created so much on your own. Did you do all the art content as well?
You are putting a lot of hard work in this, I'm totally looking forward for updates!

[Sollthar]

Thanks! The screens are from an old build where I had a script that randomized the size of the body, without affecting the head since that's a seperate mesh. So that might be the cause. That or the fact the models are just wrong to begin with.

I'm still tweaking everything here and there, since I am indeed building this all by myself. I also did all the assets and textures. Everything except the music. So I jump back and forth between coding, modeling, animating, writing, soundrecording, testing, tweaking, optimizing and so on. It's fun and I really learn a lot and I'm able to constantly improve and build on what I already have. I also keep learning how to use the engine so I can up the poly and detail count from build to build.

So it's really just something I put together for me as a learning experience and see where it takes me.

The current models (which are still about 850 polys each) look like this:

[airage]

These are definitely looking much better.
I would love to see some more Sci-Fi, especially in the environments. But i understand that it's all work in progress and you can do a lot when you plan to have different planets etc.
Just out of curiosity, would this be able to run in that unity web player thing?
And I'm really totally impressed that you're doing all the art as well, good stuff!

[Sollthar]

Yeah, I did a test build and ran it in the webplayer a while ago and it works perfectly fine. Filesize currently is 40 MB for the webplayer, half of that is audio as all the dialogue is voiced as you can see in the gameplay video above.

Yeah, there's loads of stuff missing still. Haven't even begun working on the more sci-fier elements.
I do try to get away from the "thick armor and neon lights" sci fi design into more of a "used" look. Haven't got the tone quite down yet. Still experimenting a lot.

PS: Had a look at your website. Really great and inspiring work! Will definately have a closer look at some of those images for me.

[RenderLuz]

Wow best one man operation game iv seen, GREAT work Sir!

[Torch]

Mate.....you've done this all by yourself? That's amazing, kudos to you