Beyond the Chiron Gate is now a game that can be completed!
By which I mean that the player can get to a victory screen, although to be honest this is also the first time in ages I’ve felt like I might be able to finish making this stupid game.
Of course there’s still a long way to go. Completing the game currently looks like this:
Here’s what I’ve done this month:
Story progress events
The main thing I’ve added is a series of events that trigger once each per game as you progress through the story. I’ve rewritten the game’s intro, and it now leads smoothly into passages for your first gateway journey, first landing on an alien planet, first discovery of alien life, etc., until at last you find the Gatebuilders’ home system and win.
The first screen of text in the game is now snappier, and gives you a choice (albeit a cosmetic one) right away:
One of the criticisms I saw of Seedship (to which Chiron Gate is meant to be a spiritual successor) was that you have to click Continue multiple times through a linear intro before you get to make a choice, so I wanted to avoid that here.
This one-page intro now leads directly into initial crew selection:
I’ve tidied the crew selection interface up compared to previous versions, largely by reducing each crew member to a name and a class icon so that there’s space to put the two lists side-by-side. The interface for viewing crew members during the game still devotes more space to each one so that it can display their level and any status effects on them.
The next two screens don’t have any choices, but do show the effects of the crew choice you made, by having your selected pilot fly the ship into the wormhole and then have minor effects for whether you have or don’t have each character class during the wormhole trip.
Then you’re in the new system and the intro gives way to the regular game loop, but there’s special text for the first interplanetary journey and the first landing on an alien world, which is suitably ceremonial. First you get to pick which crew member takes the first step (whoever you pick gets a temporary skill bonus), and then you get a chance to plant a flag:
(I posted this on Twitter the other day, and based on feedback there I realised the current text is pushing the player too heavily towards the “no flag” option, so I’m going to revise it and probably add a third-option to leave a non-nationalistic marker like a plaque or something.)
That’s as far as I’ve actually written of the story events. There are passages for your first return to base, the first time you find life, etc., but I still need to fill in their placeholder text.
Interstellar civilisation homeworlds
Besides rewriting the intro, the main work I’ve done this month has been on interstellar civilisations and how you learn about them.
Each interstellar civilisation now has a home system which is generated at the start of the game and never forgotten. One of the traces an interstellar civ can leave in other systems is a derelict starship, exploring which lets you discover their alien gateway drive.
Once you’ve discovered an alien civ’s gateway drive, you can buy the “Alien Gate-Drive Homing” ship upgrade, which lets you visit the home system of any interstellar civ whose gateway drive you’ve examined.
The gateway-related ship upgrades are now bought using the new “Gateway Physics” data type, which you’ll only be able to gain from examining alien Gateway-related tech and from studying the Gateways themselves.
The story idea is that each gateway drive is tied to the star system it was made in, and can be used to control the gates in order to travel to that system. This is also a justification for why you can always return to Chiron Base in the Sol system even though you can’t otherwise control where the gate takes you.
Victory
(Spoilers, I guess. Skip this section if you want to discover for yourself how to win the game.)
The Gatebuilders themselves don’t leave derelict ships anywhere, but once you’ve discovered a certain number of alien gate drives, you understand the gateway network enough to home in on its centre, the original gate in the Gatebuilders’ home system. You can then buy the final ship upgrade, the “Gateway Nexus Locator”, and use it to visit that gate.
In the final game I’m going to add a variety of different things you can find there (the Gatebuilders might be friendly, hostile, extinct etc.), but for now you get the placeholder text from the start of this post.
Road map
I feel like I’ve reached a major milestone this month. The whole development process so far has been about iterating on prototypes and gradually finding the fun, but now I think I’ve finally got a clear picture of where the fun is and what the finished game is going to be. Here’s my plans for the rest of the project:
- Refactor and rearrange code to simplify it where possible and make it easier to maintain.
- Revise existing content to make it work properly and fit with the final vision of the game, and fill in placeholder text.
- Finalise game systems, rebalance existing content, and add more content until there’s a minimum viable game that’s fun to play.
- Finalise UI, both to make it look better and to make it work properly on small screens. (This is also the point at which it will be helpful to get playtester feedback.)
- Add more content to take it from a minimum viable game to a big, rich game that has enough content to be interesting over repeated playthroughs.
- Revise, rebalance, bugfix, polish.
- Work out details of release strategy.
I’m going to resist the urge to make even a vague prediction about the release date. It’ll be done when it’s done.
Thank you all for sticking by me through what’s been a longer journey than I’d originally hoped. This was always going to be an ambitious project that would stretch my technical abilities, and various things have meant that it’s been hard to predict how much I’ll get done over any given period. There’s still a lot of work to do, but I finally feel like I’ve got a clear idea of what that work is and how I’ll do it.