All About Progression
Hey everybody! Today we're going to dig into progression. We have a pretty deep progression system in Astrobase Command which you might expect from a sandbox game, so there's a lot to cover. Hold on to your space-hats and here we go! Points First thing we need to talk about is points. The concept of points should be familiar to players of tabletop games such as Warhammer. In Astrobase Command, the points of a unit is a reflection of its attributes, skills and rank. Equipment also has points, and this gets added to the unit. A 100 point marine with...
Meta: Art Imitates Life
I want to take a step back with this post and talk about the game industry, and then relate that to Astrobase Command. So how does a game get made at an established, AAA studio? First, a decision is made to make a game at all. If a studio is planning ahead, when there is still time left on the clock for shipping the current project a small team is formed to pitch concepts and prototype the next game. It's not efficient to have highly-paid coders sitting on their hands, but some work needs to be done in the design...
Can You Dig It? – Thoughts On Our Retro Art Style
Given the recent interest in our more art focused posts, we thought it'd be a good idea to talk briefly (and fill them eyeballs with pleasant pictures) about how we went about choosing our art style. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words Over the course of multiple evenings at coffee shops and around beers in someone's apartment, we began to define what we wanted the visuals of the game to say about its universe. While we wanted certain aspects to remain mysterious and open to interpretation, there were some ideas that became important to us: A scattered...
At Face Value: Character Portraits!
We may be going to pun-hell, but at least you get pretty pictures out of it, courtesy of our friend Björn Sorensen. Check out his portfolio! Building a Face This is our first art prototype for building drawn character portraits from various layers. The goal is to combine and re-use various parts (face shapes, clothing, backgrounds, body parts, scars, decorations, alien features) to create a great variety of portraits. Notice how much variety you get with just 2 variations for each body part! The final game will come with many more to fill in the 'circular spectrum' (explained below). While...
Modules, Assemble!
Now that we’ve had a chance to get a ton of great feedback (...and friends!) on the visual style of our race creation and various menus and screens, we’ve turned our attention to solving the mechanics of module construction. Modules need to be built by your crew and, like any other game system your crew members interact with in Astrobase Command, we want to give them opportunities for great success and catastrophic failure. Here are some of the factors that we thought up to make it the most destruct- FUN! I mean fun. Construction Time Module construction can be a...
First Media Coverage and 100 Likes!
Sooooo... we ended up on Rock Paper Shotgun today. nnnnngngggggOh my god I can't get over how cool that is! Thanks to Adam Smith for taking the time to visit our little corner of the Internet and help us make some new friends! We've already gotten a lot of love from the community, some really smart feedback and even a few very inappropriate compliments! Keep it up! We also hit 100 Likes on our Facebook Fan Page! Social media party hats for everyone! Today has really shown us that we're on the right track with this game and that the...
Character and Storytelling Design
If you've taken the time to read through our Game Info section and its hilarious player scenarios, you know that the characters that make up your crew are not only what breathes life into this universe, but also serve as your main way of interacting with it. Of the many sources of inspiration we draw from in making this game, we've focused on the lessons learned through years of playing pen-and-paper tabletop RPGS (D&D, Shadowrun, Savage Worlds, Call of Cthulhu and many others) when it comes to designing meaningful characters. Now, this isn't groundbreaking in itself. Most video game RPGs...
Announcing Astrobase Command!
Hey there! we're super excited to welcome you to our brand new website for Astrobase Command. We're a bunch of game industry people that formed a team a couple of months ago to work on a game design that Dave has been kicking around since forever. Since we're all about including the community in the development process as early as possible, we're showing off a bunch of pre-alpha content to see what you think! Head over to Game Info and Media sections to check it out and feel free to discuss them in the forums. If you like what you see,...
