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Outfly

Initial Post

Irrelevant Intro

I keep getting endlessly inspired to create my own space sci-fi world (probably in the form of a game) whenever I play games like FTL, Sunless Skies, RimWorld, Outer Wilds, Space Haven, watching series like The Expanse, Cowboy Bebop, Mars, and reading books like Project Hail Mary, Anathem, the Sprawl Trilogy, and Red Star, Winter Orbit...

Also, whenever I visit my home page, I remember this gif by plupluru, which is just so cozy, and I think that this should be a game:

my home page

Image: plupluru's "finally"

The problem is that it takes so much time these days to build games that have decent graphics and run on all platforms, and I really have better things to do than pouring thousands of hours into a game that nobody will ever play. :D But then again, I used to build dozens of games when I was a kid. How embarrassing would it be, if I can't pull that off now anymore? Technology is more complicated these days, but nothing prevents me from using old technology today, right?

The Game

So I started hacking away and got this working:

Image: outfly screenshot

The game idea is best summarized by this message I sent to vifon the other day:

vifon

I want to make a game where you settled on an asteroid, attached some rockets onto it, and now it's a space ship which you can fly around anywhere you want with. You can mine the resources on the asteroid and sell them, build a cozy house there, grow space vegetables, hire workers or breed slaves, maybe build a little pizza restaurant on it to get some income from wandering astronauts, upgrade your spaceship parts, attach weapons, fly close to a sun and collect a bunch of energy to refine resources with, or mine bitcoin, or just recharge your batteries after a long stay in the depths of interstellar space. Trade with the various space clans, form alliances, become a pirate, or just build a fully autonomous habitat and fly out all the way into intergalactic space where you are away from all the humans and can live a free life until... I guess... inevitably your energy will run out and you die. As a free human. Or whatever you have become.

By neglecting the graphics, I can focus on implementing interesting and scientifically accurate game mechanics that result in emergent gameplay like in Dwarf Fortress and Nethack.

Nethack

Dwarf Fortress

Also, development time is greatly accelerated, and it basically works now already. Although there is nothing to do, no place to go, and the game is entirely meaningless (just like your life). But over time, I can add on more and more parts at whatever pace I feel like. This could be a nice pet project, let's see if this gets anywhere.

Source code

Braille Asteroid

New screenshot of Outfly:

Image: braille asteroid

The asteroid now consists of HD braille characters, the house features an antenna, the rocket became smaller and the exhaust more realistic.

Now there's also waste water and air humidity that can be recycled, methane as an alternative power source, and androids that don't need to eat but consume power.

Also, now all of the chemical reactions and item effects aren't hardcoded anymore, but instead defined in a big dictionary, which makes it much easier to add new things. \o/

Finally, the asteroid mass is a little more realistic, although I guess there's asteroids of all sizes, and the player should be able to pick their own asteroid at the start of the game, with the desired composition and mass.

Source Code

The project is free software, you can find the source code here:

https://codeberg.org/hut/outfly

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