In Development: Galactic Bondsman (Title not set in stone yet)

[ISAWHIM]

I wasn't sure where to put this. HERE seems most appropriate.

I am working on a game, a space-adventure, trader style game. Built similar to a "Visual Novel", but it is NOT just a visual-novel.

I will be posting progress and hurdles here, before I have something worthy of an actual release. This will be a free game, which I hope to get donations to continue development for. The game will also be highly moddable, to extend or totally hijack, if desired.

Currently, the game is a bit all over the place. I am a one-man army with the GREAT individual support of the users from here and within the "Visual Basic Community" Discord chat. https://discord.gg/4qe9Ze4N

The game is about a young man who has just come of-age. His grandfather, who helped raise him, has just passed away. He was the inventor of the original "Jump drives", which promised to take "jumping" from a corporate-only luxury, into a public domain. However, things didn't go as planned.

His research, as it turned out, was not really "privately funded". It was being funded by one of the largest corporations in that time. Also the most evil of the corporations. They stole his work and attempted to kill him and his team, but him and his friend had escaped. Though it was only him, that the company really wanted dead. The others were just loose-ends.

While his friend risked staying near, afraid to leave the heavily controlled borders of the corporate zones. He made a sprint for the other side of the "reachable galaxy", using the prototype jump-drive. There was no other way to get out of that zone, because the corporations controlled all the old-world jump-gates. But the border wasn't his only hurdle in his journey to escape. He had to get past the central war-zone, before he would arrive at the far end of the lesser developed end of the "reachable galaxy".

You see, our galaxy is composed of bands of stars and non-star bodies. They swirl around a few black-holes in the center, slowly flowing to the virtual "drain" of a new existence. Between these bands of dense bodies, are equally as wide "voids". These vast bands of nothingness, have no suns or bodies close enough to navigate and debris is flying around at millions of miles an hour, unseen. That makes most of our galaxy unreachable, even with the best super-computers for detection and fastest jump-drives to span gaps. So, our reachable band is about 1,000 light-years wide and about 20,000 light-years long. The voids are just under 1,000 light-years, between bands.

Nearly at the center of our band, Earth was the only planet with humans on it. After the first jump-gates were made, corporations spread in every direction. They drained most of the planets in the center of all valuables. Working outward to the planets that were just not profitable to mine. The outer planets were peppered with valuable minerals, unlike the dense packed veins found in the central planets. Corporations found new footing at the edge of the band, nearest the center. Planets were closer, abundant and much more stable than those found on the tail-side of the band, furthest from the center of the galaxy.

The tail-side became home to people looking to escape the evil empires and mining. Most became craftsman and farmers, if they didn't become pirates and mercs. This is where his grandfather found a new home and a wife. This is where his family was started, and ended.

Now, it is time for him to try and get back what belongs to his family, to his people, from those who guard it, unsure what it even does, if it still exists.

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So, where am I in progress with this game?

I have something of a shell, which I am still messing around with the "flow" of the GUI. I stopped when I hit the "Prologue" component, which is one-click away from launching the game. :P

My first hurdle was just trying to get "justified text" to display correctly. Tackled that. Now that is waiting for a format to use, which can be edited easily, as text or with a custom editor. (I want this to be multi-lingual, possible, which is another slight hurdle.)
(Talked about in link) https://www.vbforums.com/showthread....tive-solutions

My second obstacle to tackle, was the "navigation" and "trade charts". I wanted the program to do the brunt of "pathing", so the user is not going crazy trying to micro-manage every star along the way or stop along a delivery path. Have that mostly tackled now too.
(Talked about in link) https://www.vbforums.com/showthread....mental-hurdles

My third obstacle is some form of "scripting", so MODDERS don't have to "program", in VB6, in order to make playable mods for the game. (They should be able to use a text-editor or a custom game-editor, and make most game-functions interact and create the desired "story flow", as needed.) That is just on paper at the moment and no code is even hammered-out.

Next, I am working on the delivery details and ships details. The ships being heavily upgradable and the deliveries needed to make money, having a lot of codependence on the ships design. (Needing special storage types or cargo-types. Heated, Cooled, Cryo, Sleeping, Entertainment, Passengers, Explosive, Radioactive, Secured, etc...)

After that, I need to structure the "events system", to handle all of the text and scripting, so they "do things", with a reason, forming the game/story.

I have yet to determine how I will handle "conflict", which is related to ship-to-ship "battles" or fights. I am not able to do 3D any justice and my 2D work would be "just enough" to fake it, well. (I wanted a form of radar-type interaction, which I have many ideas for, but nothing hammered-out in code yet.) Initially, I may use text-only based interactions, like a system-screen of alerts that need to be managed. Only until I can get something looking like a live radar view, which is also functional.

By the way, almost everything will upgradable in the game, except you/him. The ship, the ships components, systems in the components, trade terminals, maps, radar, weapons, etc... The point is that you constantly NEED to upgrade, to survive, but there is plenty of advancements past NEED too. Then, at some point, you have to downgrade again, which is actually an upgrade, of sorts. (Hard to explain that one.)

Okay, going back to work. I'll post my next "issue" here, so I am not flooding the general "VB6 help section".

Once I get something worthy of launching, I will attempt to put it up on GitHub and mention any places, if it is allowed, for donations. (More than likely, "Patreon", or "GoFundMe" or something like that.)