Back in February 2020, as the UK went into COVID-19 lockdown I started an old school game development side-project with a few specific goals:

Gameplay

• Sci-fi / space travel / exploration theme
• First person, but more point and click than arcade / flight sim, support casual play
• Must be open world - support player access to any location at any time, in any order. Player can find their own path, not forced to any given story line, procedural content generation to keep things unpredicable
• Should be low / no combat, with a focus on story, trading, exploration, resource management
• Simulate / model everything - survival mechanics, vessel mechanics, real-time (sort of) flight durations
• Be about the journey as much as the destination

Target Play Platform

• Apple iPad 2019 or later

Development Platform

• Same as the play platform: Apple iPad 2019 or later

That last part, the choice of dev platform, was the thing that really set the constraints on this as a build - I wanted to be able to do the development and create the art assets for the game while sat on the sofa in the evenings with my iPad (I did say side-project, right?).

So from a technology standpoint, the game is a web app, developed in HTML5 / CSS / JS / JQuery / Ramda and is coded using the fantastic Textastic app which gives me everything I need including a live dev server straight from the app alongside Working Copy for Github integration. From an art perspective, everything is hand drawn in Procreate.

There are some screen-grabs included here ... they're all work in progress.

I did consider using something 3D to create the artwork, but there isn't anything available that's rapid enough (that I've been able to find), and I'm not keen on apps with a large monthly subscription and no Pro purchase option.

One year on...

This build has continued and evolved, what started as heavily text-driven interface has become much more visual, with direct interaction with things in environment the player sees.

I've reached a key moment where many of the core game mechanics are complete - last night I was trading between stations orbiting different moons of the same planet, making a profit and picking up a job from an NPC. While all this was happening, the vessel I'm in is consuming fuel, it's components are wearing out, my characters nutrition, hydration and fatigue levels are changing and I can drink and eat to maintain them, and that's just some of the mechanics that I have in place, with more coming in future months.

I have lots of plans going forward. To get this to an alpha release state, I'm working on the content associated with one planet (in a solar system of 6) and it's 4 moons and will be developing more interactions and experiences to that end.

This blog is going to be my dev diary of the UNIVERSE: NEW SOL game going forwards.

Cheers!