During the last Mini Micro Game Jam, unfortunately, not many people participated, (Tbh I won with my team cause no one else submitted an entry) but it lead to some activity on the Miniscript discord and so the idea for Starfarer was born. So we set up a project and a channel and started working.
What is Starfarer about?
Currently, the answer is "Starfarer is a game about managing the crew of a merchant spaceship."
So what did we do?
Well at the beginning we decided that if we want a game where you manage a spaceship we need to represent a spaceship in our game. So we started coding and voilà, Spaceship.
What we see here is a debug menu for the internal representation of the spaceship in the game. A filled tile means that we are inside our vessel, an X that we are outside. We also store data about walls (black lines) and doors (blue lines) and even crates (yellow squares) that are placed on the ship.
We also want to have a crew on the spaceship and members of that crew need to autonomously navigate the ship so here is the first implementation of pathfinding in our game. The green line represents the result of how the current algorithm wants to navigate between the two points.
Now we also wanted to represent that data for the player so here is how it looks like if we use Sprites to make it look like a game.
Next steps
Well currently the game is not much of a game, but we laid down the foundation for the future. It is a game about a merchant ship after all so the next steps are to implement a system for buying and selling cargo and ordering our crew to sort that cargo on the ship.
If this sparked your interest you can check out the code at: https://github.com/shellrider-games/Starfarer/
Want to contribute? Join the discussion on the MiniScript discord. (Please send some artists over 😆)
Stay tuned for more info.
