Tactical Combat ideas: Crazy weapons, The Junker and more!

tactical

Throughout February we’ve been working on Predestination’s planetary exploration and colonisation gameplay, designing the first Reptile race, and sorting through the ideas from our Kickstarter backers. With the core planet gameplay complete and the reptile race reveal  in the works, we’re shifting development focus to a part of the game we didn’t really get the chance to properly show during the Kickstarter campaign: Tactical fleet combat.

Every space 4X game has some kind of ship combat system, but most games have chosen to discard the MOO2-style tactical combat in favour of realtime 3D gameplay or even automated fights that you have very little control over. With Predestination, we plan to not only revive turn-based tactical combat but revolutionise it!

Read on for a breakdown of the Tactical Combat system, details of some fun new weapons we worked on with our work experience student Niall, and to submit your own ideas for awesome ship weapons and special abilities!

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Say hello to work experience student Niall!

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As we mentioned during the Predestination Kickstarter campaign, one of our biggest goals with the game is to help kick-start the game development industry here in Northern Ireland. There are currently no established development studios here able to offer  jobs, and so each year dozens of highly qualified university graduates are forced to move abroad to get jobs in the industry. We may not be able to offer full-time employment just yet, but we’re doing what we can to help build up the local games industry by engaging with students who are aiming for a career in game development. Read More

New colony system, what do you think?

In last week’s development update, I showed recent work on the planetary colonisation that made the exploration grid visible from orbit. This week I updated it so that you can even direct your exploration efforts from orbit and developed a new resource distribution algorithm, but I ran into a small problem: If you add in enough resources to keep exploration interesting, you’d end up with a ton of colonies to build on each world. To solve this problem, I decided to try out a new system inspired partly by Civilization. Read More

January game development update roundup

Hey guys! It’s been a hectic month here at Brain and Nerd as we worked out our budget, gave a few talks about our Kickstarter experience, and got production on Predestination into full swing. Now that we’re set up, you can expect more frequent updates on game development, artwork and races. So what have we been up to this month?

  • Upgraded planets, they are now 100% more awesome :D. (video)
  • Added new colonisation mechanics.
  • Designed the Reptile race (race reveal to come with finished art).
  • Designed new buildings (building art update on the way).
  • Added Sandbox mode with different galaxy sizes, ages and types.
  • Backer Nineveh named our big bad alien race, “The Revenants.”

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