Today, I want to go over the design of the Campaign.
Without spoiling the story too much, the campaign will take place in the not so distant future where Humans have started their colonization of deep space. Along the way, the Commander of the frontier (you the player) will be thrown into many unexpected twists and turns forcing you to stay on your toes and act quickly to keep the Human Dominion alive.
The campaign will span 9 Chapters. Each Chapter will consist of very specific and different objectives that will have to be completed to continue. The difficulty of each Chapter varies greatly and this is marked by the stars in the Campaign menu.
Here's a sneak peak - with the first introduction Chapter unlocked:
In order to increase replayability and to ensure that no two playthroughs will be exactly the same - most of the maps in the Chapters will be randomly generated based on Chapter settings.
And to make things more challenging (or potentially easier), any research completed in one Chapter is carried forward throughout the campaign.
Finally, you can optionally play through the Campaign in simultaneous Turn-Based mode. Each turn is equivalent to 1 Day in-game, or 10 seconds in realtime and the experience and pacing will change drastically in this mode.
Here's your trusty First Officer who will be with you along the Campaign:
Alright! That's it for today - Next time I'll discuss Quick Play mode and the different options you can change to make your games more interesting.
Galactic Dominion and other 4X games
Yesterday, a reddit user asked me a a good question that I wanted to repost my answers here to share with everyone.
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The question was: [Galactic Dominion] reminds me of Stellaris. What about your game really sets the two apart?
My answer was: I'm a big fan of Stellaris so I'm happy to hear that it reminds you of it. :) They are quite different though. Stellaris is a grand strategy game with many mechanics and can easily run for 40+ hours for a single game.
In Galactic Dominion, I wanted something much faster paced so designed it around getting players into the action as soon as possible. A typical game can last anywhere from 20 minutes to 1.5 hours (depending on the settings you start with). One potential downside is there is less room for mistakes and time to breath - but to help new players I added an optional AI assist mode where by default the AI will assist you in expanding stars and building fleets.
There's also a story based campaign where each chapter is distinct from one another. For example, in one chapter you have to try to escape a superior enemy while another you have to race to capture a target. I wanted to push the game a bit and explore having different objectives in a space strategy game
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I'll go into more depths on the different mechanics of the game in the coming days.
Stay tuned!
The Story Behind Galactic Dominon
Today, I want to share with you the history behind Galactic Dominion but first I'd like to thank everyone for the support and patience throughout these countless evenings and weekends. We finally made it!
So the game goes back to six years ago. At the time, it was a small pet project that I worked on to learn about mobile development. The scope was small and it took about 3 months to complete and release.
After that, the project was shelved for many years...until these past few years. It was time for a modern remake, technology has evolved dramatically making it much easier to focus on the content rather than the tool.
Or so I thought...
It was evident early on that porting the game over the Unity was not enough. The quality simply was not there. It lacked depth.
- You could not control your individual fleets.
- In fact, you didn't really have fleets. Each Fleet icon was really just a single ship.
- Stars were also very 1 dimensional and acted mainly as nodes providing your empire with a global resource point that you would allocate to Research, Industry, or Population Growth.
- When it came to performing Research, it was a simple value that increased from +1 to +99 boost.
- The only way you could influence your empire was by setting foreign policies which will adjust the spawn rates of your ships.
Was it a bad game? Well, let's just say the only fun part was watching the macro action of your empire unfold with a few button clicks.
For the remake, the scope grew and it grew quickly. It transformed from a modern port into a full re-imagination of the game.
New features quickly became part of the game:
- Fleets can now be controlled individually and consisted of many different ship types, Colony Ships to colonize new Stars, Transports to invade enemies
- Fighters, Bombers, and Battleships, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
- Star Fortresses could be built to defend and patrol your Stars.
- Stars also drastically grew in scope.
- You have planets with biomes that contributed to your population limits.
- Influence zones around your Star that affects ships warping through it.
- Your Stars have different industries which contributes to various resource generation
- You can queue different Ships to be built in your Drydock.
- You can control the workforce distribution on your Stars.
- Research was re-designed to have more meaningful technologies and a visual graph available for players to choose their topics.
- Empire Races was introduced to provide more diversity.
- Speaking of which, the Campaign had to be reset from scratch to make it work with the new mechanics.
- And then because of all this (and many more), the A.I. had to be completely re-written. They had to be able to colonize new Stars, build industries, and ships. Then find, bomb, transport troops, and attack enemy Stars.
Pretty soon, I found myself on a journey that took 2.5 years to complete. It gave me new appreciation for all the things needed in a game and I look forward to sharing more about this game with all of you.
Here's a side-by-side screenshot with the old mobile game. Enjoy!
