Star Trek Fan Games
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Comment from a fellow indie developer
http://bote2.square7.ch/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3257		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  arthling [ 06 Sep 2009, 09:11 ]
Post subject:  Comment from a fellow indie developer
Hi. I found this web site via the Wikipedia page for BOTF, which I was thinking about the other day and decided to look up. Apparently there's a patch that makes the game actually playable. I was so ticked off after buying the game back in 1999 (geez 10 years already) that I think I gave it away... dont recall. I was enamored with the PROMISE of BOTF, what the game could have been, and so very sadly disappointed. But, oh well... The X4 genre might not work with Star Trek anyway, unless Supremacy pulls it off of course!

I wanted to share another indie re-make with you all, as I am the project lead for Starflight - The Lost Colony, a remake of the original Starflight games from the 1980s, and the Sega Genesis version in 1993. I recruited a team who worked on this game for three years and now it's fully playable and beta 2 will be released soon. It's an accurate recreation of the original gameplay of the originals, so it's recognizable to Starflight fans, but the gameplay has been updated to meet the expectations of modern gamers, and it's a lot of fun that way. It's actually an official sequel which has been pretty cool for the team.

After two years in development, I decided to go open source with the hope that some fans would take up the torch and do some interesting things with it. I had some real life issues to deal with and had to step back from the project for quite a while. Well, nothing much happened for about 7 months. So, I had a couple months of time available again this summer and dove into the code again. There have been about a dozen programmers come and go in three years, while myself, one artist, and one script writer have been the mainstays for the final stretch. There are a few still involved but the original team has moved on.

The Lost Colony will be officially released as COMPLETE after this last beta--within a month or so. It depends on whether testers find a few or a lot of bugs in beta 2. We hope there will be only a few. =) Regardless of any bugs it seems fully playable, and it's been a challenge because this single-player adventure galaxy exploration game is heavily scripted and filled with alien dialog and an extensive quest system for the three player professions.... which you can read about on the site if you wish. =) It's a complex game but not as data heavy as ST Supremacy. It looks like you guys have taken one really huge bite and might need to slow down a bit and nibble while getting your engine completely up & running--that's a pretty common problem I've seen over the years and it can help a lot if you start with playable gameplay first, and get into the editors & stuff later.

I wanted to encourage you guys to finish your BOTF2 game as quickly as possible. That seems to be the key to finishing indie games--getting it done quick in a "shoot first and ask questions later" sort of approach. If you let it drag along, real life will get in the way, feature creep will set in, and everyone will get frutrated after a while. What we had to do to get Starflight finished was to set up an SVN server so that the team had a daily update of the entire codebase and script files and art assets and could run the latest build at any time. I recommend it if you guys haven't started using SVN yet, it will transform your productivity in amazing ways. You can get a free one at Google Code if you go open source, otherwise there are services like Assembla.com and cvsdude.com. We went open source in order to use GoogleCode for free, and because this game was intended to be freeware all along so there's no harm in sharing.

I would love to chip in & help with this game now that Starflight is winding down but probably will not have time. I'm interested in doing something new. As a fan of the old FASA role playing game, and the hexagon map Tactical Starship game that was with it, I've always wanted to create a game involving fleets of ships and recreating huge battles like those seen during Wolf 359 and the Dominion War.



Game portal site : www.starflightgame.com
Sources : http://code.google.com/p/starflighttlc/
Development : http://groups.google.com/group/starflighttlc



Good luck!

Jonathan Harbour
Author:  Matress_of_evil [ 06 Sep 2009, 13:13 ]
Post subject:  Re: Comment from a fellow indie developer
Hey arthling, welcome to the forums! :)

If you ever want to play BOTF again, you can actually do it - and for free, no less. A fully downloadable copy of BOTF is available for download from the downloads section of Armadafleetcommand.com. You'll need to sign up for an account AND sign in before the downloads section is accessible though. You'll also want to read This Thread for information on how to install it. (The download is an .iso copy of the game, you'll need to mount it to a ghost drive)

I'll admit that i've never heard of Starflight before. But i'm a Nintendophile so I don't know of many Sega games other than Sonic. I'll have a look at the game though when i've got time to give it a proper look. Ironically i'm usually busiest on the weekends lol.

As a member of the team, I'd like to thank you for your kind words of support. We're all working hard on the project, but the game is a lot less finished than it initally appears, so a lot of pogramming work is yet to be done. But that's down to Mike Strobel (aka Mstrobel on the forums), the developer and currently sole programmer of the game, although we have another programmer, CdrWolfe, who is developing the combat system as a separate program which will later on be merged into Supremacy (And hopefully into our other project, Birth of the Empires as well).

Supremacy actually already is open source, and has been from the start. You can find the source code on Supremacy's Codeplex Page. The editors are extremely important to how we implement the game database though, so we do actually need them; all of the database text, stats, etc have been written by Dafedz and myself. Neither of us are programmers though, so the only way we can actually implement all of this information is via the editors. By leaving the database stuff to other people, that then frees Mike up to working on just the programming side of the game, rapidly speeding up development.

As I said though, Mike is essentially working on his own on the programming side, so any help you could give would be greatly appreciated. Send Him A PM with details of your experience and knowledge, and Mike will be able to tell you what you're best placed to help him with. :)
Author:  Kenneth_of_Borg [ 06 Sep 2009, 15:27 ]
Post subject:  Re: Comment from a fellow indie developer
Greetings arthling and welcome to the forums. Yes, you are likely just the guy with the skills we need to move this project along. Mike has been looking for someone to help with the code. If you two can hit it off we would all be your biggest fans. I hope you will be sticking around. :bolian:

I am a big ship model guy for the game with my hand in some audio and 2D art as well. We have a number of skilled artist, musicians and writing staff I would love to have you meet. Some are professionals donating their work. What we lack now is more depth of field for the coding.
:borg:
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