Hello guys :) My name is I am Jonathan Camarena or better known by myself as kyperbelt. I am your friendly neighborhood gamedev noob.

I used to code in games back when i was in high school using the built in java2d libraries and hand out in a forum that has gone the way of the dodo called the java hub.

I wanted to get back into making games and decided to download libgdx when i noticed this little beauty. I've always wanted to be part of one of these things but was always too scared to give it a shot but now since i know i am a complete newb i have nothing to lose right? haha.

That said I am also a bit of a sci-fi nerd and love the idea of life in space and I hope my ideas can come to fruition.

My source: https://github.com/kyperbelt/SEGDX

Twitter: https://twitter.com/_kyperbelt_

well just added a simple loading screen and "title sequence" if you can call it that lol. i must say this is going to be interesting and I wonder where it will go.

Just woke up, going to get some coding done real quick before i head out for xmass eve dinner, trying to add a setup menu to the game since i think i have a basic idea of how deep mechanically the game is going to be.

I will post something as soon as i have it up and running.

Also been working on some lore whilst on the toilet(where one is most creative of course) and ill be writing up a mock up soon for that as well.

The gist of it is basically space, a great war, a great depression and the constant fight for survival(where you come in).

ok Got working main menu, very simplistic at the moment but ill pretty it up at a later date if time allows.

Heres some screens.

please ignore the debug lines hehe

All the settings displayed will affect gameplay and hopefully add some type of replay-ability.

Ok spent all day playing with my children's Xmas gifts. Now its time to get back into it.

Ive got the beginnings of some simple map generation, nothing to fancy but its enough for the type of game that i am creating.

I am not a great programmer, artist or for that matter a anything relating to gaming(yet.) so i decided to go with a game concept that was simple yet provided some depth at the same time.

Something you could pick up and play over and over again and never really get bored as there would be different variables on every single gameplay that would offer a different gaming experience. I have a big post coming regarding this subject along with the bit of lore ive managed to mush together.

Ok so I've been procrastinating the past few days but i said i would provide some info on the lore that i have created and what i am potentially looking at in terms of mechanics for this game.

The Story

1. the initial conflict
2. corporations greed
3. sinking ship
4. grasping straws
5. The escape

1) So the story in SEGDX takes place after the Arboros Empire(where you currently reside) has just won a long fought war against the Kartek United Federation. Although achieving victory was essential for their continued existence , due to war expenses and massive amount of casualties the empire entered a great depression. In this depression a lot of people starved and others decided to take matters into their own hands and turned to a life of piracy.

2) In the events following the war a coalition of some of the richest corporations saw an opportunity to take control. Although they had the economic might they still could not match military power of the great Arboros Empire... Not until now of course. They banded together to create what we now call the Sha'kt belt Alliance: known for the region of space where most of these entities mined for Dridium. Once supplying the empire with about 70% of their Dridium(element used to produce energy and make star travel possible) the Sha'kt belt Alliance now held the considerable upper hand .

3) Seeing their empire crumbling and with the promise of better living conditions a small segment of the Arboros Empire defected to join the SBA. This group was led by a high ranking general of the empire name Sebastian A. Goezm.

4) The Arboros Empire once known throughout for their great military power now stood weak and crippled on the verge of defeat. In their desperation the Empire declared that all able-bodied subjects were to immediately join the ranks of their military or face drastic consequences(possibly death), And thus the Great Draft began.

5) Your father and the only family you had just passed. He left you his delivery ship as your inheritance along with a nicely sized plot of land in some low pop planet. When you hear that the empire is in your system enforcing their mandatory draft you begin to fear that your freedom is at stake. You take what little you can carry and leave immediately as you would rather try and survive in the vastness of space then die for something you didn't believe in. Here is where our story begins.

Forgive me if i made any grammatical errors as english is not my first language and i am also not a writer lol.

I actually wrote a lot more lore but decided to cut it out for this small bit that i was posting here. The left out parts include an explanation for the initial confllict which brings light to events prior to the great war. Also a little backstory about General Sebastian A. Goezm more widely known as the Scourge of Meeanor. Not to forget to mention there is also a small bit about how the Arboros Empire was formed.

Mechanics

So mechanically speaking i am looking to make resource management game in space with several possible goals.

Currently i have a small portion of the ui set up as you can see in the screenshot here are the main things a player will have to keep in mind and manage.

• Food supply - you cant survive the vastness of space without food, not in this game at least lol.
• Fuel(dridium) - in order to make sure you arrive at your destination you will need to have sufficient fuel, being stranded in space is not very pleasant, or so one would assume.
• hull(aka health) -yes your ship can be damaged, and when your hull integrity reaches 0, bye bye ship.
• currency - This is your muulah, you need it to purchase all the essentials and also to invest and potentially make more of it. Takes money to make money.
• Current cycle and coundown to next cycle - on the top right there is a timer keeping track of cycles. New time cycles bring new opportunities.

The player will be able to travel in between points on the map also known as nodes. The player may travel in between any two nodes he desires. So if he wants to travel from one point of the map to the other he pretty much can, BUT if he runs out of fuel mid travel....GG brochacho you are doomed to die in space. There are Different types of nodes each having unique effects and providing different interactions. these nodes are as followed:

• REST NODE(blue) - in these nodes the player will always find fuel at reasonable prices,food and sometimes information on the surrounding area... for the right price of course.
• TRADE NODE(green) - Here the player is able to buy resources such as rare ores or important building parts,sometimes ship upgrades or new ships. prices and resources available will vary from trade node to trade node.
• EVENT NODE(pee color) - These nodes are event nodes. Every cycle each node will be updated with a new event and these events will determined what interaction happens when you land on that node, also some events interact with surrounding nodes and even affect their events or particular interactions.
• DANGER NODE(red) - these nodes are basically guaranteed conflict events,so if you want to take a more combat oriented path you will be able to do so.

I dont want to make a game with a master end goal, instead i am creating a game which can be played in a variety of different styled and yield different results each time. Hopefully this will provide a good amount of replay-ability and in turn people will enjoy playing it. All these things are subject to change for obvious reasons and there is some other mechanics which ive left out of here because i am still not sure if i will incorperate them.

Not much to report today, Worked on adding a bit more functionality to my timing mechanism(CycleTimer.java) by incorporating abstract classes that handle their own logic and function similar to button clicklisteners only instead of listening for input they listen for specific times.

I understand that maybe using the Timer class that comes with the libgdx library would have been easier to implement at first, but overall i fell that this gives me way more control and scales better with the type of applications i have in mind.if you guys want to take a deeper look at the class here is a direct link to it:

https://github.com/kyperbelt/SEGDX/blob/master/cor...

On another note, been working on making the game android friendly by making buttons and nodes easier to press(was pretty tough to press the little nodes with my fat fingers.). Here is a screenshot of what that looks like, with debug turned on so you can see the new bounding boxes.

The white circle is the effect radius of the selected node. All other nodes will be affected by some events that happen on the selected node.

Here is another screenshot to show the foldout menus im making with the help of the Universal Tween Engine:

The menus come out slowly. I am using the default skin provided in the libgdx tests and a custom font. The menus come out from the side gradually, UTE FTW! :)

So i ended up in the emergency room with my sick mother in law for about half of my day today(she is ok :) ) ,so i wasnt able to do much, but i still wanted to make an entry tonight before i go to bed.

I've been trying to improve my commenting prowess since in the past ive had trouble looking at old code. All i see is spaghetti and then i always vow to comment my next project but alas i never do haha. All i did today was added a few classes that will eventually build into a not so intricate modular system to upgrade your ship. Trying to keep it as easy,but scale-able as possible.

Basically each ship will have a number of modules that can be installed depending on the ship model and what not. Each module will have a different effect on the ship, like adding abilities like mining,cannons,energy shield,drone deployment, and also will be able to modify certain ship statistics. Maybe you are tired of running out of fuel so fast so you install a module to increase fuel capacity, or even to improve your milage depending on your economic situation and type of ship(on larger ships improving fuel economy is exponentially better than on smaller faster ships which contain less fuel but get more "miles" out of it).

the way ive set it up hopefully it will be possible to set up a bunch of content before the last day of the jam.

I planned at the start to make it possible to include "addons" through lua scripts but it would add another layer of difficulty that im really not sure i could struggle through before the end of the jam.

oh and before i forget, ACHIEVEMENTS!

nothing big but just little things to reward players for playing differently and hopefully promote replays.

no screenshots today but i will be pushing my code right now.

Been working on implementing the restposts and trade posts along with a somewhat intricate event manager for my space nodes, This is my first time working with UIs and my code is becoming spaghetti the more stuff i add lol. But i am learning a lot on what not to do haha.

Here is a screen shot of the restpost ui that appears when the player has stopped at a rest post(blue node):

currently you can buy food and fuel, prices vary from post to post so it might be a good idea to shop around and find the best deals. Specially later on in the game when your ship gets larger and demands more food/fuel.

Here is a screenshot of the ship information tab complete with a handy locate button in case you lose your ship in the vastness of space:

And the inventory system,Not super innovative but I just wanted to put together something quick and this will do for now:

Hope everyone had a happy new year :) happy coding to all of you!

Well still loads of work ahead of me and today has turned into more of a brainstorming day more than anything. Basically working out the last few bits of my planned mechanics before i start to implement the meat of the game.

Modules

Our ships will be able to buy and install modules to add abilities or increase certain attributes. These modules will be based on an "upgrade" point system. Each module will cost a certain number of upgrade points and each ship will have a certain amount of upgrade points.

Planned modules include:

• Engine boosters - increase the ships speed at the cost of some fuel economy
• Scanners - increase the amount of information displayed from various different activities
• Dridium Refinery - allow you to convert Dridium ore into fuel.(out of combat ability)
• Rail Guns - gives you the ability to fire railguns in combat
• Energy Weapon - gives ability to fire energy weapon in combat
• Drone bay - Allow you to deploy drones in combat that do periodic damage
• Beam drill - allow you to collect resources from certain nodes(depending on event,still debating this mechanic)

Cheers :)

Managed to finish up the resource trading and also implemented the module system.

Have plans for adding a Warp Drive Module that allows you to warp jump in between nodes for a resource cost other than fuel.

Also already planning out the achievement system but i will not post here as it can potentially spoil the game :P but if you are interested feel free to check out my comments on the Achievement.java page on

Github

Enjoy :)!

Hello again all!

Did a bit more coding today but didn't really progress much since most of my time was spent cleaning some things up that were preventing me from applying a scaling and dynamic event system, But at long last i did it and resource events are fully implemented.

For example nodes have a chance to have a resource event meaning that a certain resource becomes "mine-able" or collectable through one mean or another. And sometimes when there is an overabundance of these resources nearby trade posts my become flooded with it and thus lower their prices. I have plans to do something for the other end of the spectrum; for example: some event causes nearby trade posts to have high demand for a certain resource. Everything is already in place for this to happen i just need to plug in some math and make it happen.

As you can trading posts now have a limited amount of resources available. This was done to prevent the player from acquiring massive amounts of wealth by simply buying cheap and transporting somewhere else to sell high, Mind you that is what i intend for players to do but i dont want them to be able to abuse this mechanic to the point where it is brainless.

made myself an op test ship so i can test out some of the stuff im adding.

Out of combat skills work!

I will post more as soon as i can :) goodbye for now.

One of my classes has gotten out of hand and I've come to realize that i could've done it in a much simpler way(My in game ui). I dont think ill be able to go back and change anything if i want to meet the deadline. Maybe after the jam ill tidy it up.

Hello my sleepless companions. After wasting quite a bit of time fixing a very critical error I've been trying to cram as much stuff in the game as possible.

I really want to get all the core gameplay implemented first before i go and add things like achievements and stuff(hope i can get it done in time). I am working on it like a sweaty sweat shop.

What is done:

• Modules(they are done , just need implementation)
• Ships(easy to create new ships and expand)
• EventManager(Dynamic and random events that effect their surroundings)
• Variable pricing Between different tradepost(This is to produce income relatively easy if played correctly)
• Abilities(Out of combat)-(you can use things like resource extraction or Refining fuel)

What needs to be done(some of this is already coded, i just need to plug it in):

• Combat
• Combat Abilities
• Special Zone (will be hard to find and are meant for end game purposes to keep pushing the player)
• Empire Draft to add peril to the game(every few cycles you will be drafted and you must pay off or lose ^growth)
• Piracy (traveling the vastness of space can cause you to lose some of your resources or currency to pesky pirates-there will be ways to prevent this or atleast lower the likelyhood of it happening)
• Gossip (Pay for special knowledge that might give you an edge)
• Work orders(collect "quests" that reward you with rare modules or ships-should be easy to implement)
• the Achievements ofcourse(will definitely not be able to use the google api since i dont know how and would take more time than i have to learn)

Here is a screenshot of a loot tab open after successfully extracting some resources

also some modules and a tooltip lel.

Im too sleep deprived to make senses sorry :) good night!