About the game:
Conquer the galaxy ... by sending ships from your planet to others. Easy peasy isn't it?
Use your mouse to select planets and target enemy planets to set your ships free. Once the population counter of a planet goes below 0 - it will change ownership.
Owned planets generate Research Points (RP) which you can use to upgrade your tech tree on the knowledge hub.
Ah and you might want to buy some missiles as planetary defense of each planet.
Development:
The game was development for the "8 BIT WARS" competition at syntaxbomb.com which took place in the early months of this year. Rules for the competition was to keep within the color palette of the choosen 8 bit computer - I used the C64 ones. For coding I used BlitzMax NG (https://blitzmax.org) and my own framework DIG (https://github.com/GWRon/Dig) which helps speeding up coding quite a bit. While all the graphical assets were created by me, some fonts and the music were taken from the web (credits given - thanks to Eric Skiff and Kevin MacLeod).
The game "features" color alternation to cheat the eyes as if there were more colors than the C64 palette allows. So each rendered frame colors change to one in the allowed palette and then alternates with another allowed color in the next frame. My code automatically maps colors to the palette (or extended palette containing "less flickering" colors mixed out of the base palette). This kept workload even lower for me.
While some of you might now complain about "no wide pixels" I have to confess to have used the full 320x200 without 8x8 pixel restrictions and the likes. Just think I was using IFLI or NUFLI like graphics modes (found by smart persons years after the climax of the C64).
Development time was way less than the competition time frame as I only coded here and there in the evenings when the kids were in bed. Still a lot of hours went into creation - just to give YOU some spare minutes of sci-fi-enjoyment ;-).
Project page:
https://gwron.itch.io/genus-prime
It contains downloadlinks - and also links to the source code (yes, it is Open Source and also free!)
Thanks for reading - and I hope you enjoy the game. Feel free to report bugs and ideas.