State of the Game

2009-02-17T15:09:00.000-08:00

At this point, the game is basically playable and sort of fun. It'll beat you if you're not careful.

Lots of things are not yet in place, and others are only half baked. Most noticable is the complete lack of a technology tree, ship design and tactical combat.

At the moment, we're using a modified version of the Reach For The Stars rules for ships and combat. Basically, there are 4 tech levels that can be researched to produce ships of Mark I through Mark IV, each level of which is about 4x as powerful as the last. Ship combat is resolved automatically at the end of each turn. It might not be as pretty as the real thing, but at least it means that the game is playable. Tech trees, ship design, tactical combat are complicated enough, but teaching the AI to deal with them will be no easy task either. It's on the way...

You can start a new game, explore, colonize, fight and invade enemy planets. You can build factories, bases and ships, and research new tech.

The AI will fight back, though somewhat randomly. They'll beat you if you don't expand fast.

You can't, however, load or save games yet, so probably best not launch off into an all-night session just now.

Drag the map around to move it, zoom in with the mousewheel. Click on stuff to do stuff. Move the game forward with the "Next Turn" button. If you've played the original, it should seem familiar enough.

For fun, notice the "AI Fight" options at the lower right. Click "Fast", tick the checkbox, and watch the game play itself!

Cloning Master of Orion

2009-02-17T14:24:00.000-08:00

This was a Bad Idea. I have lots of things that I really need to be doing, and even if I didn't, it STILL would be a bad idea to pour all this time into a software development project that will never bring any revenue.

But hey, it was a Bad Idea to install Master of Orion way back in 1993. It was a Bad Idea to play it 16 hours a day every day to the detriment of my college education. It was a Bad Idea to introduce it to my friends, and ensure that every one of us tacked on an extra YEAR to that university degree. Orion is ALL ABOUT Bad Ideas!

But I get ahead of myself... Let's go back to the beginning:

Back in the early 90's, there was this video game called Master of Orion. It ruled. Along with the original Civilization, Master of Orion pretty much defined a whole genre of video game, known today as 4X. (The X's mean things, but I'm too lazy to look up what they are.) Anyway, it's a pretty cool game. Dig up an abandonware copy if you've never played it.

So here it is, 2009, and for some reason I'm writing a clone of the game in Javascript. It's pretty rough right now, but it can beat me most of the time. Try it out if you want. I'll keep you posted with how it goes.

Galactic Disagreement!

State of the Game

Cloning Master of Orion