Team name:
SadCat Studios

Project name:
Hidden Space

Brief description:
Hidden Space as an idea have been born long time ago. But i never had the courgae to actualy reach for it.
Hidden Space is a desperate try to bring back what once was good in games. Non-linearity, story-rich, with interesting gameplay but not based on grinding or huge - but empty world.
The genhre of the game i belive can be described as "space sim" but with much more wide definition.
Its a mix betwen Freelancer, Star Control, Weird Worlds, Starflight, Starscape and other legenedery titles. Also its mostly top-down view, with adventure-like side view.
Its an attempt to bring everything that was good in those and put it into one game. So we have RPG elements, customised spaceships and weapons, we have asteroids mining, planetary exploration (with walking on the planet surface), trading with alien races, fighting with them, space exploration, space battles, manual ship reparing and more.
As for technical detail - its mostly 2D game, perhaps 2.5D (2D game world with couple of 3D objects here and there)
HiddenSpace is just a game - we want to play by ourself.

Target aim:
Freeware with optional donation.

Compensation:
We work for free on this so lets be honest and mature - i would love to pay a programer to do this work but i cant - as i dont have any money. Obviously the profits from that optional donations are shared equaly, but we dont aim for payment.

Technology:
PC windows operating system. We do have an engine in mind but found ourselfs just not talented enough to use it for all our needs. the engine is called "Construct" and has mostly even/object oriented programing. But dont feel obligated to use it, its just the one we have been using so far - nothing more. Any programing language you are able to use is already more then can.
As it might me importand - we also have a reserved server space for future download.

Talent needed:
Programing. But when it comes down to the actual choice we prefer someone with similiar to our spirit rather then god-like programing skills. At the moment we are army-of-two. one of us is talented Music composer and the second one is rather medicore Graphic Artist (thats me :) ) but i find myself doing many diffrent jobs from sound editing, to animation designing, 3d modelling, sprites creating, special effects making ect. We have most of assets needed and we can easly fill any hole that will apear. the only thing we really need is someone smarter then we are to put all those pieaces togather and make it work.

Team structure:
Irbis - i am working on HS from 4 months. Because of my lack of programing/math talents ive been using very primitive engines, from Game Maker, RPG Maker to todays Construct. I have a huge assets compilation which i have all rights to. I am also able to create animated sprites, 3d models, textures, graphics of creatures, structures, terrain, planets, shipts and mostly everything i would need, ragining from special effects such as animated explosions, particles, beams, projectiles ect. I am also capable of simple sound editing and i have a rich libery of t2s voices and i know how to modify them to sound as i want.
I am the writer and the starter of this project

Ozi - Ozi workes with me from 2 months. he is a very talented music composer who agreed to work with me for free. we share many interests and views and we understand each other mostly without words. So yes, if you would be so crazy to join our team you must fit in and be as screwed up in the head as we are :)

Oh and the english of both of as is exactly as horrible heh (but comunicative. hey i am from poland Ozi is from Switzland or w/e the correct spelling of his cuntry is)


Website:
My dev blog: http://hiddenspace.blog.com/
Section of HiddenSpace on SpaceSimCentral: http://www.spacesimcentral.com/hidden-space-f63/


Contacts:
email: irbis777@gmail.com
Xfire profile: irbis


Previous Work by Team:
To be honest - none. Ive been connected with heavy modding of Infinity Engine and Gothic serie but nothing that would made me famous. We are mostly just old gamers who are feed up with the crap nowadays is being served.

Additional Info:
Okey, heres some shinnies:





heres a alpha intro of HiddenSpace (WATCH THIS!)
http://www.viddler.com/explore/irbis/videos/1/

heres a alpha of the spaceship animated cockpit (sadly - low res)
http://vimeo.com/15624486

unfinished battle screen + GUI
http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/6905/betaax.png


heres some music made by Ozi
Chasing Theme: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15566547/HS/Oscar%20Remius%20-%20Swift%20-%20V1.mp3

Living breathing derelecit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15566547/HS/Oscar%20Remius%20-%20Strangled%20by%20shadow.mp3

Dancing with Void Whales
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15566547/HS/Explore_8.mp3

About us. We are both 26 years old gamers. I am a husband and a father. Ive seen life in its glory and its misary, i dont throw words on wind. Ozi will propably speak for himself when you ask him :)
We are quite serious and motivated to fullfil our dreams. We have a very weird sense of humor which is a mix betwen vulgar and Monthy Python.
We have a very strong faith in what we do.

Feedback:
NONE/ENCOURAGING ONLY/ANY


PS:
where the hell is the "preview" button???

PS2:
oooh here it is. Wonder why the tags arent working in it...

PS3:
ooh greatm because theres no autotaging here... oh well

[Edited by - Eskalion on December 14, 2010 9:49:35 AM]

You can use HTML tags to make your links clickable. (Also, it looks like you forgot to fill out the 'feedback' section of the template.)

Quote:Original post by jyk
You can use HTML tags to make your links clickable. (Also, it looks like you forgot to fill out the 'feedback' section of the template.)

i would love to know how to do that. or arent working

as for feedback... what exactly is feedback in this situation? i mean, "what i am expecting" or "what i am offering" ?
sorry, its just not that clear to me :(

I wonder if there might be a fit here. I am a programmer but lately I lean heavily toward re-using existing code instead of writing from scratch.

Accordingly I currently use Freeciv for world-scale views and operations, Battle for Wesnoth for backstory, historical re-enactment, and in future possibly even causing changes in what happens next; and Crossfire RPG for individual characters walking around exploring fighting reading short texts shown in the game as books tomes etc.

What I have not yet picked an engine for is the process of removing a spaceship and its contained units from one Freeciv world to another. I have been following the development of Thousand Parsec but so far it has not reached a point where it looks like it will be useable for this. For one thing its limit on number of concurrent players is far too small. Freeciv's 30 civilisations per planet is puny too of course but that is to be expanding to 127 or 125 or so in future using already-existing patches and that is only per planet whereas the process of moving from one planet to another needs to be able to allow any of the 125 or more civilisations on any of the potentially thousands or millions of planets to select which world to move which unit(s) from and which world to move them to.

Because Freeciv turns represent a year of game-time whereas individual characters walking around on the surface of a planet or in the corridors of a spaceship or whatever move at a rate of approximately one game hour per real five minutes, it is going to take approximately a real month for a spaceship to move from one planet to another.

Obviously there are likely to be players who will need to be "entertained" during the month or so that it is going to take for a Freeciv scale - a planetary scale - "turn" to take place. So things that take place in space are of interest.

I am not familiar with the engines you have mentioned, I will go look them up now...

Actualy iam not that that big fan of Constructor. Its just what we've been using till now but that was due to our lank of programing talents or knowledge.
But there are other engines very suitable for our project like
Agen
http://www.2dengine.com/page.php?p=about

or Ethanon
http://www.asantee.net/ethanon/?p=home

or Unity
http://unity3d.com/

or Irrlicht
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/

or Blitz
http://www.blitzbasic.com/

heck, even GameStudio
http://www.conitec.net/english/gstudio/download.php

would do good if it fits you.
There are really loots of loooots of fishes in the ocean. I belive its more importand how programer feel with theengine rather then we are :)

so whatever suits you the best is fine in our book

All of those look to me like "back to the drawing board", in other words "back to the rendering engine".

"Back to the drawing board" is a classic expression, implying a totally irrevocably broken start was made right back in the beginning times when first an idea was sketched out.

Scrap all existing game engines and start over from scratch using a rendering engine instead of a game engine? Why? What does that gain? I know what it loses... complete working systems that are already operational, needing only players to log on and maps of those asteroids you want to mine.

The part about trading, on the other hand, that is something the engines I have been using so far are not really very good at right now *if* a single instance of the character-scale server is to be used for both places involved, the place where this that and the other thing are cheap and the place where those same things are more valuable.

For example in a single instance of the server all shops assume the same number of silver coins to a gold coin, the same number of gold coins to a platinum coin and so on, and also all bars of copper bronze silver gold and so on all have the same value specified in their "archetype".

With coinage we can of course assume it is all "debased" anyway and not actually the exact same quantities of the exact same alloys on all planets. But for bars of the same weight of presumably pretty much the same purity of the same metal we would pretty much have to clone the archetypes, one per planet or region within which the value is different.

Hacking the shop code to allow specifying ratios for specific objects instead of entire categories of objects might come to mind but could get ridiculous if the number of distinct objects becomes very large. I think currently all the metal bars and ores and also all the gems are all lumped into one category, so while one might be able to have all those things all be cheap at one shop expensive at another that would not let us have for example copper be cheaper near a copper mine and iron cheaper near an iron mine.


Those are the kinds of things I am wrestling with game engines about. How the bars are depicted in different kinds of clients seems to me an almost irrelevant distraction from the question of under what circumstances the bars would be observable, in what quantities, and under what circumstances a character might be able to take possession of them.

Maybe it would be helpful to make the possibly not totally true in all cases generalised "assumption" that game engines come with actual working games included, if only as reference implementations demonstrating that the engine can in fact run a game.

That assumption frees us from a whole bunch of pie in the sky hand-waving and a whole bunch of not actually quite in the right syntax and format yet to be used as an asset by the game engine sketches and photoshopped images and so on, allowing us to simply make each "minimum necessary change" to the existing game that came with the engine one "minimum necessary change" at a time until, over time, the game becomes closer and closer to various pies in various skies.

So can we put aside all those "drawing boards" (rendering libraries, graphics engines) and instead point at the existing modifiable game that is the closest one available to the one you would ideally have wanted, and work from that?

For example if you do not like any of the tilesets already available for Freeciv, maybe making a whole new tileset for it would be a step in the right direction?

Or if you do not like the terrain tiles used by the Crossfire RPG engine maybe drawing replacement tiles for them would help bring it more toward what you would like to see?

Or if Battle For Wesnoth "Eras" do not include all the "factions" you would like to see maybe creating some new "factions" for it would help move it closer toward what would be ideal?

What is the closest free open source game to any of those whose best features you have it in mind to combine? That could be a good engine to start from.

I guess I am suggesting to start from the playing board instead of from the drawing board. Who cares what it looks or sounds like if it cannot be played? Starting from something that can already be played means that right from the start already it is a working game. It just doesn't yet have quite all the pie in the sky in it yet. But the pies can be added one pie at a time, constantly checking whether adding it breaks the engine...

NOTE that if you have larger versions of the images that you have included in above posts, and you really want to put such images into a game, then maybe Battle for Wesnoth would be an easy engine to use, because the Battle for Wesnoth engine lets you put images with text written below them on "story pages" at the start of each "scenario". That is a spot that cries out for nice pretty images so much that really if story pages are used at all then they probably really *should* be furnished with nice relevant images.

Smaller images, ideally not much larger than one hex of the map, can be used as objects too, so there again is a place to showcase pretty pictures if they are small and depict an object.

(I am using these game engines as examples because I have been watching the availability of game engines - *available* game engines as in available for actual use to run games other than the one or more that come with the engine as shipped - for many years and so far these are pretty much the only ones that continue to seem relatively useable, to me. I'd love 3D virtual reality but so far I haven't been able to download an actual virtual reality game server complete with an actual runnable game. The closest thing so far it seems is one that holds back the actual assets, thus from the sound of it is not yet a useable complete game.)

[Edited by - markm on December 16, 2010 4:32:42 AM]