In some far-distant future, in some far-distant part of the galaxy, life bumbles along and makes a mess of things, just like it does here and now. But through progress, development and carefully nurtured rage, lifekind is now equipped with spaceships, orbital trading outposts, and enough weaponary to vaporize the sector 4 times over. You find youself thrust into this exotic and dangerous life when your Great Uncle dies during "trade negotiations" and leaves you a new ship, 1,000 Credits and the oppertunity to spend it as you will. The game begins as you're beamed aboard your new ship in your home star system.
So what are you to do? Well, there are lots of things you can do to earn a little cash for life's finder things. You can become a trader by visiting space stations, buying and selling commodities and zooming off to other systems to buy and sell more, taking advantage of different prices in different systems. You can also engage in combat, and for three reasons: You get bounty for every "hostile" ship you destroy which can add up to thousands of credits in each system. You also get "reputation" points and additions to your legal record for kills. For killing hostiles the law will support you - giving you awards for bumping off a number of pirates - but for destroying other traders or police ships you get punished but you also gain the oppertunity to work for the criminal underworld. Finally, when you destroy a ship, it's cargo is released into space and you can scoop it up in your ship, fly off, and sell it. Nice!
Besides trading and fighting, there are other profitable activities. You can buy a pack of 4 mining droids, and deploy them in space. They'll fly to the nearest asteroid and mine it, ejecting pre-packed crates of ore or heavy elements which you then capture in your ship and sell on. This is profitable but risky - you'll almost certainly be attacked, and other ships will try to grab your crates. Being a fun part of the universe, each star system also features a challenging race around the system against other ships, with 1,000 credits to the winner - with a bonus of 250 credits for each competitor you dispatch on your way round!
There are also a large number (well, an infinite amount in fact) of jobs and missions to try. You can taxi people between star systems, act as a courier for "special" cargo, or turn hitman for the local law enforcement or criminal underground. There are other more complex missions too, such as kidnapping specific people from specific ships and delivering them somewhere, stealing cargo from ships in flight without destroying their ships (using a short-range teleport upgrade, onyl 35,000 credits!), sabotaging shipyards and space stations, and all sorts of other nonsense. Completing missions also boosts your rep. The higher your rep, the bigger and richer the missions available to you.
Finally, there's a military and political element to the game. Each star system is either neutral, or part of one of the three political groups in the sector - The Empire, The Commonwealth and The Collective. These three forces occupy large, contiguous areas of the galaxy and there are numourous battles on the frontiers between them. You can fight as a mercenary in these actions, for huge reward (including a cut of spacestation profit at specific systems, which you collect when you dock at the right station). These battles will be huge, with dreadnaughts and battleships broadsiding eachother, small fighters scrapping in squadrens, and you flitting around with some tasty weaponary (a railgun, proximity mines, and an awe-inspiring Plasma Shroud which spreads over a huge distance, destroying everything in it's path) taking out the enemy. Your influence could lead to one side gaining dominance over the sector, which would mean riches and power beyound your wildest dreams. Or you could encourage chaos in the sector, keeping prices high while war rages on.
Throughout the game, you develop relationships and contacts with other characters, who can help you if you help them - go a good job for the local mobster, and he'll give you information about valuable shipments which may be worth "investigating". Deliver a package for your Great Uncle's laywers and they'll see that you legal status is just the way you want it. This is acheived using you on-board computer which includes an email system, as well as navigation, trading, upgrading and mission functions.
All of this happens in a huge area, featuring more than 4,000 star systems. Your final objective is to gain the highest reputation - and highest or lowest legal status. When this mighty challenge is met, you get 1,000,000 of your finest credits, which opens up the possibility of buying a bigger ship, and warping into an entirely new sector to start all over again...
As things stand at the moment, I think we're about a month away from the first full beta test, which will be carried out on the XNA Creator's Club website. I've got all of the free-space functions up and running solidly (enemy ships, mining, races, hyperspace, combat) and I'm working on the last of the shipboard upgrades (a rail gun, cloaking device and the plasma shroud) and then we're on to the mission engine. That'll be followed by the "war engine" which will manage the tactical swings and battlegrounds. At that point we enable network play, iron out any problems with it, add the options screen and music, and we're good for testing. Doesn't sound like much when I put it like that ;0)
Well, the troublesome software install I was doing on my main dev machine is finished, so I suppose I'd better crack on with this rail gun! I'm looking forward to blowing up some asteroids with it, should be a laugh! mmmmWahaha!
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