Grand Space Project

Hi.

I decided few months ago to encourage the community to make an open community project to show capabilities of Game Develop.
Since we didn’t get too far sadly, but I keep working on a project in my free time and I’m really would like to make it happen not only as a GD user, hobbyist, also as a gamer.

The “project” I’m working on is a space game that I always wanted to play but despite the many great space games out there, I always felt one or more features is missing from them. Maybe some of them has great economy simulation but lack of combat, others have great combat system but lack of customization features, upgrades, weapons and others are great in all way but simply the actual content is few, the universe is boring feel empty, gameplay is too short, repetitive after some time. My idea is basically a GTA sort of game in space. A top down, action sandbox space game with some rpg and rts elements where the player can not only fly ships, and jump sector to sector, but also can walk around inside ships, explore stations, surface of planets, manage and upgrade ships, crew members, ship systems, weapons, discover new technologies, places and who knows what else. I know it going to be a huge project but in my opinion the best if someone not only want to make a game but also want to play it and this is the game I want to play. I know that on my own I can’t complete this project at least not in such quality and scale as I wish, so to encourage the community to join I’m going to share information here about the project regularly and also share the most recent project files with all media.

The project is shared under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. The license is subject to change but for now, I don’t let anyone to use the project files and share it in any ways. I would like to let anyone to do anything with the project as long the changes (and I mean the actual project files with changes) are shared, but to do so I have to find the right license to force people to do so. In the meantime, if anybody would like to join the development can share modified project files ONLY in this forum topic but not outside this forum topic and website. This topic can also be used to share ideas, suggestions, start discussions about the project and report bugs. If the project gain enough attention and contribution from the community, I’m more than happy to change the license to be more “open community project” friendly.
If you going to work on something, please let us know in this topic to avoid more people working on the same thing accidentally.

Most recent version of project can be downloaded from here:
drive.google.com/folderview?id= … sp=sharing

Please note, most media you see in the project is only place holder, not representing the final style and quality of the game.
With the project files you can find a readme text file where I try to explain how things works in case you wish to add custom content and I also try to do my best in the comments. If you have any question please feel free to ask. Also you can find a release_note text fie where I just mention what features added in which version and what have been or have to be fixed. Recently only v0.06 is mentioned as this is the first documented version of the project.

Recent state of the project:

Features added:
-player movement can be controlled by wasd and mouse to look
-player walk forward-backward,sidle left and right animation
-player can enter ships and stations and walk around
-player can fly ships (ships can be controlled using wasd)
-player can dock on stations using ships and ship transporter
-player can undock from station using ships or station transporter
-objects can be selected by right mouse button to interact with them, for now only ships, stations, transporters, doors and com objects are set
-collision between player, ship_interior, wall tiles and ships on board of stations

Known bugs (related to bad logic in events and not to Game Develop itself):
-when docked on station we can still select (invisible) objects on different (hidden) layers (FIXED)

Next features/content to be worked on by my self:

-GUI system to replace keyboard actions with mouse to interact with objects
-path finding to be able to control player and ship also with mouse.
-check distance between player and selected object

Next features/content to be worked on by others:
-nothing :frowning:

Please let us know in this topic if you do work on something

Okay, recently I managed to add object selection to replace collision checking, for now you can select objects by using right mouse button, no distance check yet, in this version every action works from any distance for selected object. I have also added collision between player and ship interior. Finally I decided to keep ship interior as an animation of the ship_interior object but I’m using transparent areas and pixel perfect collision to set actual borders of the interior to keep player inside the ship :slight_smile: I’m still not sure if it the best way to make ship interiors, but for now, this is the most simple way I found that works. You may also notice I have renamed the project, from now on the project is called Grand Space Project, this is not a final name, more like a code name for the project but never know :slight_smile:
Next I’m going to work on the GUI system to replace keyboard actions to interact with objects (dock on stations, enter ships…etc) and I would like to add path finding to be able to control the player and ship also by mouse not only with wasd. For example, if you want to dock on station, you can select station with right mouse button, select dock from options and the player/ship would go there automatically to dock or you can go there using controls and just do the same, you going to be able to do however you want.

Hi, I recently decided to also create my own GSP, which lead me to Gdevelop, and while looking for ideas on how to create an RPG ( I also wanted it to be GTA/RPG style) I came across your post and Idea and I am Excited! :smiley:
I would love to hear what more you have planned (story, character creation, customization). I just started learning GD so I’ll be slow at first but i have a bunch of ideas that i would love to toss around.

Going to look at the files and play with GD. Thanks for the head start, and I’m glad to find someone else wit the same idea to share!

ddabrahim, is there some git repo of the project? So people could contribute easier?

I don’t have git repo, actually I have stopped the development of this “community project” and I don’t care about community contribution any more as I don’t have time to maintain/lead such project. I’m still working on the project in my free time but I have no plans to share recent versions at all, not because I think it too good to be shared or anything but because I don’t have the time to maintain a community or open-source project and also I don’t really know what direction should I go with this. To upload to github would require clear goals which is foggy at the moment. Only thing I know, I want to explore a visually stunning space with stations, planets and random events around me and have fun, do all kind of things but this is too wide range of possibilities, really I should pick a path set up a list of possibilities I want in the game but at the moment I can’t really decide, I just working on things come in my mind and will see the outcome but really I should not doing this way but at the moment I don’t have nor time nor idea to make a plan how things going to be in the game.
Maybe I’ll share it on github one day, but for now I develop it as my private (hobby) project and I don’t planned to share anything before I have clear goals with it and worthy to show and playable. Also, as I have mentioned I’m not sure what license should I choose I would go with something similar to GDevelop but I’m not sure if source code license can be applied here as I don’t share actual source code.

But thanks for the interest :slight_smile:

Nothing exciting I’m afraid. Since last update, few things have changed and some features have been added. In recent version to move between interiors and exteriors I do save and store everything inside external files. I have only one scene and one layer for the whole game and I save-load everything from files during gameplay instead move player object between layers and load things from external layouts. I feel better organised this way and also easier to use after all. I have also added parallax scrolling background for space travelling, more advanced spaceship control/movement, basic inventory system for player, storage, ships (cargo) and station to store useful things. I have also made basic slots for ships to be able to fit weapons, mining lasers, shield and such. Spaceship interior is removed because at the moment I have no practical use of spaceship interiors, so I decided to remove it for now, I also decided to add stats to player such as stamina, hunger, thirst, bladder, fitness to make gameplay more interesting. So yes, the player during journey going to need food and drink and need to empty bladder and need to rest time to time. If the player is hungry, tired, thirsty or the bladder is full it affect his/her accuracy and speed. If hungry, going to cause less damage and die after a while, if eat something get even more thirsty cause run out of stamina quickly and movement slow down if have a drink, bladder is fill up faster if bladder is full…affect everything.
Maybe it sounds stupid, but the idea is that to make sure player can’t go through everything if have enough ammo as a terminator. It can add some mood to the gameplay imo, for example if you get lost, your ship get crashed on a planet, or you just get too far from the last known food and drink source, you can still continue the game until die as a “survival s***” or something hoping that you going to find the way out of trouble and find enough food and drink, as you can hunt for food on planets (I don’t have details yet but yeah, this is the plan) But missions also going to be long and complex not just go there, kill 10 space pig and come back. Missions are going to be part of the exploration and going to take long time to complete them as you also need to find the way how to complete them. I’m working on a complex mission system now where “things” just randomly happening to you, around you as you explore the universe, stations, planets so you never know when you going to need food and drink or a big weapon or what fitting and equipment. Things just happening around you like it or not and you need to find your way out even if you are not prepared. If you can’t you may die or loose all your equipment by the end, but of course there will be a save system on stations so if it really sucks, you can still load your last save but I hope it will be fun and people will continue instead load last save. When you explore, things can easily turn in to a gripping action or electrifying discovery or a grievous surviving, you never know things just going to happen and everything depends on your skills and how you prepared with your equipments, inventory and stats, so yes player also going to have some skills to use better weapons, to fly better ships, to use better equipments…etc. And I plan to have mini games as “training” to get skills or upgrade existing ones, not just numbers you get after each kill or something, you actually going to play mini games for better skills.

I’m not sure about character customization, yes would be nice but maybe it going to be only few variation to choose from with different skills to start with, maybe one of them has better skills with weapons but the other has better fitness by default and such but no detailed customization planned such as hair, skin, clothes…etc

Regarding story, nothing detailed at the moment, I decided the game going to start on a space station (this is your home basically) in deep space and you can do whatever you want. You can accept missions or do trading, mining, manufacturing to make some cash, but the real essence of the game is going to be exploration to discover anomalies, planets, dungeons, ancient ruins on planets other stations in deep space, fight aliens, pirates and unknown deadly creatures, trade, salvage, craft mew technologies and empty your bladder frequently… Ok, bladder maybe going to be removed, because I don’t want to turn the game in to The Sims, but actually could be fun, between missions you could build your little home on a planet, craft, buy furnitures, staff like that… Oh well, maybe in GSP 2 :mrgreen:

So this is the"plans" I’m working on, don’t have all the details worked out yet but I have couple of years to work out everything and nicely bring them together :smiling_imp: