A rogue-like sci-fi strategy survival game with base building, tactical combat, crew management and emergent storytelling.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Progress Report + Announcement + Ridiculousness
over 10 years ago
– Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 04:12:37 PM
Hello Halcyon 6 Backers!
Welcome to another edition of Update Thursday!
Progress report!
Things are moving and shaking over here, future galaxy explorers, and we're excited about the progress we've made. We have (mostly!) completed versions of space combat ready to go, and we recently were able to integrate it fully with our starmap/exploration and gameboard resource income system. That is to say, of the four Xs, we've got extermination, exploitation and exploration more or less covered.
Next on our plate is the event system, which Jeff is designing the architecture for. It'll govern everything from enemy fleet generation to flavour-based events and quests, and it will be 100% lua integrated. So, needless to say, we'll soon have Chruul fleets doom creeping their way across the starmap, wiping out everything in their path using the right architecture, which is exciting!
Ship Customization!
Remember back when we reached that Ship Customization system stretch goal? Well, we're happy to announce that we expect to ship it with the earliest pre-launch versions of the game this fall.
Originally we were going to hold off until after release, but we realized we'd actually be holding back too much fun and also necessitating a massive combat rebalance later, so this really is a win-win for everybody!
Here's a sneak peak at what the ship management screen looks like currently...
It'll most likely be tweaked before we launch, but we get all excited about this stuff and we wanted to share.
Keyboard Control Quandaries!
We added a question to our backerkit surveys this morning. We're basically trying to gauge your, our backers, preferable control set up. What do you gravitate to? Are you a mouse and hotkey kind of person? Are you a keyboard master? Did you once have a pet mouse? Are your parents anthropomorphic keyboards?
Let us know!
We Hope You Like Puns...
As you'd imagine, we're legit living and breathing all things Halcyon 6 here at MDI and it's creeping into all parts of our lives. Some of us are starting to see star map designs on bus shelters and in our morning cereals, others can't stop running combat scenarios and mock battles with the granola from the snack table. It's taken over, is what we're saying.
And we have to admit, we like it.
To this end, we've created a very stupid, pun-filled summer playlist inspired by the burgeoning H6 universe. Tell us what songs we've missed or the songs you'd add to the list!
Throwback Thursday! (At Least I Think This Is What It Means!)
over 10 years ago
– Sat, Aug 01, 2015 at 10:04:10 AM
Hello!
Things are humming along nicely here! We’ve got Lucky and Linda working together on some really nice upgrades for the starmap, which should make fleet management super intuitive. Which is exciting, because you’re all going to be spending a fair amount of time there.
Meanwhile JC’s churning out lots of animations using a tool Lucky set up for him. Felicity’s cleaning up script documentation, Jeff’s designing and instituting better AI architecture, and Peter’s being a domineering jerk-face.
So everything’s all going to plan!
Throwback Thursday
Yesterday somebody in the office mentioned that Throwback Thursday is a thing, and following a quick trip to urban dictionary -- the ultimate compendium of all human knowledge -- we decided that it was indeed a thing. And furthermore, it was a thing we should do.
To officially throw this Thursday back to the degree it deserves, we thought it would be refreshing to take a few minutes to step away from parsing the minutiae of code and screen-by-screen player control iteration to reflect back on how we initially got started on this absurdly ambitious quest and the various evolutions and changes we made to the initial concept to match various technological and design considerations.
So let’s travel back in time to Q1 2014, when Chris Pratt was most known for being an adorable supporting actor in Parks and Recreation and the sad, ultimately glorious injured guy in Moneyball and everyone was pegging Interstellar as the obvious choice for best movie of the year.
Station Concepts
Originally we were thinking the station would be a basic human station where you started out with a handful of rooms and built outwards, and that’s reflected in JC’s early drawings.
"For here am I sitting in a tin can..."
What We Changed
We realized pretty early on that free-form limitless room building was a major balance issue, and that a structured station format would be preferable. That, of course, chafed with the idea of a structure floating in space, where being able to build freely in any direction is kind of a given.
So that’s pretty much where we got the idea of the Ancient Alien Space Station™, where players have a defined set of segments within which they can build. Also, you know, we felt the whole ancient alien mystery setting was more compelling anyway.
On its way, but not quite there yet.
On the game systems side, keeping the rooms small and simple restricted their usefulness to the game mechanics, relegating them to passive bonuses or resource production status, which really wasn’t what the game is about (we’re not making Tiny Tower or Fallout Shelter, after all).
Also we soon realized that using rooms for ground combat necessitated a more isometric perspective, and knowing that we wanted our rooms to give a meaningful visual context for key game control modes (such as ship building, tech research, etc.), we enlarged the room concepts and gave them a lot more detail.
And, seeing as the game takes place in Ancient Alien Space Station™, it made sense to make the rooms massive and cavernous, so as to dwarf the character avatars and give the sense that they’re a little out of their depth. After all, these rooms shouldn’t look like they’re made for human beings.
Avatar Concepts
Speaking of avatars, JCs original concepts were pretty awesome.
The thing is, they became problematic as soon as ground combat came into focus.
It’s one thing to have a giant green multi-limbed alien officer hang out in a room in the station, but it becomes a problem as soon as you need to outfit that officer with the same kinds of combat powers as your human officers. It means effectively multiplying the attack and skill animations by 2 for each new race model in the game.
Either that or severely restrict the animations for that model, which works fine when that model is for a monster you run into a handful of times, but another thing entirely when it’s the player’s unit.
What We Changed
With that staring us in the face, it made sense to focus instead on creating different humanoid aliens and creating an avatar animation system around that humanoid model instead.
You can play around more when you're working with a basic body template.
Seeing as every sci-fi movie ever made -- with production companies always facing a woeful shortage of skilled non-humanoid actors -- has done the same thing, it seemed like a natural decision.
The nice thing about doing that is also being able to fit all the different alien models into the red = tactical, blue = science, yellow = engineering uniform structure, which is at this point is so accepted it might as well be codified into the universal laws of gods and men.
Hope you enjoyed the throwback (Thursday)! Presuming that there will be more Thursdays in the coming months, we’ll probably do another one at some point!
Shout Outs
Space Foodtruck
First off, a shout out to our very good friends at One Man Left, who are currently running a campaign for a sweet co-op card game that puts the player and their friends in the role of chef, captain, scientist and engineer in an interstellar food truck.
As fans of space, foodtrucks and non-sequitur word pairings, we couldn’t be more excited!
XO
Finally, a proper shout out to even MORE friends (notice how we’re friends with so many people?) at Jumpdrive Studios who JUST brought their awesome-looking sci-fi strategy game XO from Square Enix Collective to kickstarter!
Check them out!
- Ken, Peter and the Halcyon 6 Team
New Dev!
over 10 years ago
– Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 04:13:57 AM
Hello Kickstarter Backers!
Remember way back when we met our stretch goal of "Hire a dev for the team to help make Halcyon 6 super awesome"? Spoiler alert, you guys: we hired that dev! We're devoting this week's update to introducing her to all of you. Meet Felicity!
Felicity originally, albeit briefly, joined Massive Damage as our co-op student while finishing her degree in Computer Science, with a minor in English, from Waterloo. (Waterloo means she's got serious skills, guys.) We always knew we wanted to hire her full-time if we could: she's that magical combination of hardcore gamer, super talented dev, and impossible-to-get-rid-of-ness. For those of you that understand the wizarding ways of the dev, she's a back-end dev with experience in php, C#, Java, Python, Lua, and some Cobalt because, as she explains it, "some of my profs in second year were apparently time travelling teachers from the seventies".
On Halcyon 6, she'll be focusing on developing the features and logic that sit on top of our game engine. We're all pretty stoked because she's got the chops for this. We sat her down to ask about how she ventured into computer science, her background in gaming, and the path that lead her to us!
Talking-Head Interviewer: Hey Felicity!
Felicity: Hi, Disembodied Talking Head!
THI: You've always been a gamer, eh? Tell us about the games you've played that have influenced you.
Felicity: The first game I remember playing was Chip's Challenge. It taught me two lessons: that the right boots will, in fact, protect you from fire, and the pain of losing seventy levels worth of save game with one click. After that I started into the Maxis Sim-Whatever games. I can still recite every notification from SimPark. 'This is an elderberry! She is deaaad. Her species was overeaten.' In retrospect it was a little nihilistic for an eight-year-old. After that... I guess it was Myst! I remain dully confused by lighthouses to this day.
Then somewhere around age fourteen, I found Everquest and forgot about the sun.
Actually, the first piece of programming I ever did was for Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, when I was about ten. It was on the Infinity Engine, which actually still has a very active modder's community (which is part of why keeping H6 moddable is really important to me). I still mess around in there at times.
THI: Yep, legit gamer pedigree, Felicity. So it was actually games that lead you to coding.
Felicity: There were a few items in that game that were built, but not actually available. I wanted to build a merchant that would sell some buffs that I couldn't acquire otherwise, so I sat down with my Internet Explorer forums and my built-in copy of Notepad (once again, it was 2001 and I was ten) to code it myself, for myself.
The results were... interesting I could create his creature file and make the merchant appear in the game, but I could never quite master getting him to use the dialogue files that I wrote for him. The result was a somewhat hobo-like character wearing a hot pink shirt (again, ten), who would happily sell the items I wanted, but randomly yelled pieces of dialogue stolen from the main script when you spoke to him. He was particularly fond of screaming brutal main plot spoilers. "Oh, [major seemingly trustworthy character], I could never have dreamed how you would betray me!" Because geeky children make very poor gods, I never figured out how to fix him. I just marvelled at the mad prophet I'd created.
I got better.
THI: When you went into Computer Science, were you hoping it would lead to gaming?
Felicity: If you'd asked me in elementary school, game design was probably my third choice. My first choice was an astronaut, but being near-blind and having an overly intense relationship with Netflix probably dashed that. After that I wanted to be a dinosaur, but science has yet to catch up to my ambitions.
THI: So naturally, games came next. I'm sure you're asked this all the time, but how do you get into working at a game studio?
Felicity: Honestly, I got lucky. Being part of the co-op program means you'll be spending some time uncomfortably going to class in a suit, but it gives students an opportunity to meet representatives from companies that they never would otherwise. In my third year I had great interview with one of the founders. We spent most of the time talking about Settlers of Catan and Assassin's Creed, and now I work somewhere where the catapult on my desk is by no means the only one in the office.
In all seriousness, though, this job is a dream for me. I can't believe I'm lucky enough to work at something I'm so passionate about, and with fun, intelligent people who care about the work they do every day. Everyone at MDI is a gamer as well as a developer, and with the amount of talent and energy going into this project I think that H6 has the potential to be something really special. I love it here and I'm so grateful to the backers for making it possible for me to return as a full-time employee, as well as to Ken and the rest of MDI for giving me a chance to be part of this amazing adventure.
THI: I think your spectacular hat also plays into it. Never question a girl about her hats. Thanks for chatting with us and welcome baaack!
Back On Track! + H6 Website
almost 11 years ago
– Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 10:03:38 PM
Greetings all Halcyon 6 Backers!
The long hours are paying off, and everything's set for a super productive summer. But for now, a quick update!
Space Combat!
The Lua scripts for combat are in place and functioning exactly the way we want, which means the first leg of our journey towards functional game tools (and eventually, mod tools!) has been completed. Right now we’re able to make all the combat powers, units, status effects and AI scripts we need in highly flexible Lua scripts, which is awesome and bodes well for the project as a whole.
With that architectural structure now in place, the entire team has been focusing on space combat the last few weeks. The goal is to make combat as seriously amazing as we can first before moving on to incorporating all the other game loops.
It’s going to be the beating heart of the game, and so we couldn’t be happier that it’s coming along nicely.
We'd love it if you dropped by and said hi on the forums.
Another Backerkit Reminder!
About 10% of you haven’t signed up for backerkit yet! You all probably received reminders earlier today. Please sign up!
Thanks!
Shout Outs:
Diluvion -
Arachnid Studios
This project caught our eye the other day, and we think it looks like an awesome combination of some classic 3d space games like Freelancer and Independence War with the super cool underwater visuals from Bioshock.
They’ve only got a few days left, so please send them some love!
We Happy Few - Compulsion Games
We're blown away by the incredible visual style and fantastic game concept from the montrealers at Compulsion Games. It's a super creepy Orwellian survival game reminiscent of The Prisoner, and It’s unbelievable how great it looks!
Thanks!
Until next time, thank you again for your continued support and we’ll be in touch soon!
Ken, Peter and the Halcyon 6 Team
Dev Blog: Art! + Slight Delay
almost 11 years ago
– Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 12:02:31 PM
Happy Thursday, Halcyon 6 Backers!
Architecture Detour!
tl;dr - The Lua interpreter we were using has proven to be a bit too unstable for our tastes, so we need to reimplement some of the architecture natively in Unity and rethink our APIs. It's working out so far, but we lost about two weeks of dev work.
So, this week a thing happened where we realized that the Lua interpreter we were relying on just wasn't going to get the job done. It's better that we caught this now rather than later, but it's definitely annoying and we figured it would be best to be upfront with you all about it.
To explain our thinking, we were hoping to be able to run most of the game through Lua, which would have streamlined the mod tools creation process down the road and given us a ridiculous amount of flexibility. The good thing is, thanks to Jeff, we were able to determine that we'd eventually run into a brick wall if we kept going that way.
The point is, a bunch of the architecture we’ve built for combat needs to be reimplemented in Unity. Apart from sorting out some API changes, we're almost there, but it means the last two weeks or so has been a bit of a retread in terms of development and testing.
While annoying, it's certainly not backbreaking. It’s still our plan to have a playable build ready for the fall.
In the meantime, we’ve been hard at work making sure everything is in place by then, with a mind towards delivering as polished and compelling a release as possible. We’re going to keep you updated on how this goes with regular dev diary updates.
In this post, we asked JC to shed a little light on his process for creating the art for the game.
Enjoy!
-------------------------------------- Dev Blog Transmission Begins
Halcyon 6 Dev Blog: Art
Part 1: Concept
I want every screen in Halcyon 6 to have some kind of striking image. Whether it’s a cool space background or an awesome in-combat animation or some interesting action going on in a room on the station. And thanks to the game’s setting, tone and themes, there’s a lot of potential for that kind of memorable imagery.
That being said, the image needs to remain within the context of the game mechanics, so it’s almost always a collaborative process coming up with the concept. Like, this base screen I’m working on is a Repair Bay, with its primary function being to add a “positive modifier to ship and module repair over time in and around the base sector”.
So it’s pretty easy to get, mechanics-wise.
If this were Star Trek, we’d probably just have a couple officers typing away at consoles or something, but we decided pretty early on that we wanted avoid doing that, as it’s a generic trap. If we do it for one room, we might end up doing it for all of them.
And it’s just boring.
In each case, we work hard to associate a unique, interesting image with each base room to make sure the player can easily tell the difference between them. And it makes the game more visually compelling.
Thankfully, one of the central themes of the game is learning to confront a horror (the Chruul) by compromising your humanity, an act symbolized by the ancient alien station, and the meld that occurs between it and the officers onboard. There’s a lot of potential striking imagery that comes out of that theme. Sort of like what if the cast of Star Trek wandered into an H.R. Giger set? What would that look like?
So instead of showing engineers plonking away at consoles, we thought it would be cooler if the concept was that the engineers controlled remote drones with a sort of Pacific Rim-like control chassis that sort of distorts their bodies, making them appear less physically human.
The only way to know if this will work is to try it, though, so first I do a very loose sketch of the main elements I want from the scene.
Part 2: Drawing
From there I use the pencil tool in photoshop to start to block in main elements of the image. The aim is to make sure the colours, elements and shadows are working together.
These things get a bit harder to fix later, so you want to make sure you get it right when it’s still easy to spot colour and composition errors.
Once I’m happy with the scene and blocking, I do a bit more detailing. I try to smooth out any angles or curves that look jagged, which is the main difficulty with pixel art. Smooth angles don’t come naturally to it, so you need to put the work in to make sure every angle looks a smooth and natural as possible.
Generally at this point I check with Peter and Linda to figure out where the UI is going to go. With these base screens, the UI and art need to work, and in this case it required the removal of the components on the left side. Everything’s it’s own layer, though, so it’s not much of a big deal to hide whatever needs to be hidden.
Part 3: Animation
I used to use Photoshop to create my sprite animations, but I found the tools a bit bloated for my needs. Pyxel Edit is a more slimmed-down package, and I highly recommend as an alternative.
Generally, you take the sprite you want animated (in this case, the engineer in the drone-control pillar) and you make the changes necessary to create the frames you want. I’ll be working on them in After Effects, so I then export them individually.
After Effects is more or less the final step, where I piece together the animations, which is easy to do with the import image sequence command. That makes them play as one layer, but also allow you to manually change timing and add effects like light pulsing.
Part 4: Conclusion
So that’s my process for making these screens! Each screen goes through multiple iterations and additions, so I’ll 100% be adding, altering or reimagining these images as we go through prototyping and QA.
Of course, actually getting these images into the game is a whole other process! Especially when animation is involved, I need to work closely with Lucky to make sure the front end handles my images with a certain degree of fidelity.
Who knows, maybe when we’re deeper into animations, we’ll talk about that process in another post!
In the meantime, thanks for reading this post, and I hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks,
JC (Juan Carlos) Solon
More Information
Programs Used: Photoshop
, Pyxel Edit,
After Effects
-------------------------------------- Dev Blog Transmission Ends
In Conclusion...
Wow, long post this week!
Before we sign off, we need to remind all of you who haven’t signed up for backerkit to please sign up.
Also, keep your eyes peeled for our new official website, which will become the home for all things Halcyon 6, where you’ll have a more permanent place to have discussions, ask questions, etc. It’ll be great!
