Space Pirates on itch.io

This project is one I worked on many years ago. I'm happy to be able to share it on itch.io.

It may not be much of a game now, but I see so much potential in it. The game is playable and has a neat, vector based, art style to it. I look forward to digging into the game to bring the art, sound, and game play it deserves.

Origins

This game dates back to 2010. I had been making little games using the Java APIs for a short while. I wasn't very familiar with programming at the time and wanted to build the game engine from the standard Java codebase. As such, I made terrible decisions in regards to code structure. I spent more time with technical code writing than designing games. While that made me a better programmer, I lost out on game design principles.

At the time, I wanted to make a space game where the player would fly around in a space ship and raid trading ships. I felt the game play was not that great as is. The camera was too zoomed in and there was no skill during combat. The code was also very messy and hard to maintain. I thought it would work better as a strategy game, so I rewrote the engine... twice. I got it to a good place then stopped working on the project. I am ready to revisit the project and bring it up to a game that I can be proud of.

Where to go from here

There are many aspects of the game that I need to work on before I can go about adding content to it. The first step was to set up a new and maintainable development environment for it. This is now complete! The next steps are addressing memory leaks, long load time, the performance window, and lack of graphics configuration.

The menu and loading screen are, frankly, quite terrible. I would start the artwork by making it more appealing. I would also like to add an ending to the game so that it is more satisfying to play.

Until next time!