Restarting development
A few years ago I started working on an advanced 3D space combat and trading game known as Darkness Falls. I was lucky enough to have the help of Ian Bell one of the co-authors of the classic space game Elite and the game was shaping up nicely. Unfortunately due to a severe shortage of spare time on my part the project had to be put on indefinite hold.
Since then I’ve made a few abortive attempts to get back into the project but nothing made it past the tinkering stage. More recently I’ve committed myself to creating some spare time to work on developing a new 3D space game. Instead of continuing with the existing code base I have started again from scratch. Darkness Falls was written in C, it was a very ambitious project and I was never really happy with some aspects of the design. This time I’m using C++ and trying very hard to have a clean and solid design to build on. For the moment I’m calling the game Courier. That’s a work-in-progress name though and may well change.
My intention is to lift as much clever stuff as I can from Darkness Falls and integrate it into Courier. There is lots of the clever stuff to use too (all written by Ian so you know it is really, really clever stuff)…
- Wingmen that fly with you and help you in battles.
- Remote drones that can be launched to help in fights.
- A smart auto-pilot.
- Non-Player character ships battling each other.
- Asteroid fields.
At the moment I’m working on some other aspects of the game such as procedural planet generation and the ability to land on those planets. Once I have something interesting to show I’ll put a download up for people to play with.