Sticks & Starships

[Dispatcher]

Looking like a hodgepodge mix of games and genres, notice its physics will include orbital mechanics:

Apparently it will Kickstart early this year. Check out the home page:

http://www.aloftstudios.net

[Elthy]

While the gameplay could be interessting im realy disgusted by the graphics. It just looks ... old, not like minecraft where you know that its supposed to look "blocky".

Until its released and i know the graphics are final i will stick with KSP for rockets and Minecraft+IC2+Buildcraft+Gregtech for building other stuff...

[MC.STEEL]

Another minecraftvania(?) esque game.After that game showed that the premise of block based graphics support procedurally generated world that are able to be changed in any way shape or form.A lot of other games have sprung up to see where else this could be useful.

As for this game i see that it has its own merit and its made in such a way as to just look old instead of block based and i give it bonus points for proper orbital mechanics!

[vger]

I don't know much about the game yet, but my gut tells me that to call it a minecraft clone is a great disservice.

Granted, the 'block-building' genre is very quickly getting oversaturated, but for some reason, I'm getting more of a "Second Life - Evolved" vibe off of this, rather than Minecraft.

I won't ever go near it, since with no moderation it turned quickly into a troll ghetto, but I was still always fascinated by the idea. Had there been more rules in place to make it function like a game instead of a glorified chat room, I might have given it a shot. This seems like it actually stands a chance at being what I WISH Second Life was. As an old SWG player, I'm also somewhat intrigued by the crafting and skill system. And if you can actually add your own textures like the 'art' section implied, wow.

I also don't know for sure if some of the low-quality graphics are permanent. Clearly, the rocket scene at the end demonstrates that the game is more than capable of gorgeous particle systems, so I don't understand why the candle flames are being shown as 8-bit animations. Maybe it's just not polished enough and they threw textures into it as fast as they could, just enough to get the video done. Some scenes look beautifully detailed, while others look like Minecraft 1.0. I found the contrast between them to be very distracting.

Edited April 10, 2014 by vger

[dansmithers]

Looks like a hybrid of Tekkit and Everquest Landmark.

In other words, quite cool

[hotmailcompany52]

Sounds interesting, Im going to keep an eye on this and maybe back it on kickstarter.

[NovaSilisko]

Sweet lord.

They had better not screw this up. A massively ambitious project with relatively niche gameplay might prove to be a fatal combination...

Edit: I have now become incredibly pessimistic about this game:

The title was initiated in August 2013, and has been in continuous development since that time. The first phase is mostly asset- complete in terms of art, and the engine is being finsihed. Currently, we are focusing on generation and navigation, and will begin to implement mechanics soon.

So they've done most of the art first, haven't finished the engine... and, er, haven't actually done any of the game mechanics?

Edited April 11, 2014 by NovaSilisko

[hotmailcompany52]

Edit: I have now become incredibly pessimistic about this game:

So they've done most of the art first, haven't finished the engine... and, er, haven't actually done any of the game mechanics?

Hmm, I have to agree it is an odd dev plan, but as some one who does not code it makes sense.

[NovaSilisko]

I've come to the conclusion that none of the media presented so far has actually been from the game's engine. Case in point:

These are both stock unity lens flares. None of the stuff is actually rendered in their own engine... The FAQ gives more evidence:

The game is being developed with an in-house proprietary engine. The game is also being developed in parallel with the Unity game engine as a design tool.

So, all of the media, with no direct indications to the contrary other than observation and the small snippets in the FAQ, is effectively faked, and that's what they're going to run their kickstarter off of... I am deeply worried.

Edited April 11, 2014 by NovaSilisko

[SuperBigD60]

Whether or not this thing actually makes it, after having watched that trailer, I want a mixture of minecraft and ksp somewhat badly.

How cool would it be if this game was like that (and more)?

If only...

[vger]

Hmm, I have to agree it is an odd dev plan, but as some one who does not code it makes sense.

Yep. So you're more or less seeing glorified concept art. In professional circles ever since the idea of proposals became a thing, this is what you would get if you were a producer having an idea pitched to you (with the addition of budget plans, flowcharts, etc). Typically very little work would actually be done beforehand, because nobody wants to spend tens of thousands of hours in development if there's no chance at getting the necessary funds to finish.

[Dvarvaro]

Hi Everyone! This is Dvarvaro, one of the team members on that project. We do a search of our game on Google every couple days, to keep abreast of new articles and discussions that appear, and we noticed this thread on the KSP forums.

I will see how well I can address your ideas and concerns here.

The screens and the cinematic you see are done within Unity, which I have used to test assets for the current life of the project. That fact should probably be more prominent in the future Kickstarter. I don't agree that this makes them fake however, as the models and textures are the same as we will use later, with a slightly better shader palette. We are waiting to launch the Kickstarter after our first consumer demo is out, so that our players can get a full and direct preview of the experience the engine will provide. Because we are developing the engine from scratch, we feel that step is necessary to give others the confidence that the project is substantial, rather than merely concepts.

On the question of influences, Tekkit and Feed The Beast are accurate connections. Other titles which have influenced development in some way are Terraria, KSP, and the Star Trek universe. What that leaves us with is a sci-fi adventure in a fantasy setting, with gamplay I would term "sandbox-engineering".

I also agree that the project is ambitious; on our webpage and Kickstarter, we go in to how we have divided the game's development into modules which roughly correspond to the four major ages (classical, industrial, information-interplanetary, and interstellar). The team is projected to begin adding members to the coding department once the engine core is fully developed around this Summer (which is also when the first demo is projected for).

While we are not going to appeal to everyone with our art style, we do think feedback can be constructive, and some things may perhaps be refined as we go.

We understand your concerns, and we hope to alleviate as many of them as we can prior to our funding session. Thanks for the interest!

I can take questions here, or on our newly launched forums, in either our content or coding sections (the others will be up shortly).

http://www.aloftstudios.net/

http://forum.aloftstudios.net/index.php

[vger]

Dvarvaro, retro-styled art is fine, the only thing I can say more about it is, be consistent. If you want a retro game, have all its elements look retro. Or have it look super-modern. As I said in one of my posts, I was very distracted by how vastly different the space launch appeared, compared to some of the other scenes. Something in the look and feel of the game needs to be streamlined, at least in my opinion, otherwise it will feel like a collection of mini-games.

At the very least, use particles for flames. The space vehicles have it, so I can't see any reason why candles and fireplaces shouldn't. Effects go a long way in making a world feel more alive, even if the geometry is simplistic. The environments in the video were simply breathtaking in spite of the blocky minecraft terrain.

[Dvarvaro]

Hi Vger! I appreciate that name lol.

I agree about stylistic consistency. I think one of the challenges with that is that the game is sometimes experienced on different scales. For instance, all of the textures and particles are rendered at a scale of 32 pixels per half meter. So while the rocket modules and the smelter for instance have the same texture resolution, there is quite a bit more of the rocket module to be textured, so many more pixels. At one point I experimented with having different texture resolutions for different parts, based on what scale you usually experience each at- the rockets, for example, I textured at 1/4 the resolution. When you were observing them at the global scale in moderately zoomed third person, the rockets then looked as though they were the same texture depth. But then the issue came when I walked around the modules at the assembly center- they looked vastly lower resolution, and gave the impression of being a smaller object that was just scaled up, and was now very low texture res and very low triangle count- hence why I have the rocket parts where I have them now.

One compromise may be to have different resolutions for the rocket parts when they are viewed from the character's perspective in an assembly center, and when they are in flight (high for 1st person, low for third person).

Similarly with the particles. In order to be consistent, I gave the particles the same texture resolution as the rest of the world; this creates the same contrast again when you see something tiny like the flames, or something big like the alpha smoke or rocket thrusters. People might be satisfied with particles not being tied to the same texture resolution, however, and maybe taking on a slightly more "cartoonish" character, with higher resolution.