The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

This looks like it could be a lot of fun:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2064021040/tiny-trek

2D Overhead battles (like Star Control), but with procedural ships and weapons.

Unlimited stars and planets.
Unlimited aliens to encounter.
Unlimited starships.
Unlimited alien worlds to explore.
IOS, Android, Ouya, Windows, Mac, & Linux.

Too bad it takes ten bucks to get the game for mobile devices, where it really belongs.

Kwayne!

I appreciate your feedback, thanks for the interest!

The game is in fact designed to work on PC's, iOS, Android and Ouya. Were are looking at Linux and Windows Mobile 8. When you back at 10 bucks you get the PC version and a mobile version as well, Thought that was a pretty good deal.

I guess I sounded negative ... again. Don't worry, I'm just fantasizing in my unique way. If you live in Hungary, doing cost-benefit abacus jugglery is a natural habit that's hard to shake off, even when it's meaningless.

So, on the bright side, you're doing something I wanted to do myself back in the "good old days" and you're immortalizing the name of anyone supporting you, both of which I really appreciate.

No problem, thanks for the input!

In the interest of full disclosure: 'dczanik' and 'Gamesare Studios' log in from the same IP address. I'll leave it up to them to fill in the details.

I started working in the same office in the programming division of our shared job 2 years ago, He learned about my work in game programming, I learned about his work on Star Control II. I hope that doesn't change the that Dczanik thinks Tiny Trek would be fun, or my desire to answer as many questions as the internet has about it?

I just want the reader to know the context in which the posting was made. While Tiny Trek might be fun, it's not as impressive when someone with close ties to the creator says so, than when an independent person does it.

And imho, it is dubious not to come forward with this fact when bringing up the game in the first place.

I completely agree with you, I do have to say he simply said he thought it might look fun, But I don't think he went above and beyond to pitch it, He told me about it after the deed was done, and I was more focused on answering questions over the entire campaign, so it slipped my mind. I hope you don't hold this against Dczanik, He works real hard on Ur-Quan and I think only wanted to share his excitement for the project. If you feel the thread itself is other wise not legit I would humble ask you delete it. If you have any questions about the game itself feel free to e-mail me as well as admin you should be able to get at my e-mail addie.

The thread itself is perfectly appropriate here, and I see no reason to delete it.

And I value's Dczanik's work on UQM, and his contributions to the forum.

Not sure who would be angry at me when I make free Star Control games for them to play. 

Well, To those angry,  I said:
"This looks like it could be a lot of fun:"

That's all I said. I wasn't lying. I wasn't trying to deceive. LOL!
If it wasn't like Star Control, I wouldn't have even posted it.  And, no offense to the creators. But it's not like there's a lot of traffic on the forum.
Yes! We work in the same building. This is true.

I even helped him once move a fridge.  It was white.

So, my apologies to anybody angry.

Full confession:
I also once worked with a guy in Austin TX, who had a brother-in- law, who worked with Chris Roberts in the 1990s. Because Star Citizen will get mentioned by me eventually.


I try not to make meep-eep angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry.  (http://www.crafty-games.com/forum/Smileys/classic/hulkout.gif)

... Uh ... anyway ...

I didn't see any anger here except poor Bruce.

Kwayne! I appreciate the bright green congratulations notice. Thank your sir. In other news we have jumped on the Steam Greenlight bandwagon.

I wish I could add to the cash pile, so I hope there'll be a PayPal preorder option in the future. Unfortunately KS seems to work only with Amazon Payments, which is suspiciously curious about my credit card data.

Np, from what I understand I can litter even the KS page with paypal links after the campaign.

So the recent backer build I posted over at Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2064021040/tiny-trek) included the ship editor allowing for the first time users other then me the design a chance to play with the editor. I added the function to screen capture and save a image of the editor to the app. I have alot more to do on it, but today I received a image of our first user made ship!

If you a backer and have tried the tool feel free to send me a pic of your ship, Want to see how users are crafting their vessels. Might give me ideas for editor improvements!

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/MClar1.jpg)

Stretch Goal 1 Complete

     Thank you my friends, We have reached the first stretch goal, Now I can assure you get better editors and deeper control over your ship design, weapon systems, race stats and looks. It's quite exciting. I will post more information on that this weekend as well as more detail on what we plan on doing with the internets and sharing your creations across players games should we reach the next stretch goal of $8,000. The campaign so far as been amazing and that is due to you guys and gals, I deeply appreciate it. Help me continue to push this out the world so we can assure the best possible quality game I could muster by the end of May. Any suggestions on how to reach more media is more then welcome. Now that's out of the way let's talk about legs.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/NewWalk.gif)

Crew Members v2 - Now with Walking!

      So I wanted to share this recent development concerning the Away Team graphics, specifically the team themselves. As you can see in the above image we have the old static blocky crew member representation I am came up with. But my good friend and game developer colleague D.Czanik (http://"http://dczanik.deviantart.com/") chipped in with hopes of solving my walking dilemma with the two animations you see next to mine. So I ask you the mighty 451 (Backers as of this update) what do you think. Do you like them? Do they fit in the game? These little guys are important cause you going to be doing a lot of adventuring together so we want them to look just right.

     Speaking of away teams I have been asked recently "What do you do on a Away Mission anyhoo?". It's a fair question, so to give a bit more detail, the away mission engine will be capable of delivering interesting fun and excitement a couple of ways. One is when you just decide to visit the surface of planet for no reason, on the surface you will be able to scan items, collect samples, conducting mining, And conduct trade and conversation with sentient species you might meet. During this you may trigger "Episodes" which provide more structured gameplay through the mission matrix. A trigger on the surface of planet or on board another ship could be requests from other sentient beings, discovery of a artifact or even running into so pirate smuggler types. The idea is I have gone through and attempted to figure out what kind of things one would do on a Mission and distill that into triggers, and mission components. What kind of triggers and planet surface mission components would you like to see?

Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2064021040/tiny-trek (http://"http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2064021040/tiny-trek")

Steam Page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=198351562  (http://"http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=198351562")

Just on a sidenote, Gamesare Studios has another game -- Vincere Totus Astrum -- now on the Humble Bundle Weekly Sale. https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly (https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly)

I think it's worth checking out.

About the away team graphics, I think smoothing the animation contradicts the point of having Atari-esque retro graphics. Something like this is more fitting to the style you chose IMO (sorry for the glitchy overlay):

Kwayne good stuff!

Stretch Goal #2!


(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/server.jpg)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2064021040/tiny-trek (http://"http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2064021040/tiny-trek")

So we are working towards the second stretch goal with seven days to go and I thought I would talk more about what we have planned for this. Basically all the generated content that you create during a game is stored in strings. We can send these strings across the net from PC's, tablets, phones and other devices to a central server. So what we would we do with that you ask. Well here we are have several ideas i'd like to share...

Historical Records: In game you can dock at Space Stations and the idea is one of the station function options would be to review historical records. View other players races, You would be able to see their ship, race avatar, planet, Captain name and a record of the exploits. Kinda of a cool way to see what other people are doing in the pixelverse.

Encounters: We could with the server make it so some of the races you encounter in your current game could be other players races. So I generate a race play my game and have a certain ship design and weapons layout, you might play your game and encounter my race as a NPC or enemy. We can extend this idea and track in your historical documents what races you have battled or made friends with from other players.

Melee Combat: Search online records and select other player created races to do combat with in a separate melee mode. And we can then store the success rate of downloaded races in the historical record how they fared against other players.

Web Viewer: We would also create a web based interface to review all the race historical records using HTML5, You could search out your own races and see their stats, or search other peoples submissions.

Editor

I also today I finally got the ship editor to behave bug free, and include not only symmetrical editing but also the most requested asymmetrical editing mode. So I decided to craft a few ships for fun.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/TinyTrekScreen12.jpg)
Battlestar?

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/TinyTrekScreen13.jpg)
 It might not look like much but it's got it where it counts...

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/TinyTrekScreen14.jpg)

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/TinyTrekScreen15.jpg)
We are Pixlingons!

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/TinyTrekScreen18.jpg)
 I'm sorry Dave I am afraid I can't do that.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/USS%20Tiny.PNG)
Trekking along!

Tiny Trek on Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2064021040/tiny-trek
 (http://"http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2064021040/tiny-trek")
Today I was able to rig load and save to the editor. Now you can save your ship design and then load it again later. I will expand on this over the next day or two. In addition I began designing a space dock from where the ship is edited. So you can make multiple saves. Here some up to date images of the editor...

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/TinyTrekScreen19.jpg)

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/TinyTrekScreen20.jpg)

In other news I have been work with Mr Czanik to figure out how to create lifeforms on planet surfaces. And I think we have come up with a idea. We are going to have several body part types, for instance movement may be achieved with wings, fins, two legs, eight legs, etc. So we will have these parts available, and the engine will stitch them together based on the planet. Here is a concept image below.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25138707/TinyTrekScreen21.jpg)

 Finally we are nearing the end of our second stretch goal and as promised today on the Kickstarter info page I revealed the 3rd and final stretch goal, More Melee options! Here is that information copied for your convenience!

"$10,000.00 Raised - Mega Melee modes: If we can reach the $10,000 dollar mark we will be able to expand the Melee combat mode we have planned out. We will be able to include the ability to create team battles where you construct teams out of your save files and download NPCs from the server. Then battle one ship at a time against another team. Another mode would be endless mode, where you ship of choice has to survive against a never ending onslaught of Saved NPCs and generated enemies. The third battle mode would allow you to combat against two enemy vessels and you have a friendly NPC to assist you, two on two. The fourth mode would involve a endless round of battles, where each battle is timed. Each victory adds more time to the clock, the faster you can defeat them the more time added to the clock. "

Tomorrow I hope to post a new build for Backers to edit their ships and do combat again, but this one will have the load and save functions in and I am attempting to code some method for e-mailing each other our ships for fun in-till we can get the server up.

Wouldn't you mind me requesting some stuff. This is something with which I regularly harass developers doing Android games, and I guess most of these won't put much strain on you since apparently an OUYA port is planned as well. These are things all .EMU emulators commonly have, making them the perfect applications for any Android setup.

1. Generic USB gamepad support: I know the OUYA controller has a touchpad on it, and you'll probably exploit that, but for a plain Android port I wouldn't mind support for the cheap, generic gamepads that are often forgotten by shortsighted developers infesting Google Play.
2. Hide system bar: the system bar is the most annoying thing ever. A stupid black bar that never lets you enjoy the entire screen.
3. 4:3 aspect ratio support: an old school styled game looks best on CRT TV-s. When I'm at home I usually convert the HDMI output of my android dongle to the old A/V signal. A few OUYA owners do the same, since to their disappointment OUYA didn't include A/V ports.
4. Overlay options: I like scanlines, but doesn't look that great on larger screens, and they need to be switched off if the player's eyes are sensitive to them. Some other overlay patterns might worth trying out.

New article on Tiny Trek up at Super Game Droid!

http://www.supergamedroid.com/2013/12/20/kickstarter-spotlight-tiny-trek/

48 hours to go, 3rd Stretch goal within reach. Thanks for all the support!

And to answer Kwanye's questions...

1. Generic USB gamepad support: I know the OUYA controller has a touchpad on it, and you'll probably exploit that, but for a plain Android port I wouldn't mind support for the cheap, generic gamepads that are often forgotten by shortsighted developers infesting Google Play., I will attempt to avoid the touch pad on the Controller based versions of the game, So I think we are go their, on the Ouya version I maybe humstring to only the Ouya control, I will keep you updated!
2. Hide system bar: the system bar is the most annoying thing ever. A stupid black bar that never lets you enjoy the entire screen. Agreed!
3. 4:3 aspect ratio support: an old school styled game looks best on CRT TV-s. When I'm at home I usually convert the HDMI output of my android dongle to the old A/V signal. A few OUYA owners do the same, since to their disappointment OUYA didn't include A/V ports. Interesting Idea, Maybe even box it in a old looking TV lol.
4. Overlay options: I like scanlines, but doesn't look that great on larger screens, and they need to be switched off if the player's eyes are sensitive to them. Some other overlay patterns might worth trying out. Indeed others have made this request and so it will be a optional off function.

It might be worth to mention that the PayPal donation option is already on the kickstarter page (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2064021040/tiny-trek#) since who knows when.

Any news?