Spaceship building game prototype

It’s become a bit of a tradition now that when I host a LAN I show up with a new game prototype (although as it’s usually six months between them that’s not saying a lot). This time was my first attempt in Unity, and it got its first outing a couple of weeks back. Conveniently I had a second LAN the next week with a different group of friends, so I had time to make some tweaks and improvements. Here’s an eight-player team game:

If you know the Galaxy Trucker board game (which I raved about ages ago) then the ship building mechanics may look slightly familiar. It’s pretty simple – you start with a central tile and add more tiles which build outwards, making sure the connectors match up on all sides. Nothing can do directly in front of a weapon, or directly behind an engine, but that’s about it for building rules. Everyone has the same tiles available at any time, and once a tile is picked a new one spawns for everyone. After 60 seconds it’s all done and you get to use your creation.

At this point you’re all dumped into a deathmatch arena, where you fly your ship around and destroy everyone not on your team. The combat is somewhat inspired by Mechwarrior, with large, slow ships that take a lot of punishment, and each part of the ship can be blown off individually. Firing weapons and boosting uses up energy, so there’s some management involved here as well. Destroy the central component to destroy the whole ship.

Considering I hadn’t actually played it properly during development, it worked really well. After the first session I made the ships a lot less sluggish and added team games, which made the fighting a bit more tactical and less random. I had a few people saying it was the most fun game of the LAN, so there’s definitely potential. It still needs sound, and some non-programmer art, and I’ve got a bunch of things I want to add, but I’m really happy with it so far. I should really think of a name…