Colony: New Strategy Game
Hi!
Ever since Blizzard announced Starcraft 2, I’ve been inspired to make a Sci-Fi strategy game in Flash! And now that day is getting closer. Even though Colony is a relatively small game compared to Sonny 2 I’m trying out a lot of ideas that I haven’t done before. Here are some of the features of the game:
Online Multiplayer
The game can support up to four players (in 2v2 format) but you can also play 1v1 or with/against CPUs. So you can choose whether you want to play co-operatively, competitively, or both 🙂 This is all possible because of Jiggmin’s BRILLIANT Blossom Server system. He’s also been hard at work on the back end of this game as well to make everything runs fast and smoothly. Thanks Jiggmin! Any Flash develops who want to make online games, I recommend you look at Jiggmin’s BlossomServer right away.
High Standards, Low Requirements
As3… rocks. By using it to render vector graphics into bitmap during runtime, we’re able to maintain a low file-size (the game without sound is only about 900kB), but have great looking visuals with no lag at the same time. The game’s highest settings even worked in a Multiplayer game on a computer with 500Mhz processor, and a 56k dial-up modem.
Random Music Generator
Instead of putting one big loop into the game, we’ve cut up the music into loads of little slices that fit together, so the system composes random and original music as you are playing, but it will still sound like one continuos track. I know it’s not a new idea, but I can’t believe that I didn’t think of it before 😀
Interactive AI
When you’re playing on single player mode, you still need a strong partner to survive, so I’ve made you able to communicate to the AI. There are currently five AI personalities, and they all have different strategies and tactics in combat. You can talk to them via the chat, and ask them what they are going to build, or what you think they should do. They will let you know what the biggest threat from the enemy is, and if they are about to form an attack group. You can even ask them personal questions like their name and age 😛
Unit Micro
This time you can actually command any units on the field. You can tell them to fall back, hold position, advance, or charge. There are many different kinds of units, some that do splash damage, some that fly, and some that regenerates its health. You can even have Meditecs behind the line healing your troops! You can even launch missiles from your base to take out a group of bunched up enemy units.
This is scheduled to be released at the end of this month, so watch this space! We just need to clean up on the multiplayer GUI a little, and stress test the servers, then we’re ready 😀 Here is a demo video in the meantime:
Cheers,
Krin
PS: Anyone interested to BETA test for balance and bugs before launch please send an email to me at Krin@ArmorGames.com with the topic “BETA.” You don’t have to write anything else, I’ll just mail you all the info you need.