Research Fleet:Control - Announcement and Tech Preview

Above: A seamless, live scrolling map of Champ de Mars in Paris, France. A green circle indicating an area of NPC control is visible on the bottom of the visible area.

It's been 5 months since the last prototype was released for Weekend Space Command. Since then, I started on an updated base game and re-examined the core game ideas presented. The results so far are shaping up as Research Fleet: Control.

The biggest tech improvement is the visible map. Matching much closer behavior to my older Solar2D games, but powered by Godot to enable drawing full map tiles on demand. This now updates automatically as you move, indicating your position in the center of the screen and detecting all the places nearby. As you move, new tiles are drawn on demand from source data that can be retrieved from PraxisMapper servers, expanding on the single-tile featured in Weekend Space Command. If you don't download the full data, the built-in offline set from WSC is still in place.

The game keeps the ability to detect places of particular types from WSC, and my current plans are to make those interactions for  more game-y and natural as opposed to ordering players around as the WSC prototype did. You'll have suggested places, and NPCs will show up near specific place types and be able to interact in different ways with them.

The game is now public at https://cerol.itch.io/research-fleet-control