As you may have noticed, I finally got around to updating the site to reflect the new aims for the Junkship project. Junkship is no longer an attempt to create a hybrid JRPG space opera game. While these types of games will always remain dear to me, they do so in a mostly nostalgic sense as I have found my tastes and interests moving away from these types of games for a number of years now. I think most of the problems I now have with heavily linear ‘cinematic’ experiences can be summed up by this quote from the suspicious developments manifesto

You can make a movie where people have to press the right buttons to see the next scene, but it’s hard, expensive, and spectacularly missing the point. These things count as ‘games’ in the same way that a wheel on a stick once counted as a ‘toy’, and we’ll look back on them with same tragicomic pity.

Maybe I’m just harder to impress these days, but ‘Epic’ storylines and cool cut scenes just don’t do it for me like they did when I was a teenager. Instead these days I’m floored by games that put you inside amazing dynamic worlds and don’t try too hard to tell you a story, instead they allow you to uncover the story as you interact with the world. So in keeping with this Junkship is now about putting you in the shoes of a freelance interplanetary arms dealer in a large procedurally generated solar system full of various planets, asteroids and rival political factions. The arms dealer aspect of it makes it interesting to me for two reasons, first – unlike most space trader type games you’re not a pirate, the goal of the game isn’t to purchase the best ship and fly about blowing people up. Instead you’re the guy designing, testing, and building the weapons, and choosing which pirates you want to sell them to. For me this emphasis on creativity and ingenuity is more compelling than a combat based treadmill to buy better and better stuff so you can blow up more stuff. Think more Tony Stark, and less doom guy.

he second reason is that being an arms dealer brings with it all sorts of interesting moral conundrums. When you are a space pirate, you don’t have much choice in your actions – its kill or be killed. An arms dealer however is in a completely different situation; who you sell your weapons to and why is a personal decision that reflects who you are and what you believe in. It also provides an interesting dilemma in that something you enjoy doing generates misery for many people, so how do you go about justifying those actions?

Obviously things are in the very early stages at the moment, and exactly how I’m going to execute on this vision is still very much unknown. With that said, I’ve largely completed the initial prototyping for the procedural solar system generation, so now its on to designing the weapon design workbench. downloads box2d