Fangorodrim

[djcityscapes]

Here's a little game I've been fooling around with in my spare time. This is a screenshot of my ship as it comes to the rescue of the Frenlees fleet getting stomped on by alien scum:


Download link:
Fangorodrim (11 megs)

1. You win by colonizing all of the sectors.
2. Should take about an hour to win on medium map and normal difficulty.
3. Tested on Win XP, Vista, Win 7 systems.
4. There's nothing to install, just unzip the file and double-click the exe.
5. Freeware single-player game.

This is a hobby project in progress. I'm open to change requests. Currently working on Trade Ports and Resource Zones.

Known issues: if you save a game while your factory is making a ship, the ship (and your money) is gone when you load that game.

[jdarling]

Downloading now to check it out, looks interesting from the screenshot.

[WILL]

Looks cool. How long have you been working on this game?

[djcityscapes]

2 or 3 months.

[jdarling]

Got a chance to play with it a little bit last night. Must say, it's A LOT harder than it looks. Overall solid idea and a nice combination of themes.

Some things I found a bit disturbing:
1) The controls, there are a LOT of them. IMHO too many for this type of game, a simple click and kill approach would have sufficed.
2) No tutorial I know, and I'm as guilty as anyone, its still in dev, but this is a must for this type of game.
3) Death to newbies, seriously I think I died 4 or 5 times before I figured out how to get warp and build ships Could be fixed with #2

Other than that, fun game and I really enjoyed playing around with it. Then again, I like the building type games.

- Jeremy

[djcityscapes]

Thanks for playing it! Btw, there is a tutorial in the main directory: _Turorial.rtf. I need to integrate that with the game menu, but I'm waiting until I figure out how to smooth out the in-game font. Another thing not explained very well is the ; key which fires all guns. Otherwise, don't know what else I can do to cut down on keys. WASD is standard keyboard movement.

[jdarling]

If I get some time I'll take a read through the tutorial. On the game play and controls, I got the feeling I was playing Starcraft or Warcraft where I would give a concept of what I wanted a unit to do rather than directly controlling a unit. Could be interesting to have a combination of both where you could setup a unit to perform a certain task and still directly control a specific unit as well.

This may be what you have in place, but I haven't figured it out yet

- Jeremy

[djcityscapes]

The only unit you control is the mothership. The formation editor lets you decide how your fleet is deployed. Everything else is automated.

[Galfar]

Nice game, I just finished it (on easy difficulty only though).

Are you planning to have some victory screen with various scores etc?
Currently there's just "You saved the galaxy!" label in the top corner
and the game seems to go on.

Also allowing to change the size of the window would be nice (not just small window/fullscreen options).

And maybe more levels of Logistics research? I've built fixer ships in visited sectors to repair
defense drones when my mothership was away, but later I've hit max ships limit and have to finish the game
with just 2 ships in the mothership's formation.

[djcityscapes]

Thanks for the feedback, Galfar! You raise some valid points. A nice victory screen is on my list (waiting for my artist to finish it). I hadn't thought of various window sizes.

The 8-point max logistics is a hard limit to force the player to decide between offense and maintenance. How about if 2 Fixer ships = 1 logistic point? That way, you could have 8 Fixers and 4 attack ships in your formation. Or 6 attack ships and 4 Fixers... you get the idea. Let me know what you think of that compromise.

Another item on my list is a "scuttle" option for buildings and ships.