How Universal Conquest has evolved.
Author: Big Chungus,
published 6 months ago,
As we said in prior posts, Universal Conquest was originally just an Earth Based RTS named "Wars of Liberation" that evolved into something far more than what it was back 10-15 years ago.
[img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44247064/89d543dc3c46757a4b21769f6e4f247802bb5849.png[/img]
[i]A really old screenshot from over 10 years ago. A lot has changed, a lot hasn't...[/i]
Originally ground combat was limited to an Earth-like environment and was extremely different from what it is today. Maps were not procedurally generated. They were loaded from bitmaps and processed pixel-to-tile. Originally there was no overmap. We DID however have a huge backstory involving various factions, a sprite sheet that contained a huge amount of units and factions, modern style armies, and so forth. Among some of the factions that were present in this early build of the game included various parodies of real life historical and modern empires. Among these included the Ethiopian Empire, who was supposed to have been taken over by an alien posing as a human which would lead them to become a superpower, a series of parodies of real life historical armies such as the Holy Crusade, medieval crusaders to the near future complete with power armor and tanks, a United States that had split into several different factions like the Confederacy, and the Corporate Alliance, which was a parody of Japanese zaibatsu, that would have 4 corporate armies you could specialize in, and other such things.
[img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44247064/bfbda2e9f36d61d40eac52381aa13533576d607f.png[/img]
[i]Concept art for the solar view.[/i]
The idea for the game itself was nuts. But executing it was another story entirely. We got as far as a working demo before even the team members lost interest and drifted apart. Around 2017, after working for a couple of years as a game developer for another released Steam title, I resurrected the game and ended up rewriting huge portions of the game and doing bit of concept art for what would eventually evolve into Universal Conquest. We had several working names for it, including "Galactic Conquest" - but that was taken. So, the game itself has been known by several different names throughout its history...
[img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44247064/ffa254a9e3abe2ca1cf4d3bc4783591eac29d339.png[/img]
[i]Concept art of the space combat.[/i]
Regardless, after thousands of hours of effort, we're nearing completion.
I was going to release a build for testers over the past couple days, but I ended up getting the flu and being bedridden, haven't had the chance to thoroughly test the next build. I'll try to get on out in the next couple days.
Thanks,
Reptilian Games, LLC