[b]Q) What inspired you to delve into developing video games with space-based civilizations and world building gameplay?[/b] A) A long time ago in another life, I had the idea of developing a RTS game similar to another one released in 2004 (That I shall not remain name or even hint at), and had been a massive fan of one involving desert exiles trying to reach their home-world. I was also playing a game involving little Romans that was released in 2004, had spent 3 weeks straight playing it to forget about an ex-girlfriend I was dating at the time. Needless to say, I played that game so hard that I ended up giving up video games for a while, but it left a definite impression on me. The sequel to the first game was canceled, and I thought at the time that the market was there for a game that was relatively similar to that first game, and I did some sprite sheets for a game like it in high school. The RTS, Wars of Liberation was developed from 2009-2014, and had gotten as far as having working builds and a small (but not very helpful) team assisting me. However I didn't have any marketing, and it didn't nearly get the attention I was hoping, and I ended up shelving it in 2014, especially after getting a job professionally developing games. Around 2015, I worked on an MMORPG that's on Steam that will also remain nameless - but was designed by one of the developers of the expansion pack of another 1997 MMORPG as a spiritual successor. I worked there for 2 1/2 years before financial problems forced me to reallocate work for the federal government. Needless to say, that line of work wasn't very fun or even profitable, and so I eventually moved away from Washington D.C. in 2017/2018 to the state I'm living in currently out West, where I went back to school and got my degree. It was also around this time in late 2018, that one of my coworkers I knew when I was working as a janitor at University ended up telling me that he got abducted by aliens repeatedly, and confessed this to me when UFO's became public knowledge in 2017. Because I am a madman, I told him "Alright, if you're getting abducted by aliens, why don't you go up there and ask them questions every time you get abducted, and then tell me what they say, and I'll implement it as game mechanics in my game". He would end up divulging a wealth of knowledge to me on a whole bunch of interesting things about the universe that seemed rather logical, but at the same time utterly fantastic. Needless to say I ended up turning this stuff into the mechanics of “Universal Conquest” and the game became what it is today, inspired by all the previous events and games as a combination of them. Around the same time, in private, I spent time playing a notable and well-known 4X Grand Strategy game that had come out recently in the last 8 years. I was playing the 1.9 version of it, but became disappointed when they released the 2.0 version as the mechanics had substantially changed. I had become rather enamored with the earlier version of the formerly mentioned game, so instead of doing the logical thing and simply playing the earlier version, I took the earlier build for the RTS I made and ended up reworking it, adding an over-map that turned into an entire procedural generation universe simulation, adding space and ground based combat, allowed feature creep to expand unabated, and it evolved into what you see today. [b]Q) What unique challenges have you encountered while creating a space-based civilization gameplay experience? What are some issues you run into frequently? [/b] A) Frequently I've encountered several issues: This game was started in a language that was initially supposed to be the "next big thing" but has after 10-12 years has become obsolete in ways and become relatively under-utilized except in many cases on (typically old) server clusters. The game itself was written in this language simply because - that's the language everyone was using in 2011 - that was "the future" of programming. Most of the time during development the game has had small performance issues or hiccups; sometimes it throws a tantrum just in attempting to try simulating several thousands of star systems and many hundreds of galaxies all at once, but also in other instances, such as ground combat or even using rendered 2.5D graphics. The outdated library and the runtime themselves have had a number of changes and updates over the years, but ultimately it has been a challenge getting this project to run efficiently on a potato or smaller less capable machines than my own workstation, which it thankfully now does. The game has simply been in development that long that porting it over became several orders of magnitude harder because when I began writing it, Oracle was still a common tool, FLASH was everywhere, and home PCs hadn’t broke 3.5ghz in the mainstream yet, still. Since then, things have changed and become significantly easier to port over and bugfix. The actual generation and overall feature creep hasn't proved to be that much of a problem during development and testing steps, but beta-testing, bug-fixing, and other such things has proved to be a massive time sink to the point that I've had to hire out other people to test the game. Currently we have abut 18-20 testers working weekly on the project, a handful of volunteers, and a few capable Java and C+ programmers. I simply do not have the time to test by myself and repeatedly break the game over thousands of hours in my personal life, and that has required some minor financial investment. It's also one of the reasons it's taken over 10 years to develop. But I haven’t given up during that time, working diligently to create a product that a youthful, more passionate version of me would have swooned over and spent a decade playing, discovering its every secret and exploring every nook and cranny. Technology has marched on over that period of time. Since its inception, the game has been updated and well-maintained throughout the years to run on most recent (10-15 year old) low end and modern systems. What has actually been a problem has been finding the time to dedicate blocks of my schedule to work on this. I spend my time currently pursuing a bachelors/masters of Science degree, I am involved in community outreach and public activism, I have friends and a loving supportive family, all while working another full time development job at either the federal government and sometimes working as a computer programmer to pay the bills, battling the every day problems of life - all endeavors well spent and time well used. It has been a hobby of mine that I have thoroughly enjoyed, but I've spent almost 1/8th of my hypothetical lifespan developing this. If I had managed to secure funding sooner, this could have been done a lot sooner and with much more gusto and aplomb. Hard work is hard, and this game took hard work and dedication from a small team that grew from just myself over a decade ago, to almost 20 people now and rising. That kind of commitment and community doesn't come easily. Nowadays, many publishers tend to go and invoke absolute creative control over a game in an attempt to get it to sell, no matter what the producers and brains behind the project beg them to do or what the intent was. As this is something I've wanted complete creative control over prior to completing the vision, I've avoided a publisher for the most part until I was ready to go public and fully release the game. Once I had a product I was proud of, it became time to seek investors and send out copies of the game. [b]Q) How have you approached world building in universe, specifically in regards to creating immersive, believable environments? How do you plan on balancing realism and fun in your space-based civilization gameplay elements?[/b] A) Firstly, when I say I consulted actual aliens to help me build this game, that wasn't a joke. I was working as a janitor when I was going back to get my bachelors between government jobs and there were two people working there who have had... let's just say 'extraterrestrial encounters'. It was also around this time that the Pentagon had ended up releasing knowledge that they had actually ended up having UFO programs for a number of years, pushed on the back-burner during the wars in the middle east. Upon revelation of this, I had begun discussing with a number of other game developers in the area, and my coworkers, and they revealed this to me during the process of working on the game. Since then, a number of other people have admitted they have been getting abducted, and the most surprising thing about everything they have told me is that – yes, the stories and what they've said about the universe outside Earth has been pretty much the same. In other words, people I know got abducted by aliens, and I used them as a sort of liaison or game of “telephone” to have them go up and talk to them, ask them questions, and then they came back and told me what they said. Some of the stuff was relatively... surprising. I was told things like "Quantum Entanglement can't be revealed because it could create a super-weapon that could destroy the planet", to things like "The most valuable and special thing about planet Earth isn't human beings, but actually the biosphere which is extremely rare..." to more mundane things like seeds, plants and animals are regularly abducted and brought to other planets to form the biospheres of other planets, and so forth. It was all very interesting. Most of the people who had this happen to them are artists of some form, and while I have heard rumors otherwise - they seem more than happy to divulge information about to the universe to other artists such as me. In some ways, this is a presentation of the Universe as I have been told it by people who are either seeing things and very creative, or are straight up being talked to by space aliens who have traveled across the galaxy. Their stories add up, everything they say is relatively similar. I have gotten to the point where I indeed believe on some level that everything they're saying is true, if only for the case that should Grey and Reptilians prove to be not "real", then why do people completely unrelated to each other end up saying similar things describing how the universe is out there? Needless to say, the core concept that this game embodies- that this might be what the universe is actually like, and I built a video game out of it - is fascinating to consider. Obviously the simulation isn't entirely accurate for game-play concerns, for example from what I was told it's relatively hard and takes lots of time to travel to another galaxy, there's fuel for engines and warp drives, and that in reality space ships don't actually work in combat the way I have them portrayed, but there had to be some element of "coolness" I had to include when it came to developing this or it wouldn't have been a fun game to play. [b] Q) What kind of research or inspiration did you draw from when creating the different alien races present in Universal Conquest?[/b] A) Some of it is from existing science fiction, such as long forgotten games that nobody has heard of. A broad range of the content in the game ranges from references to movies, tabletop games, and other more famous games, and even – straight up - the firsthand accounts of my abductee friends. I would ask them to go and draw the beings that they had seen, which I would then redraw to the best of my ability and place into the game as possible player and NPC races. I would then take the time to go through some of the art and concepts, showing them to the abductees, and ask them if they were real enough or not? What surprised me the most was that the people who claimed to be abducted by aliens would often tell me things like, "The snout is longer!" to other claims of things like...well.. seeing aliens from ancient fiction done 30 years ago and telling me that those aliens ripped from them – were real! That someone saw them! That was most shocking concept to me. Even more shocking was the notion that some of them had abducted these men and women or talked to them in person, despite being supposedly entirely fictional. Obviously there were also plenty of creative liberties involved in the process; for example, a number of icons I simply drew freehand in a lesser known MS-paint clone. Some of these I was told were real or looked realistic, also. Others, I was simply told, do not exist or couldn’t be believed. Most of the testers and abductees interviewed were in agreement as to which aliens appeared the most realistic by their accounts, and which ones were not - but I will leave those answers up to time, and allow the player to discover – perhaps in old age when (and if) formal extraterrestrial contact finally occurs publicly, which races that appear in game (potentially) actually exist. [b] Q) Can you tell us more about the resource management mechanics present in the world of Universal Conquest? What will be available for players to do/gather?[/b] A) The one thing I have heard universally from every abductee was the stressing of the importance of natural resources - especially in Earth's biosphere. These creatures, they aren't here for us; they're here for the trees, the animals, the plants, the forests, the DNA in these things. Capitalism as it turns out - otherwise known as the control and access through one form of another of resources - is universal. Every planet in the universe has similar, or the same physical laws, and has to deal with things like - food, fuel, materials, water, shelter, resources, the social dynamics of cities - that sort of thing. Even planets and civilizations evolve in a similar manner. These resources are always growing ever scarcer and rarer. Sometimes, to give one example, to the point where (In my opinion) one of the stupidest thing that humans have ever done was tear down the proverbial gold mines on our planet - forests - and replace them with recycled and wasteful empty buildings. I saw a lot of this growing up in Northern Virginia, and it infuriated me to no end myself to see old growth forest torn down for the sake of housing developments that wouldn't last 20 years before becoming decaying or abandoned. I had a family member who was an abductee, and she had told me that one of the things they had done when she was brought to a jungle planet (apparently the 4th planet of Zeta Rectulii) through a wormhole on a ship, was that instead of tearing down trees there, they had grown desks, walls, chairs that sort of thing by genetically engineering the trees (presumably they had grown from seeds gathered from Earth) to form these things rather than chopping them down and carving them. Animals they had gathered from Earth they had allowed to spread freely on their planet, and they used them as a food source or to harvest some material to trade, the same way we do with sheep or goats or cattle - but in their case it was Mexican Burrowing Toads. Power they had generated by using holes in the ground to drain rainwater, after which gravity would spin a turbine - and that's how they would generate electricity. With all of this in mind, I developed a resource and material gathering system that displays to the players, in units (up to 2-3 billion I think max credits so far) how much Wealth they have, how many Mined Materials they have, and it displays a cap of each in the corner. Each planet has their own limited pool of available materials to trade at the start, and these materials fluctuate with population size and depending on the amount of farming/mining you do, and things like nuclear events, solar storms, and tsunamis can also effect them at present (as a few examples, there are many more.) In a literal sense, that is why barren planets in the game do not give you as many resources as ones with biospheres, because this logic says to me that forests make the Earth extremely wealthy. You can build mines on forests in the game, or construct buildings, but it will immediately turn the tile on the planet into a desert, which will reduce the amount of available resources for the player. Additionally, while agriculture can be done on barren planets, it's also why famine is a huge possibility because planets with stable biospheres are the breadbaskets for the rest of the player's empire. You can construct trade routes to trade food and resources with your barren planets so that they end up being supported by the main planet... and why if you nuke a planet's farms into molten slag, this will decimate not only their economy but cause mass starvation on multiple planets. It's also why barren and desert planet starts are more difficult, despite being far more common overall. [b] Q) How have you balanced the need for player freedom and exploration with a coherent, engaging story-line that doesn’t hand-hold too much? Is there a defined lore to the universe or will it be a sandbox environment for players? [/b] A) Quite honestly, the game was developed as a sandbox along the lines of a certain game involving dwarf colonies. The ultimate goal of the game is to end up either conquering known space, or developing technology so much that they become effectively invincible, and win the game. That's one possible outcome. In truth, there is no needed ending to it, but there is some story to it. The date of the game is a few hundred thousand years in the future. In the game's lore, a whole history of science fiction exists, which admittedly isn't revealed enough at release. But effectively, in the game's backstory the oppressive human-supremacist galactic empire in the Milky Way Galaxy was overthrown tens of thousands of years ago, and the alliance of aliens and humans that overthrew it, spread across the universe, leading to the simulation you see. I had been a massive fan of not just a certain 3D space sim involving a mothership transiting the M81 Galaxy, but also of another well known game involving a common tabletop game turned into an RTS released in 2004, involving demons and space marines and a godlike emperor that was and is overwhelmingly negative and I thought - "What if there was a good ending to that universe?" That's the basis of the soon to be hopefully elaborated on lore, to be published in future releases. If the game is successful. [b] Q) What can you tell us about the soundtrack and audio design of Universal Conquest?[/b] A) Initally I had not put much emphasis on the soundtrack. If there's one thing I cannot do, I cannot make good music. And believe me, I have tried. I initially had gone around and used a specific and common music library that's used in YouTube videos frequently in an attempt to sound similar to old RTS games, but it wasn't to be. When the game was known as Wars of Liberation - I had at one point hired a guy who made trap music to try to do the soundtrack, and what I got was definitely cool, it wasn't the atmosphere I wanted. Needless to say the soundtrack consisted of the YouTube library for a time, until I met a friend who lived in the area I knew personally who also developed games, and I will shamelessly plug his game CTHON as the epitome of the "Lost Gamemaker Games" seen in the meme. It's a fabulous game, and I had helped him debug some of the issues on one occasion. Needless to say he knew a guy known as Burning Mir who does soundtracks for film productions in Belgium and he was more than happy to donate his time to developing the synth sci-fi influenced soundtrack that is present in the game today. The man is an absolute master when it comes to music, and I'm eternally grateful he was able to donate his time to develop the soundtrack for “Universal Conquest”. As for the audio design, it's more mundane in most cases. Some are simply public domain stuff I ripped off of FreeSound. Among some of the more interesting sounds are that one of the ship alarms is actually the seatbelt alarm on my 1994 Chevy Z28 Camaro going off, transformed with audio. Another is a good number of the explosion sounds are actually me slamming the door to the same car while in a parking garage visiting friends at the University of Virginia, which I recorded with my phone. The voice acting itself is mostly me transformed in various ways, but at one point I had hired a guy to do various foreign accents for when the game was simply an Earth-based RTS - and they were absolutely hilarious and he was great at it - but I couldn't use them after the project collapsed initally and I ended up letting feature creep turn it into a entire universe simulation. Admittedly the game itself sounds rather... chaotic at times, but that's something I want to improve in future releases. [b] Q) How do you plan on incorporating expansion content into your video game while maintaining continuity and balance with the original game? What kind of post-release support and updates can players expect from your video game?[/b] A) Most of the game is going to be published as free updates over the course of the next few years. We have a skeleton of a roadmap planned, a list of features we wanna add, and it grows every day. There's a whole metric s**t-ton of features I plan on adding (provided the game is successful) once we're done with release, up to and including a time travel mechanic as one example of future ideas. Others include other dimensions that the player can visit, wormhole gates, stargates, superweapons, GPT integration to the AI negotiations, really big units, megastructures (such as Dyson Spheres) and a number of ideas and feedback I've got from testers. The Sky is the limit here, that's the advantage of developing an engine from scratch is you can essentially do anything with it. Eventually, after a period of time, I do also plan on doing expansion content in the form of DLC for the game - but it won't be required for the vast majority of features. Things like additional factions, units, mods, variants for the in-game races, all will be added at some point in the future as DLC. There may also be free achievements, player cosmetics, decorations for your homeworld, faction ship colors and other such cosmetics, optional sidequests, random dialog, branching quest-trees, new weapons, dungeons, and faction expansions in the future, if people can’t get enough of the stuff. Way way way further down the road when the game is completely dead in a few years, I'll probably release the source code so that it can be adapted for future operating systems or expanded upon independently. Definitely under whatever version of GNU General Public License there is then, as I'm a massive supporter of free software and free information in general. [b] Q) What tools and software do you use in the development process of making the game? Will those systems be available for players to easily mod in their own DLC in the future? [/b] A) There will be mod support upon release, and a tool to upload it to the Steam Workshop, or alternately having a mod in the mod folder for downloads from other sources. Ultimately, how this will work is simply having a folder by which any of the data files, textures, art, sounds, music, etc. can be replaced, and instead of checking the internal /data/ directory, it will pull the replacement file from that mod directory. As this will lead to conflicts with multiple mods, I am going to enforce two things: 1) If you are releasing a mod, and you have problems with someone else modifying it (without good reason), or you try to claim copyright over something you're doing but at the same time make your mod incompatible purposefully to where you otherwise push other mod-makers out, I'm going to ban you from the workshop. If you reupload work that belongs to someone else also, or attempt to bully other mod creators to make assets for you and then you claim them as your own, I will remove you from my platform. There will be moderation tools availabel, and a support email will be setup to talk to admins on the workshop. 2) This will be dealt with on an individual basis. The reason being is that I have seen this happen on other games I play where someone will write intentionally malicious programs, or people will take and expand their mod and make it compatible into Steam app names of other games, or they’ll even put something executable in script files that bans certain Steam ID's from using it by enacting hacks of some kind, or they troll other mod-makers who expanded on it because someone took your mod and made a different slightly better version, forcing people to stop using your version by spamming multiple uploads. I'm not going to tolerate any abusive stuff like that at all without consent. Granted you have copyright over your own work I feel, but I don't have to allow it on the Steam workshop page for MY GAME if you abuse your copyright because someone else before you made a comparable version with another mod pack. This is on an individual basis, but it's not up for debate. Don’t steal from others or misuse the workshop or you will not use the workshop again. 3) I'm implementing a priority versioning system where if you whitelist other files in other mods into a text file in your directory, it will load another person's file instead of yours. If I see people abusing this on the steam workshop, I will attempt to directly contact you and if you do not comply - I will ban the offensive mod for it. That means no reuploads, no spam, no bad asset libraries, no hacky work, you need to check for errors, etc. Regardless of all that, mods have been a long planned feature, and that's why the game's data isn't thrown into some large file for the purposes of saving space. I learned how to program myself from editing .ini files from other games, and that lead me down the career of software development I have today. In that sense, I want to inspire other people to code, and if I can do that by allowing fans of the game to go and modify the game to their hearts content - go for it! [b] Q) What has been the single biggest overall challenge you've faced so far in developing Universal Conquest?[/b] A) Recently? Staying motivated to finish this project. It's a lot of work, call it a labor of love. It's been a decade I've been working on it. There's a few hundred thousand lines of code in it, and it takes up a ton of time and energy to get this finished. If you can believe it, all that effort went into a game that clears a little less than 2GB of space. AS far as Technically challenging things? The hardest technical challenge for me was getting satisfying art that appealed to a broad user base, getting it all to render cleanly, and receiving corrective feedback without a team, at first. What was Hardest Overall? Probably one of those three. Historically the problem arose from getting the many different systems working together, from terrain generation, to ground combat, and so forth. Also debugging has been a real pain. Finally, saving and loading has always been a massive effort for the game engine. Any time any change occurs to one of the in-game entities, I have to redo the save system entirely to compensate. For this reason, right now, saves are locked and are not forwards compatible between updates (but this WILL change at launch). This is a problem as whenever the save/load system changes, the save file changes. And the save-files in binary at this time - at one point I attempted to get it to work in JSON but the save-file ended up being too large - several gigs! As of right now, that's the biggest CURRENT technical challenge, and it's likely that initial versions will end up requiring someone to start another save file each time I update the game in its early post-release phases. This should be rectified soon, if not at 1.0, then before 1.1. In future releases, this will be backwards compatible, but it has been very frustrating at this moment as every time we have changed it we have had to restart our long-term saves during development, and backing them up often took an hour at a time. This might be alright for initial release for a week or two, but we will have to have some form of backwards comparability in the future. [b] Q) What kind of multiplayer options and social features can players expect? Is PVP planned at any point or co-streaming the game?[/b] A) Yes, multiplayer is planned, along with PVE. It will not be ready for release. We at one point had a halfway working version of multiplayer that worked but would crash frequently, and the code for that is still mostly there. Technical challenges included sharing some of the details such as level generation between clients and server - and yes, that is the only way we've been able to get that to work, currently. One thing we might do is cut corners and do a sort of "hot swap" release of multiplayer. That is to say, I will disable the code now, write it into a future update, and iterate on it till its ready in a basic state. Some of its features will include drop-in/drop out world joining, roaming with friends, PvE combat in a party or an an enemy faction, and space battles reminiscent of FTL with you and your friends vs the vast majority of aliens. That kind of system is easily doable, quickly deploy-able, and especially with the Steam interface, will probably be the fastest route to allow multiple online players in a session. That will probably come the next release after initial, or - if it is requested repeatedly - in initial release, as it already has the skeletons of a netcode, I just have to finish it. The BIGGEST problem arises when it comes to doing space/ground combat as that is already played in real time in engine, and design decisions have to be made as to how that's going to work out later in a PvP/shared setting. There's no decent way of writing that as two people/player NPCs cannot share the screen at the same time on a LAN or server/client connection. If anyone has any suggestions on how to do a hot-swap RTS effectively, let me know. [b]Q) How does the player's relationship with their faction or civilization affect the gameplay and story outcomes of Universal Conquest?[/b] A) As of right now, the main interaction is controlling your resident population. This can be done via several means, but the primary means is by buulding structures that house them (via the Colony Ships or Starbases), making food, incresing your wealth, controlling unrest, making sure they have enough resources, and ensuring that hostile armies do not attack your planets, all while defending your fleets in intergalactic space from aliens. You’ll be in charge of: Battle Fleets, Bomber Captians, Faction Coups, Civilian Choices, Government systems, Political parties, and other stuff to come later. Rebellions, military coups, separatists, galactic invasions, rare pandemics, natural disasters, building capture, kidnapping, artifact collection, buffing your units, civil wars, all of that is implemented, but relatively untested - and will be expanded on further as the game releases. [b] Q) How did you approach designing the game mechanics and user interface for the best player-made experience?[/b] A) Regarding game mechanics, I have to admit, I had a vision in my head it seems of how the game should play out - even starting out, I imagined the perfect game that I always wanted to play, and simply put it to paper. I had played a number of games similar to this prior, and the actual 4X Grand Strategy/RTS genre has been done a number of times. This is the first time to my knowledge that anyone has ended up creating something like or similar to this, and it is my personal perspective that this is something nobody else has done before, for reasons unknown to me. Yet at the same time, I hope this game is as groundbreaking to you - the player - as it was to me to create it!