UNION Spaceship Simulator

I have a real vision for UNION. It is a social game, in that it encourages people to interact and work together. It does that by bringing people together to pilot a ship, each person taking one or more stations (Captain, Helm, Engineering, Tactical and Science).

The idea of multiple people commanding a ship is not unique, Dangerous Waters and Artemis Spaceship Simulator are two recent examples, however my implementation of it is. The stations and systems on the ship are designed to be simple, accessible and intuitive but offer enough complexity to allow unique experiences to be created. In short UNION is about creating stories.

The initial version, which I am working on now, will have the base functionality for each station on the ship and PvP multiplayer (with crews/ships on two factions battling it out). When that is ready, in February 2012, I intend to either approach publishers or try to crowd source the funding required to complete UNION.

The game is being built using Unity3d. The majority of the architecture for the game (including networking) is complete, along with state management (including sub-states for the player’s current station and view). I’ve integrated the Jitter Physics engine into Unity, as the default PhysX engine doesn’t play nice with my networking (it has no physics stepping which is required for my client side prediction correction). I am currently developing the multiplayer flight mechanics.

For some screenshots from the development of the game, see my UNION Dropbox gallery.

 

Mark Aherne – Game Design and Development

I started programming at the age of eight, completely by accident. A friend of my father emigrated to the U.S. and left us with his Commodore 64 and books. He had a large science fiction collection and as I was reading through them I found a book on BASIC for the BBC Micro, for kids. It was brilliant, using illustrated characters to describe variables and commands.

My father had shown me how to type code from magazines into the Commadore to produce programs, so creating my own was very exciting. The first thing I made was a game, an interactive text adventure. I liked to write short stories and the idea of creating one that was interactive fascinated me.

From then on every time I got a game I’d try to pull it apart, changing things to see how it affected game. Ultima VII made a massive impression on me, and I spent more time modding it than playing it. I didn’t have any end goal, other than learning and creating. It was then that I knew I wanted to make games.

After Ultima VII was Ultima Online. I played it on the official servers for about a year (I used to have to post cash to the U.S. to pay for my subscription and could only play for an hour a day due to dial-up costs). Then I found out about server emulators; I cancelled my subscription and never looked back. It wasn’t that the player run servers were free, or that the gameplay experience was better, it was because I could change the world. Over the next three years I created helped to create new worlds, stories and features in two different UO player “shards”. It was intoxicating; I could see people use and interact with what I’d created.

As with all good things, UO came to an end and I moved on. I did my Leaving Certificate and tried college for a year, spent some time working and then I opened my own business, a social gaming centre – Wired Gaming. My idea was to use the gaming to bring people together, to create a community, and it worked. Although it was a business all decisions in relation to games and events were done by community vote. I ran the business for over five years, moving it to a bigger premises after three years. In the end the economy went south and disposable cash dried up, so I had to shut up shop. It was a fantastic run though, and a testament to the strength of the community many of our members are still friends today.

I won’t go into many details about Wired Gaming other than the systems. My vision for Wired was to give members the best possible experience and to maintain a level of quality across everything in the business. With that in mind I developed my own account management software for the business, with a client that contained a script driven menu system and member roaming profiles which automatically synced their game settings and save files to the computer (the computers wiped all changes to the file system after a member logged out). Once that was complete I started modding the games that we had to create new experiences or even just to make them easier to use. One example of that is I rewrote the Garry’s Mod menu system to be more user friendly (this was long before Garry’s Mod 10 did something similar), adding macros for common tasks like duplicating and stacking items. I also created a version of GunGame for Call of Duty 4 which was extremely popular, though I never released it into the wild.

After Wired Gaming, in 2010, I went to work for a local start-up called Schools Websites. For them I came up with the concept, designed and developed the “Content Compiler”, which schools use to submit all of their website content online. It was built in such a way that the users were taken through the flow of entering content, ticking items as complete as they went. Once all items were green (complete) they could submit it to us. This saved countless hours in customer support and halved the development time for websites since the content came pre-formatted. I also designed and developed one of their main products, the Student Management System, which is in use by more than 70 Irish primary schools. That system was designed to minimise data entry, with each child being entered only once in the system it could then be carried through each year as a student, with a history of all data kept (you can go back to last year and see the data as it was at that time). It also allows the easy tracking of attendance, year end functions for moving students to their new classes, and custom reports using a report builder.

Schools Websites kept me very busy for a time, but as the projects matured that changed. My game developed itch was returning though, so I started to build prototypes in Unity3d. Out of that came my current game development project, currently titled UNION Spaceship Simulator.