Project Information

Project feeds
Code license
GNU Lesser GPL
Content license
Creative Commons 3.0 BY
Labels
rts, go, ion, space, solarflare, planet, future, c, xna, cellularautomata, game, hogeschoolvanamsterdam, gamedesign, netherlands, student

Members

ezra....@gmail.com

4 committers

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I.O.N

This project was started in March of 2010 by students of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam as part of their minor in Game Development.

People

Roland Keesom - Project leader / Game Designer

Ezra Pool - Game Designer / Programmer

Diana - Game Designer / Designer

Michiel van den Anker - Programmer / Software Engineer

Mustafa Qadri - Programmer

Emmet Power - Programmer

Awards

The game has also won several awards.

Golden Dot Awards

ION has been nominated for two Golden Dot Awards and has won the IAM Creative Award.

Game Design Award

The college self also gives out awards to the best projects each year. ION won the second price out of all the games of the minor this year.

Idea

To combine control of areas and resource collection in a real time strategy video-game.

Products

When completed this project will deliver a desktop computer game operating on the Windows platform. Secondly there will be a board-game inspired by the same concepts that make up the former.

Technique

This project will be developed using the XNA framework version 3.1

Design History

From the start we knew we wanted to make a tactical or strategical game. Soon after we settled on making this in the form of a 2D isometric view.

We were asked to develop a board-game alongside the video-game to help in the early design of our gameplay. The traditional board-game Go attracted our attention and we were inspired by the rules of gaining and losing ground in that game. This is where we agreed to employ a mechanism of conquering areas of a map and combining this with traditional mechanisms of RTS (real time strategy) video-games.

Working on the board-game we ended up with a simple form of gameplay that consisted of moving units around the board to capture tiles and fight the enemy's units. Tiles that were surrounded by tiles captured by an enemy player turned over to that enemy player (not unlike Go). After each turn players received credits corresponding to the number of tiles they controlled. These credits were used to buy additional units. (Some things are left out for the sake of simplicity here)

The video-game variant of the board-game is supposed to be a much more enthralling experience, whilst holding on to the simplicity and implicitness of the original. To accomplish this we focussed mainly on the rules and mechanisms that govern the interaction of the friendly and enemy tiles. We set out to implement all sorts of different approached and look for interesting ones; knowingly or unknowingly, we were creating a Cellular Automata of sorts.

Right now we developing something we internally call the "Thunder Strategy" after having tried several others. It means we want to see the tiles as a deck of clouds; not violent but ever-changing. Every so often a thunder-storm appears that unsets the balance. These areas of thunder are more valuable to control and can also be of benefit of caputing the enemy's tiles.

We are also still balancing the combat. We have decided to stick with one type of unit until the need arises for more types.

Victory/Winning Conditions are in development too.