Hey

I've been working on a project that will use the turn based gameplay of X-Com gameplay to create a fresh project. The project won't be an X-Com remake, there are enough of them ongoing, but something more original. The story is simular to X-Com in some ways, there is an alien invasion, but it does have it's own structure.

I've got quite a bit of information in my forums so I won't reel off the whole story here. The basic premise is that there is a WW3 that cripples Earth and destroys borders as they are now. It sees Europe pitted against the US and against China in a 3 way war.

The game starts in 2080 with both factions creating small colonies on opposite sides of Mars and your job is to both protect the colony from sporadic Alien attacks, to manage your colony and expand across the globe, to create mining colonies across the solar system, all with the eventual goal of retaking Earth. You can do this either in competition with or in alliance with the other faction, however the alliance option will be less desirable than you may think. On retaking of Earth, a more important goal will be given that will see the player colonizing many other solar systems around Sol.

Enough ramblings about what I hope the overall project to be, for now I am a realist. I am working on this project alone. As such, I decided the project should be made in two sections: The strategic section and the tactical section. In a way, the strategic section will take over from the Geoscape and the tactical section will be very familiar as the Battlescape. The strategic section will be more about colony management that X-Com's Geoscape, I am using the Championship Manager model for this section, with specific turns for each week ( or month, no decision made yet ) and all being driven by a news/email system feediing the player events.

The part which I will work on first will be the Tactical section of which I think the members of this forum will be interested in. I have spent a few weeks reading through the forums here and I think the members here want something new. As I said here before, why have X-Com in 3D if there is already an X-Com in 2D? Content first I think and so I would like your help.

This doesn't necessarily mean I want loads of programmers, artists, modellers etc. Fans of the series' idea's are what I want most. What really made the game so good? Which things didnt' you like? Which things would your miss if it wasn't included? What things could have been developed further but were missed out? All this information is almost as vital as the work of a modeller, so if you could I would love some people to post some idea's. Modellers and programmers would be very welcome as well

I am currently doing a tech demo that I can mess around with and work out a program structure. This is currently at 0.0.3, my hope is that a basic AI structure can be set up for 0.0.4. The releases so far have been just under a month in frequency, but due to my wish of wanting AI in the next version and having only just released the latest version, it could be a little longer for the next release. I have a programming blog in the forums so you can see what stage I am at in development as well as what I have been doing in the previous week.

The project is open source, the code is released under the GPL License. For everyone's information, the reason I am creating this is to push my own limits, to see what I can achieve. I believe that I have the skills to get this project done on my own, which I think is vitally important as it means with or without help from modellers or programmers the project will be finished. I could still use all the help I can get.

Thanks for your time. Please visit the link in my signature and test out the tech demo.

The website is now at www.spacecolonization.net for anyone interested in following development.