I saw that other people had done some Devlogs so I figured I'd give it a try. I play a lot of Stellaris and have always wanted to make a Sci Fi strategy game (with a much smaller scope, obviously...). So i started to think of a game where your goal is to survive as many "Cycles" around the sun as possible, whilst defending your planets from alien invaders.
I don't really remember which days I worked on what so I'll just go over every feature that has been added to the game so far...
Currency: Two types of currency: energy and resources. Energy is used for station upkeep (and in the future, for station upgrade) and resources are used to build stations (and in the future, repair stations), Planets generate small amounts of both over time. Stations consume energy over time. If you run out of energy, you will not be able to build any more stations, so be careful and make sure to balance your consumption.
Station building: 4 types of space stations that can be built around planets:
Orbital Defense Platform: Short range, high rpm, hitscan laser attack. Fairly cheap to build.
Ballistic Missile Platform: Long range missle attacks. The more expensive option.
Solar Array: Generates energy over time.
Orbital Refinery: Generates resources over time, but far more taxing on energy than other stations.
Enemies: Enemy fleets will spawn in waves at the edge of the sol system, with each wave getting exponetially more difficult (increased spawn rate). Enemies will target a random planet, slowly moving towards it. Once they reach a certain distance they will begin to orbit the planet. Enemies will attack both stations and planets. The two enemies so far are:
Enemy fleet: Squishy and only equipeed with short range lasers.
Enemy carrier fleet: Tankier and equipped with both lasers and long range missiles, but more rare than the standard fleet.
Artstyle: In the game, your essentially playing as a commander commanding the defense of sol via his strategic hologram table. Units like enemy fleets and stations are portrayed as simple geometric shapes, vaguely inspired off of NATO military symbols. I found that this approach to the games artstyle made making assets a lot easier and also makes the game look more visually interesting than simply going for a "realistic" artstyle. The addition that really made the artstyle and presentation of the game click for me was adding a linerenderer to enemy ships that traces out their tragectory. Its super cool seing a bunch of enemy fleets slowly make their way towards your planets and being able to see the tragectory they took.
MVP
So far, I have a gameplay loop that kinda works. The player must carefully balance the amount of defensive stations they have with the amount of energy and resource generators they have. Too many stations consume too much energy, forcing the player to build more solar arrays. However, not enough Orbital Refinery's and the player won't be able to replace the defensive stations they have lost in time. It's not the most compelling strategy gameplay loop but I'm happy that it atleast feels like im making strategic choices when im playing. Their is still a lot of balancing that need to be done. Its hard to find the right spot where neither the player nor enemy are too powerful.