itch.io

To be honest I'm not quite sure. I've noticed sound always seem to take up a large chunk of the project, but as to why the .dat format I will have to admit that I actually haven't looked into the details of audio that much.

What I can tell you is that I think the music tracks are quite large, and were uncompressed as .WAV when I added them to the game. The game is made with Game Maker Studio 2, so maybe their audio system turns it into .dat for reason. I do not know!

Thanks for checking out the game!

Hey Cirind, thanks for the interest! This game is and is not in development... It's still under development but it has taken a pretty radical new direction under a different name over at Hostile Domain. I'm slowly working away on it over there if you want to check it out!

This is a very bizarre bug, but I think I've finally killed it now. My last fix was only a 'half fix', and now it should be 'FULL FIXED'. 

I've had it running on 3 or 4 different computers just fine, but looking at the code where you crash this should not be possible... But I think I have fixed it for you now.

If you have the itch.io app it will be a much smaller update for your game, otherwise I'll have to ask you to download and install the game again.

You can just download the game from the store page again for the latest version. Thanks so much for your patience and I really REALLY hope it works for you this time. And do let me know what you think about the game if you get a chance to play it!

Ok luckily it was a simple fix and I've uploaded the new version to itch. I've tested it on two different PCs now and it should be good to go!

Sorry about that, hopefully it's working for you now too.

Oh dear. I think that might be a simple fix but I'm not sure. I'm at my 'day job' the rest of the night but I'll look into it and get back to you as soon as I can.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hey all,

Wanted: Alpha testers!

This game is kind of a 'hands-off' RTS where your units do most if not all of their own fighting and decision making. The main thing you do as the player is choose which ships to build, which levels to travel to and which upgrades to unlock through Research.

Any feedback would be appreciated!

Get the game free Alpha build here: https://reefpirate.itch.io/hostile-domain

Alpha 4.140 change notes:

I managed to screw up the version numbering again... Should be 5.140 according to my own twisted internal logic. Will try to get back on track with next update.

Highlights

• New enemy structures added for Pirates and Drones
• Minor level generation overhaul, mostly as relates to placing enemies and not so much for geography.
• Numerous bug fixes and ui improvements, as usual
• Asteroids are now Orange! Helps distinguish them from ships or structures that have gray colouring.

Full change log:

- Updates to in-game Manual and Tutorial

- Some updates to Ship and Structure descriptions to better explain their roles.

- Fixed bug with Player Faction being inactive when it shouldn't be

- Tuned Mining speed a little bit. Should be faster to 'mine out' an entire level.

- Asteroids are now Orangey-Brown!

- Reworked a lot of the way that mobs are spawned on level generation - Each Faction now has a collection of 'Spawn Cards' depending on what the system level is - Different factions can draw different amounts of cards each level depending on a spawn table. These cards are drawn and placed on asteroid belts to produce ships and structures.

- Added Structure: Pirate Gun Tower, because bad guys get static defenses too.

- Added Structure: AI Cube Gun - Static defense gun tower for Neutral AI faction

- Added Structure: Pirate Space Bar - Spawns some tougher pirates and is built near Pirate Hideouts at system generation. Also a primary target for Pirate Leisure Time.

- Added Structure: AI Data Farm - Does... Nothing at the moment. In the future will be a source for bonus Research if destroyed in sight of the player.

- Tweaks to AI and Pirate spawn cards, and expansion bahaviour during the level.

- Added Pirate Mining contracts on creation of Pirate Hideouts or Pirate Bases. Pirates are not very efficient miners, and enemy factions still don't rely on resources for construction of their ships and structures. But their mining should provide a bit of incentive for the player to disrupt their operations before they consume all the resources....

- Added Pirate spawn cards. Various System levels will now have various amounts of Pirates and Drones fighting each other. In the future I will need to turn off some of the sound effects for non-visible enemies because it gets loud sometimes, even when the player can't see any combat.

- Fix for Tutorial crash

- Several changes to system generation as relates to spawning enemy factions

- Tonnes of bug fixes

- Heaps of UI improvements

- Piles of Balance tweaks

---------------------

Alpha 4.131 change notes:

- Systems spawn Pirate Hideouts and Pirate Builders at system generation, but cannot spawn on player's starting asteroid belt.

- Several changes and improvements to Contract UIs in particular. Brought some of the whole Contract system up to speed with where the rest of the game is at. Still much work to be done here.

- Rebalanced fuel and ammo stats across the board for all ships. Definitely not finished with tweaking these numbers, but fuel and ammo feel a little more reasonable now.

- Added more in-depth 'Leisure Time' system. Ships now have a 'leisure script' that represents their leisure activity preference. When checking for leisure time, ships will first do a Rest if they have not rested recently. If already rested then will perform their preferred leisure activity. (For now this mostly involves drinking, although there are some more 'cultured' ships out there too)

- Several camera fixes. Camera now smoothly jumps from point to point. Still some strange edge cases in there. I honestly still don't know how 25% of my camera system works... This is quite an improvement in the last week or so, down from probably 80% in retrospect

- Player can now click on specific Game Log entries to have the camera zoom to the location. This could be a ship, an asteroid belt, etc. Helpful for giving quick heads-up info to the player about what is happening in the system, and then letting them jump quickly to the point of interest.

- Right-side UI update, mostly changes to the Game Log. It now has its own UI box and a little more space, along with fancy new highlighting technology on mouse-over

- Moved all research data to Faction object instead of the Player object... Still not entirely sure why I wanted to do this but it's now done.

- added Leisure Time to PoliceSquaddie behavior

- Fixed UI positioning of Tutorial

- several savegame fixes: view set correctly on load, player object correctly loads variables now (as in it never actually loaded any local variables before. I have no idea how that worked out for as long as it did), planets save position and asset data properly now, etc.

- Federation Beacon added. Large, expensive, slow-making structure that grants a Research bonus when finished. Can only get 1 bonus per system, and can only construct 1 beacon per system.

- several small tweaks to ship chatter and descriptions during 'Leisure Time', and in general cases too

- added 2 new 'Neutral' drone ships

- made several modifications to ship and structure sprites, made new sprites for neutrals, etc., etc.

- added AI Cube structure for the 'Neutral' AI faction... It's kind of a powerhouse right now. Will be toned down by Alpha. 'Neutral' is becoming a bit of a gag faction name.

- made some small changes to main command scripts, some pirate structures and to the way that pirate AI works and how Pirates and Creeps are generated in the system_generate script

- adjusted global ship accelleration down quite a bit... Looks much better at 4x game speed

- Made move speed inversely proportional to how far the ship needs to steer when doing non-combat moves like Patrol or MoveXY

- yet MORE adjustments to acceleration, steering and ship movement in general. Ships now decelerate to 0 if pointing more than 90 degrees away from target, and steadily goes to full speed as point more towards target. Should be less endless loop-de-loops

- all factions now have a boolean 'active' variable which can be used to turn the AI on or off, and also determines if the faction gets free ship or structure spawns at system generation. All faction objects are now spawned on each map

- Explorers now operate based on nearest unexplored or nearest explored site to scan rather than a random site.

- Explorers play nicer together now, no double counting anything

- Explorers only have 5 tries to scan for Research Sites per belt. If no research found then there's no more trying. Exploration is better described in Game Log.

- UI feature: retired ships now show up with Red buttons to make it obvious what is happening to them.

- Beefed up total minerals in a system a little bit

- removed music again to save space for now

- Several, several balance tweaks

- Several, very many UI fixes/tweaks

- Whoa bug fixes all over the place, both big and small

Thanks for taking the game for a spin!

I think alternative key binds are a great idea, and I'll add some more in the next big update...

As for the instruction manual, I don't want to put too much work into it at this point in time because the game is still changing quite a bit. For example with the new update, some of the tips are already obsolete. I hope to release the update soon and will probably make the 'Manual' less complex rather than more in-depth...

Eg. The manual will probably say something like: 'You can only really do 3 things: Build structures (and build ships from structures), create contracts and conduct research... Experiment and see what happens!' Until things become a little more solidified near the end of development where I'll try to do some proper tutorial/intro levels early in the game.