I’ve got ~60 page rules document in play testing as a table top PbP game on SpaceBattles and we’ve got ~9 people involved in play testing. You can see the applications for play testing here:
For Phase 2, I want a more simulationist feel with NPC agents operating on the markets, disrupting nations, and having simple AIs to provide something other than player vs. player conflict. I also want to rework the movement system and map to something easily generated in code. I’ve mostly done the map generation. It’s not Stellaris-quality maps but this prototyping is a hobby game, not AAA production. ;)
The main thing I’m looking for is people with practical skills in web development, writing/editing, or 2d art (icons, UI/UX) that also are interested in participating in developing the game mechanics and design. I’m not asking you to develop or make any art at this stage. Its mostly just workshopping my prototype ideas/builds where I do all the work and you just comment and offer game design/mechanical suggestions.
The reason I want practical skills is if you stay interested past the prototyping stage, I’m going to move forward with requests for actual work (i.e. making a variety of system icons instead of my single programmer art image, taking OpenAI generated news articles/diplomatic messages and cleaning them up or scrapping and rewriting them if they don’t work). That said, I don’t think its worth anyone investing serious hours into building stuff when I’m still testing ideas out and may scrap ideas/features based for Phase 2 based on the work required. (i.e. Some ideas I discarded like a proper stellaris style map due to the work required. I went with a much simpler algorithm for generating and UI for displaying the map)
Phase 2 is going to be a hybrid of play-by-post play testing with heavy automation support. I expect reaching this phase to take 12 months from now, the next 3 or so will be me prototyping ideas.
Phase 3 is going to be a proper game beta open to the public. This is going to be taking the lessons learned from Phase 1 & 2, fixing the alpha/game prototype into something playable as a proper PBBG that is also an API game where players can write their own agents. This is probably going to start after 6 months of playtesting of Phase 2 and ironing out the bugs and will take another year or so.
So basically, I’m looking at a 36 month timeline (more due to this being a hobbyist project where I’m not expecting anyone to put in more than 8 hours/week) with the scope being limited to a GSRPG with mostly relatively simple mechanics that can be play tested by hand with reasonable effort. The exception is going to be the NPC agents and map generation systems which are really only testable as code for obvious reasons. (i.e. Generating a 200+ star systems by hand would be hours of work so no point in making that testable by hand)
This is not intended to be a commercially viable project but a passion project for people interested in the Grand Strategy genre. So I’m making the whole project open source, and any money raised is going to expenses for infrastructure & commissioning stuff from the active team members as feature/asset bounties. I don’t expect the income from a Patreon to exceed $100/month so don’t get your hopes up plz.
Discord https://discord.gg/7WYJY9Gd
Just DM Abydon after you join to talk/discuss or just chat in the Phase 2 category. It has all the relevant docummentation/threads linked in appropriate channels in the discord.