Dec
21

Let’s smash a couple galaxies together to make a game.

When the concept for this game was being developed, I thought a little bit about the back-story, and what kinds of stories existed in games of the same genre. One thing that troubled me, was that we always assume things start from zero when you start a 4X game. I wondered if there was a way to set context between multiple games where you expand. Could there be a start from zero, multiple times, over several games that are played and still linked together into a bigger over-arching campaign? Starting from zero occurs under different kinds of circumstances. It could […]

Razcrux   Game Lore, General Info
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Dec
17

Two steps forward, lightning strikes back

Miroslav was our game’s sole C# Unity programmer at the time, this is now around June of 2014. Before starting the work Miroslav acknowledged that he didn’t have experience making a game of this level of complexity but he assured us he was capable of doing it. To be sure things were going well, I wanted another more experienced developer to review the current code. Miroslav himself also expressed that he would appreciate us adding a more senior person to the team, so that he could ask questions and get guidance. Rob did a bunch of pre-screening and narrowed it […]

Razcrux   General Info, Storyline
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Dec
15

One adventure leads to another

Programming was now underway and as it turns out, multiple projects were happening in parallel now: four to be exact. Miroslav in Serbia was coding GalaCollider, I was continuing to program a side scrolling platform game in Corona SDK with Lua and sprite/levelhelper that I started a year or two prior (but still hadn’t finished), a card game of mine: The Black Rose was about to be run on kickstarter, and a friend / co-designer of mine named Jeremy White here in Santa Barbara (Author of games like: Enemy Coast Ahead) was co-designing with me a new abstract-strategy civil war […]

Razcrux   General Info, Storyline
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Dec
13

Uncertain times followed

Each year at GenCon they have a meet-up for game designers organized by the Game Designer’s Guild, and in this particular year game designers were showing off prototypes to publishers. Emerson and I had a great conversation, and I showed him several of my game prototypes. While our discussions didn’t result in any publication so far, we did decide at the time to try and come up with a game idea together. He knew I had worked as the lead game designer for ShadowEra and suggested we try and design one together. I had just gone through this process with […]

Razcrux   General Info, Storyline
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Dec
12

Core gameplay development

The main game underwent about 12 major revisions over the course of several months of print-and-play playtesting. I live in Santa Barbara and here there is actually a great little community of avid gamers and fellow game designers. 3 people helped playtest the game in this early phase. These people ranged from sci-fi board game lovers of Twilight Emperium, Eclipse, and Android: Netrunner to digital players of Masters of Orion II, StarCraft II and Sins of a Solar Empire. At the time I was also reading several design methodology books. Game Mechanics, Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams and Joris […]

Razcrux   Game Design, Game Play
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Dec
11

Our project begins

Greetings and welcome to the first post of this new developer blog! Please join us as we explore the making of a new game tentatively titled: GalaCollider. Design of the game began in mid 2013 with early concept development and then several iterations of paper-tests. Since this game is inherently a turn-based game, it had to work as a physical game first. As a paper game we couldn’t fully test fog of war rules, but the heart of the game’s phases, combat systems and economy are all available systems we could refine and explore. So what is GalaCollider? Galaxy Collider, or […]

Razcrux   General Info
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