Unity Wings of Empire [Devlog]

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic & Morningstar]
Donor
Game Developer
Dec 30, 2017
7,362
18,999
woe_banner_f95zone.gif
Developer: Droid Productions - - - -

With Morningstar: Book of the Fallen finally done, and the New Game+ mode for Love of Magic complete, it's time for me to fully focus on my next game: Wings of Empire is a space opera set in a world where the Roman empire never fell, but clawed its way to space.

Quick view of the opening

Key inspirations for Wings of Empire are epic space-opera novels like David Weber's Honorverse, Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet, CJ Cherryh's Merchanteer Saga and David Drake's Lt Leary, Commanding. I'm also inspired by scifi and anime series, like Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Space Battleship Yamato, Starship Troopers and Battlestar Galactica.

I quite enjoyed making a dev-log for Love of Magic back in the day; figured it might be fun to do one again.

1745038563670.png

Basic technical overview:
It's running on the same basic tech as Love of Magic and Morningstar, a VN engine in Unity, which tries to mimic the user experience of Renpy (save anywhere, rollback, etc) while giving me more freedom in terms of non-VN gameplay and VFX.

1745038762323.png

Like Love of Magic / Morningstar it's a sandbox/AVN inspired by the Persona 4/5 format; a fixed calendar where time is the main currency, and progression is a mix of fixed events (Morning day 9 this event always happens) and open time-slots where you can explore optional events, upgrade your character and chat with the other characters.
astrid.gif arya_casual.gif
Visually it's a mix of fullscreen renders/videoclips and character sprites; rendered in Daz, animated in and then played back realtime.

In addition I'm using UE5 to generate the space cinematics:
(Why UE5, instead of Unity? It's honestly a much prettier engine, which matters for pre-rendered sequences. I didn't want to do it realtime, since that would sharply limit what PCs could play it back properly, and a lot of times it also gets VFX work in AE after I'm done rendering it)

Key challenges
So. What are the key challenges left?

I'm now working on the combat system, inspired by the X-Wing table top game (and more recently, the space combat system of Rogue Trader). It's still very early days for it, though, and a lot of work remains.
1745041422019.png

I also need to get better at the space-based cutscenes; the systems I'm using now will scale to smaller events, but eventually I want combat sequences with a lot of active missiles, etc. For that things to be automated, or I'll die :)

Sigs
I quite like making Sigs (and I ended up making a ton of them for Love of Magic, and a few for Morningstar as well. I'm planning to continue that practice for Wings of Empire.

Valeria.gif Keira.gif Cass.gif

Checking out progress:
Like Love of Magic and Morningstar the game's heading to Steam. If this looked interesting, give it a wishlist to help it do well at launch!

I like to share updates as I make them; latest update can be found on the Development branch of Morningstar: Book of the Fallen.

I also give Steam keys to my games to all / supporters, if you prefer that. Those work even in countries like Germany, which bans porn games on Steam.

As always, this game wouldn't have been possible without the awesome people on my , who kept me sane-ish through the last 6 years of making adult games. Come for the pretty girls, stay for the theorycrafting, history discussions and memes.

Demo:
The first Act (Day 1-17) is now done; about 2 hrs worth of gameplay, and about 40 days worth of sandbox content. You can download it from here:

Win64: - - -
OSX: - - -
Linux: - - -
 
Last edited:
Aug 5, 2017
198
214
Did I miss a patreon update on the combat system? I was out of the loop for a week on discord so I may have, but I don't recognize that screenshot from any of the dev work you've talked about.
 

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic & Morningstar]
Donor
Game Developer
Dec 30, 2017
7,362
18,999
Did I miss a patreon update on the combat system? I was out of the loop for a week on discord so I may have, but I don't recognize that screenshot from any of the dev work you've talked about.
Nah, it's just not playable enough yet to make it public :) I'll do a talk about it next week, when I hopefully get back to making it.
 

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic & Morningstar]
Donor
Game Developer
Dec 30, 2017
7,362
18,999
I was making some sprites for the combat minigame and decided to do a little recording for my . This video clip looks at how I use UE5 for the space-based combat sequences.

 

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic & Morningstar]
Donor
Game Developer
Dec 30, 2017
7,362
18,999

Spent the weekend messing with the tactical combat system. Inspired by X-Wing the table-top game, and Rogue Trader's space-combat, it's shaping up nicely. Next up, I need to start working on the AI.