The first steps

Hi there!

Welcome on the official SiN blog. This would be my first post and I don't really know where to begin with.

What's SiN?

"Shrouded in Nebulae" (name idea suggested by u/Widmo from Reddit) is upcoming rougelike(-ish) game written in C# and Duality Framework.

SiN is open sourced just as Duality.

(note: I will provide link to SiN code when it's a tiny bit more mature... and when I change the previous project name to the new one officially)

The Backstory

In a world of SiN the only inhabited planet is Eden - though don't let the name mislead you. Eden is ruled by all sorts of mega-corporations that do all kinds of shady things.

That's why you live(d) in mid-secs - the middle sectors of the system, far enough from Eden to enjoy freedom but close enough to actually avoid serious trouble. At least until the corp-rats started to expand their reach.

That's when you sold all your stuff and paid a hefty price to move to outer sectors.

You ended on a small little station cutely called "Little Hell". With no means to survive you took a loan, bought a ship and got to work. The problem is - that loan came from one of the crime bosses in Little Hell and paying it up isn't going to well.

Your ass is going to be hunted down and hanged outside the docks if you don't get your shit together - your only real option is start doing serious jobs for the boss and other folks - which can be simply put "hunt down assholes... like yourself".

That's where the things start - you are a beginning bounty hunter, hitman, smuggler, shadowrunner - whatever gets your bills paid. Hoping that one day you'll be able to get out.

The Core

The game will revolve around few core aspects:

• Simultaneous turn based tactical combat during missions
• Running missions and some management between them
• Reputation system where your actions drag consequences - next missions might be influenced by what you did previously... if you like it or not

Those are the core elements - not the only ones - but probably they will be implemented first and main "fun" will be build on them.

Other notable features will be - a lot of deterministic elements in combat where randomness will steer from "choas" not from "dice rolls for damage" - what I mean is that it's deterministic but there will be an amount of factors at play and they will change depending on the decisions of AI and player.

An example might be when player decides to shoot a "currently" standing enemy. It's deterministic - we already know if we will hit it or not - but since the turn is simultaneous the enemy might move at the same time changing the factors and the result might end up below the required mark to hit (moved behind cover for example).

But... why?

OK - I guess there should be a point where I start to writing about my motivations and so on.

I'm not really a roguelike player which might put people off. This is also a reason why I don't fully commit to make SiN a true classic roguelike - it's because I don't feel I would be able to and... I don't know if I want to. I have a clear idea of what I want to try to put into the game - I'm just not sure it will be "rouglike" enough after that so better under-promise, right?

 

On the other hand there is a lot aesthetics and features of the genre that make a single developer game easier to produce - I don't have neither time, skills nor budget to tackle something  more ambitious.

 

Going into my personal motivations - I always wanted to make games and tell stories - I did wrote a few short stories already though none made it too publishing (a few are still waiting for response from various contests and redactors) but I never made a truly finished game (meaning playable). SiN is my attempt to fix that.

 

Another point is that I always find things missing - on the game market - like I'm never satisfied with games about samurais and feudal Japan and feel "something is missing". A SF "Bounty Hunter" is also something that I felt I wanted to play and didn't feel like anything could scratch that itch in a proper way. Out of these two I chose the SF Bounty Hunter - for now.

 

Most of all I want to finally get ideas out of my head - make them real and share them. I love when people enjoy my stories and SiN is ultimately a story - yes, told by gameplay, immersion and procedurally generated content - but still a kind of story. Though I think that I will have to discover what it really means - by coding the damn thing!