I thought I might provide a bit of info about our development process and how we came to develop Twelve. I have been in constant contact with Michael (programmer) and unfortunately he won't be able to write many if any blog posts at all because he's too busy actually working on Twelve.
Twelve started out as an idea for a multiplayer space shooter two years ago in 2013. Michael had started coding a long time ago and by then we were already coming up with wild video game ideas, little did we know, video game development is very difficult. We had definitely already tried and failed to make other games, we were simply too inexperienced and never planned ahead. Twelve seemed like a relatively simple concept, a pixel art style and simple mouse controls with thrilling competitive multiplayer action. That was the problem though, multiplayer. From what I understand (as someone who never codes), networking is a very difficult task, not to mention the cost of servers involved. We created 10 different ship drawings and drew planets and asteroids. All we did was make the ship fly around and shoot, and then Michael lost interest.
Since then we've attempted even more projects, not all games, but when they were games I would gladly provide the artwork needed. We've even experimented with mobile applications, and earlier this year had actually published our very first game on the google play store. It was a very simple game that had tons of art and very little gameplay, but we finished it and published it and that was the most important part. Now I'll refrain from actually naming it for fear of being associated with that (monstrosity of a) game. Though we may come back to mobile games in the future, our focus turned to one or two other projects and ideas before Twelve again crossed our minds.
The issue on our previous attempts was always that our games didn't feel fun, and that is why Twelve is different than those failed projects. Michael had decided to use the same old ship designs from the original attempt and make a very simple functioning demo, where all you could do was fly around and shoot an enemy ship. This got him thinking about computer artificial intelligence, and how he was going to code NPCs, which, with greater experience and skill than before, he accomplished quite well. This new AI allowed the game to feel fun, the player controls a ship with their mouse and clicked to shoot, and the AI's behaviour allowed for a great experience.
Since we finally had a small bit of fundamental gameplay done that actually felt fun, we decided to move the project forwards, but this time we wanted to finish it more than ever. We both knew that we needed to make a plan in order to organize our ideas and make our project doable. These projects always seem to be much more difficult to complete than previously anticipated, largely due to our overlooking details that should not have been forgotten.
This time we set more limits to our vision, and even though it's all great and wonderful to have crazy ideas and big dreams, when it comes to development it's better to take it one step at a time. So we decided to limit our game to singleplayer only, and attempt to make good use of our fun gameplay mechanic while figuring out what kind of game we wanted. When we saw that we could make our AI just as skilled or even more so than the player, then came the idea of having them be on some sort of "even ground". Quickly we formulated the concept of and open world game, then we decided this would fit well in a conquest styled game. We wanted to make the enemy ships as alive as the player is, and so the concept of territory control was a perfect way of implementing this.
We decided to have 12 different races that were all disputing over territory, each owning a part of the universe and each capable of growing their territory. The NPC races will automatically capture each others' sectors at random intervalls, each time with certain odds of success depending on multiple variables.
We are now around 2 months into development, which we're hoping to get through greenlight on Steam. And we're very excited to have a very fun game that we didn't immediately give up on. We now have a team member making music and another for additional design input. The music so far is phenomenal and the game details have been thoroughly thought out, and we still plan on adding more.
Stay tuned for the eventual release of Twelve on Steam.
-Brendan
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