Space Game Junkie: Interview With The Last Federation Details!

[x4000]

Original: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2013/11/space-game-junkie-interview-with-last.html

Podcast #38 over at Space Game Junkie has a lot of great information in there about The Last Federation, our next title.  There's only so much information that I've said publicly about the game prior to this podcast, so if you're following this game there's a ton of good stuff in there for you.  We do discuss AI War and other things related to Arcen for the first 20ish minutes of the podcast (or maybe slightly more), but then we get down and detailed about TLF.

What is The Last Federation?  Check out our first sneak preview about it, or our preview discussing simulations in the game.

Enjoy!

[Sounds]

Interesting podcast.

I bought AI War way back in the Impulse days (don't use since GameStop took over) and whilst I wish I was better today at playing AI War, I always have a blast when I do find the time.

SC is my current favourite to go to, but AI War is the one that I plan ahead to set aside several hours of uninterrupted play time. Its a shame I can't do it more often though, it has so much depth that coming back to it is always a surprise. And yeah I still feel like I'm new to the game at only clocking 100+ hours of play.

[Cyborg]

I listened to this podcast. Very nice.

One of those comments made me think you should name the game, The Directive Factor (which is the exact opposite of a prime directive).

Also, I heard you mention that this game has space stations. I have been lobbying for space stations for AI war for quite some time. Please see my planetcracker thread.

As far as the specifics of the game you mentioned, I like everything you said except for the comments about making a shmup minigame. Don't like that idea. Suddenly, an intellectual game becomes twitchy, which is bad.

Things I really liked:
* Being able to view the solar system and see what's going on other planets.
* Having a newsfeed that updates you on the happenings. Actually, this particular part wasn't entirely clear if you were just agreeing with the hosts or if you actually have this implemented. Either way, there needs to be some mechanism of recording the happenings. I would actually like to see all of the news aggregated and saved somewhere as part of my saved game. I like reading stories, and I think I would enjoy reading over the way the game played out. If you don't have a way to see what happened, a lot of the cause-and-effect might be missed, which seems like a central theme to this game.
* Combat sounds fast and exciting, and you mentioned a video coming out. Looking forward to it.

Overall, I enjoyed the interview, and your hosts seemed appropriate to the subject matter. Good job.

[x4000]

Very cool, thanks for the notes.  And you are right on the shmup minigame, I've moved away from really the idea of minigames at all.  The combat graphics are coming along really well, so we should be to the point of screenshots in the next week or two, I think.  I want the first screenshot of those to be as complete as possible, and we're getting there -- I'm really stoked how this looks, actually.

In terms of logs of what has happened and why, those are definitely all over the place in various contexts, and I do also have a desire to be ramping that up even further during the alpha -- I'd like to see graphs, etc, of various things.