Welcome to the openStrato wiki!
This should become the remake of the 1998 PC game "Stratosphere: Conquest of the Skies" that was neat but buggy, a great idea though and good fun to play. Gerd is developing this game to procrastinate his thesis! openStrato will be a 2D or 2.5D, top-down view, design, build and fly your spaceship game.
Some links:
- wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratosphere:_Conquest_of_the_Skies
- buy: http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/stratosphere-conquest-of-the-skies
I found some (quite scary) videos of the old PC Game stratoshere that should be remade here:
For the game principle, it might be nice to mix in some Magic Carpet / Magic Carpet 2 like gameplay: Fly around, hunt down some smaller monsters, scavenge their resources, build a larger flying fortress, kill those evil other overlord monsters, scavenge more resource, even larger fortress, kill those lord-of-the-current-world-other-fortresses!
I'd first like to make a 2.5-D version with sprites only, looking from above with parallax scrolling background. Later, if it's running nicely and somebody is interested we could still do a full-3d version or use different renderers.
Graphics could be used from free space shooter tile sets, maybe also from the open source "Total Annihilation" remakes that use the Spring engine.
I'm really puzzled at the moment, which platform to use. Probably it'll be javascript using WebGL rendering.
Other options would be:
- standard Java, which would make it simple to run on a desktop as well as on Android, maybe using AndEngine (http://www.andengine.org/)
- JavaScript using fancy WebGL, could just be running in a browser - PhoneGap would allow to have it run as a smartphone app.
- Or GWT using GwtGL which would allow to write java code that is compiled down to javascript
- Dart (www.dartlang.org) - compiles to javascript, also for web apps.
- glMatrix seems to be a fast and efficient js matrix/vector implementation: ( https://github.com/toji/gl-matrix ) ( http://glmatrix.net/ ) by Brandon Jones