If someone had told me that they could make an addicting game out of progress bars, I wouldn’t have believed them. That is… Until I ran into “Starfleet Commander” on Facebook.

Blow Away the Opposition in Starfleet Commander

In Starfleet Commander, you enter the universe on a small outpost in a large galaxy.  You have a small amount of Ore, Crystal and Hydrogen to build up a massive space empire and armada.  Unlike games like Mafia Wars or Castle Age, everything in Starfleet Commander happens in real-time.  Building your first levels of Ore Mines and Power Stations takes only minutes.  In later levels, it takes hours, and sometimes days to build things.  So for a lot of the time, you will be seeing a bunch of progress bars across your screen.

Is it done yet?

Yet, this is what makes the game incredibly compelling.  After a few levels of being immune in “newbie” status, you are thrown into a pretty cutthroat world.  Once you are out of newbie status, anyone can attack you and steal your resources, and harvest the remains of your fleet from orbit.

I started the game with a friend of mine who was unlucky enough to live close to an incredibly aggressive player named “Caesar.”  That player plundered most of his resources from neighbors who happened to be weaker than him.  This sparked a massive arms race which also led to an alliance formed by many players disgruntled with becoming a feeding ground.

So, these progress bars become everything – how fast your fleets can move, do raids against other players, or how fast it takes to research technologies or construct buildings that are necessary for you to climb the tech tree.  And for some strange reason, organizing fleets, transporting goods among colonies, and arranging the flow of traffic becomes incredibly compelling.

Maybe I should work for Air Traffic Control

Now, the monetization of this game is fairly light compared to the Zynga games of Mafia Wars and Farmville because you can really only buy technologies or buildings with in-game credits. So there is a limited number of places a person could “buy” their way to the top. And I have to admit, I have been tempted more than once to swipe my credit card or to take these surveys or offer deals on in their store to get ahead in the game.

However, recent news has been showing that these games are full of scam-ridden surveys and offers.

To be fair to Blue Frog Gaming who created Starfleet Commander, they aren’t part of this massive class action lawsuit against Zynga. But if anyone is considering putting money into these games, be really careful. I personally would give money directly to the companies for credits because their games are just that much fun.

And to be honest, Starfleet Commander did contribute to my insomnia.

If anyone tries Starfleet Commander out and wants an alliance to join, look up my alliance – “Fading Suns“.

Danc at Lost Garden wrote a great article asking “What is your game design style?”

I am unabashedly a “Copycat.” I honestly don’t believe in seeking innovation or originality.

This may come as a shock because I am also through-and-through indie but I believe that the the constant search for something “new and innovative” in game design is a fruitless quest. In fact, we already have another medium that shows us what the constant drive for that ambiguous “something new” leads us – the Modern Art Industry.

And these are the pieces they come up with:

"Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp

The endless seeking of something new and innovative tends to be a fruitless search that ends up “in the toilet.”  Originality and innovation comes when you least expect it.  It cannot be forced.  It comes from mastering and understanding the craft first.   Then with proper understanding of the craft, are you truly free to express something the world has never seen before.

"Le Ravissement de Psyche" by William Bouguereau

I believe in classical training.  Imitation and mastery – buidling upon the knowledge and experience garnered by the giants that have come before you.  Only then are you truly free to express something new.

As I’m coming close to finishing up this project, I have to admit there have been a number of times I’ve almost completely given up.  The self-doubt in my head has often filled me with thoughts from “You don’t have enough time” to “The game isn’t fun enough” to prevent me from finishing – among some other issues such as some massive deadlines at work that have kept me weekends and late into the evening and some time that friends have needed.  But I cannot thank enough my family who have been supportive of my efforts in completing the game – especially my wife.

Once the contest is over, I will unlock all my private posts about the game as a “post-partum” view of the challenges I have faced in creating the game.  (By the way, I like the term “post-partum” better than “post-mortem.”  It’s more apropos and less morbid.)

Already I feel I’ve had to make a number of compromises to make the game possible within the timeframe I have.  From a technological standpoint, I am very happy with the performance of FreeSpin3D, however, I believe I have pushed it and Flash to its technological limit in terms of processing power and speed for software-only graphical rendering.  I’ve also used a number of mathematical tricks and artistic flair to give the game some polish.  So I am very happy with how the game looks from the artistic standpoint.  So from both an artistic standpoint and a technological standpoint, I am very happy with the results.  Although, from a coding standpoint, I’d love to get a code review with someone to figure out how to reduce the bloat in the Main Document class and to see common strategies and paradigms for creating elegant, modularized scenes and functionality.

My only doubt is gameplay.  “Is this fun?”  And much like most AAA-games, you can have the best technology and some fancy eye-candy graphics, but if the game isn’t fun, then what’s the point?

For now, the point is finishing the game and getting it published.  This is only the beginning and I’ll only get better.