After countless hours the galaxy has been fully populated. Now there are roughly half a million stars in the core all with unique planetary systems. The planets that are colonised all have unique markets, economies and tech levels allowing for an in depth trading game.

A bit more about planets…

Planets have been sorted into 5 categories, terrestrial (like earth), barren (rocky dead worlds), chthonian (harsh firey atmospheres like venus), gas giants (like Jupiter) and ice dwarfs (like Pluto). Only terrestrial planets are colonised. Gas giants are too dangerous to scan. Chthonians can only be scanned with specialised equipment. Ice dwarfs rarely contain any items of interest worth scanning, but you never know…

However trading will only be one aspect of the final game, the core will also feature real time combat, generative mission system, mining, levelling, ship upgrades and planet exploration modules as well. Once all these modules are in place an immersive story arc will be added alongside the free roaming sandbox play that will be playable at any point during your time in the core.

I’m going to put together a decent sized tutorial on GUI setups in Unity as I see its something a lot of people have issues with and I’d like to share how I made mine. Once the games out I’ll post a good tutorial on the subject.

If you’d like to see the full resolution video. You can watch it on my server. Follow this link.

The races in the core’s galaxy have been finalized so here’s the lowdown…
All races fall into one of two groups. Alien or Terran (Human).

Human Races

Serian : Free thinking individualists who believe in fair trading and are bartering experts. Don’t get into a trade war with a serian, you won’t win.

PPC : Government organized group of strict law and order. Capitalist and shrewd they play by the rules and expect everyone else to.

Lera : Nature loving freedom fighters. They have respect for all natural life on their inhabited planets and favour natural evolution over technological advancement. As a result some believe they live happier lives but have poorer economies where money and trade are concerned.

Archovian : Fight first think later is the attitude of the archovian people. They are ruthless and have been forced out of the core systems by the PPC but still occupy much of the galaxy 50+ light years away from Sol / Alpha Centauri. (Half)

Alien Races

Zatek : A race of scavengers who have evolved this way thanks to unfortunate ecological disasters that seem to plague every planet they inhabit.

XaX : Not a lot is known about xax, not even the correct pronounciation, what is known however is they are no ones ally and are believed to be responsible for much of the chaos that happens within the galaxy.

Ridul4 : A race that plays along with the PPC’s rules and maintains a good position in the intergalactic economy. No one is sure of their true agenda as they give away very little. There are theories about the 4 in their name, such as they have established themselves in 3 other galaxies, but no theories have been proven.

Jarachai : Immense psychic abilities mean these aliens are ruthless traders. They are lethal in combat as there awareness means they can predict your moves very efficiently. You’d do well to not get on the wrong side of the jarachai. There relationship is difficult to build and will require constant attention if you want to keep them on your side.

Well it’s been announced that unity plans on supporting the iPad. So what does that mean if you want to begin development now? For “The Core” I’m going with unity for a couple of reasons.
Firstly the announcement implies they are aiming for support as soon as the ipad lands (or very shortly after)
Secondly it’s THE cross platform engine. I can easily make web player builds or full pc/mac releases with minimal code changes.
Finally, Unity iPhone (which Unity iPad will be built into i assume) already supports importing of projects from the free version of unity 2.6 so (with obvious exceptions such as input methods) you can begin prototyping with a very capable engine for free.

So what’s next? Well if you develop in unity 2.6 all you need to really do is set your player window size to 1024×768 and get going.

With iPhone unity being based on a slightly older core this option isn’t available but you can force the game windows aspect ratio to 4:3 and then with some clever layout customization and resizing you should be able to get the game window to exactly 1024×768 (hit the stats button in game view to see what size it is currently)

Here’s my layout:

As you can see, its a bit cramped in there with a 1024×768 sized game view, but its adequate for my needs as most of my projects are code heavy rather than design heavy.

My first potential game will be a space trading / combat game called “The Core” exclusively for the ipad. I chose this platform as the iPhone would possibly have worked but due to the increased screen real estate of the ipad it lent itself to this project much better. Also as the ipad is reminiss of something from star trek it should feel a lot cooler commanding a space ship using this device.

As the ipad is not actually available yet and little is known, so far I will assume the hardware has similar grunt to the iPhone 3gs and will be prototyping based on the limitations of this. We know the screen size is fixed to 1024×768 so I can build mock ups, ui and art to this resolution knowing it will be just fine. I will test areas of the game on the iPhone 3gs for now as I’m counting on performance similarities between the two. (which could be a huge gamble).