Blender Game Engine: Ascent
Ascent allows you to construct your own space stations, and the team behind it has big plans!
Samuel Moxham writes:Hello
For the past three months my team and I have developed a small fun video game in the blender game engine for an assignment.
The assignment brief theme was ‘Imagining the Future’, we had the idea that in the future all humans will eventually need to move from Earth and out to space.So what we created was a small space station building game. You need to support enough people and food to evacuate Earth. The scenario in which Earth must be abandoned is randomly selected.
It’s up to you how you want to balance your space station. Do you want incredible amounts of wealth? Save as many people as you possibly can? Or save a few people to last a very long time in the great unknown.My team and I are extremely proud of what we have created in such a small development window. We hope you enjoy!
Here is our download link, windows only sorry. There are a lot of issues/bugs but hopefully you can overlook them ;) If you get stuck the ‘home’ key will quit the game.My team and I discussed future endeavors now that this assignment is over. We are going to change it into a sandbox game where the player owns a company and must compete to monopolize space. We are going to have an entire universe where you connect planets digitally etc for profit and include a lot of micromanagement and random events.
-Samuel Moxham
Somehow that one spy thing on the bottom left consumes 80 million although its price is 10 million… that seriously endangers my space station construction ;-) Anyway, a nice little game. My first attempt saved 80.000 people and they will survive for 23 years. Maybe that’s long enough to find another way to produce food etc. (Soylent Green?) *g*
Yes, we noticed this mistake directly after committing the final export. It has been fixed. This caused havoc at the presentation day.
Making food is on the to do list. What is currently ‘stock’ will be split into food / water and we will introduce space farms and water filtration. The current stockpile build set will not be filled by default, it will be gradually filled by your farms as reserve.
Good looking game, and a great demo of the BGE.
A couple of things on the intro screen: “Your team is humanities last hope” should be “Your team is humanity’s last hope…”.
The words “…and may God be with all of us.” should probably be reworded to something more universal such as “…and may your God be with you.” to ensure it appeals to a diverse audience.
You are correct in all areas, the dude who wrote the scenarios for the game is Mormon (and apparently not a good speller). I will fix these, thanks for pointing them out.
It’s a cool idea and looks like it has potential, kudos :)
now the bug report :P :
If i go into options there are no options i can change .. not even an option to return to main menu.
When playing the game, initially when i press right mouse button the view jumps in some direction and dragging the mouse around has little effect.
The large solar panel module can be added in such places that causes models to intersect, didn’t notice any other modules with this problem.
And some other suggestion:
There is no tooltip for modules that i cant currently afford, maybe it would be better to always have tooltip available and just gray out all contextual information related to the pointed-at item if it can’t currently be purchased.
After I have selected an item i think sometimes escape would cancel selection, other times it would pause the game.
It’s hard to get modules to snap to their connection points unless the view is close to that point, maybe not a problem if the view can be navigated, maybe its possible to use screen space proximity?
I still had fun playing it a few times, look forward to next update!
Cool concept. Just remember that humans cannot grow in space due to the lack of acceleration in relation to ground. Orbital stations are at the date just theoretical and prone to frictions, so they can´t give us those 9.8 m/s^2. As a result all humans in the future could present many bone deformations, as our bodies are adapted to grow with the acceleration and atmosphere pressure of the earth.