Show HN: Fleet.simgames.io – An “io” game built with dart and flutter
fleet.simgames.io
fleet.simgames.io
As the title says the game is built using pure dart for the servers and dart+flutter for the cross platform client on Android, iOS, and web. The repository is currently 98.7% dart code. After dealing with rewriting a complete code base for Nebulous (native Android /w Java and native iOS /w swift) I decided I would never do that again. Flutter won out over other cross platform tools for 2 reasons: (1) I find Dart more enjoyable to write than any other language I've used and (2) Flutter was quicker for me to deploy 3x starting from 0 knowledge than anything else I tried. I miss the flexibility writing direct openGL code provides but was pleasently surprised by the performance of Skia so far.
The game is inspired by numerous games that I've enjoyed in the past: Privateer 2 / Wing Commander, WoW, Starcraft 2, and most obviously Nebulous which was in turn inspired by Agar.io.
Fleet is a little more PVE focused than Nebulous and encourages grouping up. The core gameplay mechanics are mostly balanced now but anything is subject to change.
* I want an upgrade that is a magnet. It get's boring to collect all the energy orbs or whatever the shiny points are.
* I want an upgrade to auto target the asteroids.
* It is weird how the planets move. Try to use something like the third Kepler's law, so the outer planets move slower than the inner planets. (And in each system, move all of them in the same direction.) [OK, most people would not find this so annoying.]
* Add damage to the star in the center of the orbits of the planets, and If I touch it, I'm dead.
* Give the pirates some personality. Like custom color or shapes.
* Are there super pirates? At some point they are too easy to kill, and planets are too difficult to kill.
* If you are not afraid of the dark side, add some bots, so the universe looks more full.
* Fleets? Can you add some pirates that move in a formation?
You're the second person to mention Kepler haha. In my initial planning the movement was going to be realistically simulated but I quickly realized it would be difficult to tune the movement the way I wanted for gameplay / strategic movement. Doing something that appears less arbitrary than currently would be a good middle ground.
I'm probably not going to add bots. This game is much more pve focused than other io games, and some players are playing for hours in remote sectors alone. That said, I will probably add a couple of drifting "bonus" sectors to attract daring players to a central point.
Pirates get stronger as you move in to the "skull" sectors shown on the map. There is no limit to how strong they get (and how much energy / score they give):
power = max( 1, isInNoobSector ? 1 : game.rand.nextInt(2) + max((1.5 * (max(sector.coord.x.abs(), sector.coord.y.abs()) - Sector.MAX_D_FOR_NOOBS)).round(), 0));
What about "automated orbs collector" that don't attack you, but "steal" the orbs that are floating around? They have defensive weapons, and if you attack one of them near a planet, the planet gets angry and attack you.
What about moons/space stations? (I don't think they will add fun to the game, but the I can't avoid the joke.)
Perhaps increasing the size of the skulls in the map as the power of the pirates increase, will motivate the player to go to the more unsafe area.
For me it's fine that magnetism and vision are in the same upgrade.