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Show HN: A Demo for a Strategy Game

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109 pointsjoegibbs32 comments

This is something that I've been working on on-and-off in my spare time for the last few years. I started in 2020 during Covid trying to do a Mount and Blade style map in UE4, and it grew from there until where it is now - I would just add a feature, then another, until it came together. Since the start of the year I've really been trying to polish it some more.

I've got the full thing planned for a Q3 25 release.

Github release if you don't have Steam: https://github.com/joe-gibbs/fall-of-an-empire-release

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You should clarify if it’s Real-Time Strategy or Turn-Based Tactics. Different audiences.

For sure-- they want different things. But this looks great.

It does look great. But while that warrants an upvote it doesn’t warrant the effort of having to turn on my old machine with Windows on it and going through the effort of installing the demo just to then find out it’s not the kind of strategy I like.

Steam has tags for both kind and that’s how I search. I want the OP to have more people of their intended player base finding and enjoying the game.

Thank you! I just re-read the copy and realised that I'd taken the real-time part for granted and focused on the turn-based element of the battles.

It's real-time, but it's pauseable and the player can change the speed of the game from 1x to 4x. Then when a battle occurs, it has a turn-based system where the two armies attack each other in succession (each turn is 4 days in-game).

I came to write that a preview video could have shown this instead of only pics. Always happy to see another (semi) RTS game though.

I heard that StarCraft Remastered & II is coming to Xbox Game Pass. Wonder if that will stick (or a new generation will hate the brutality of 1v1 ladder).

You are one person?

This is pretty impressive for one person as a hobby in spare time during Covid.

Nice

Congratulations on making it this far.

On Steam, I'd suggest adding a video of some sample play.

Thank you! Yes, unless you're counting the artists who I've hired to do freelance stuff.

I think that it would definitely benefit from a gameplay trailer, so that's something that I'll try to get up in the next few weeks.

Map looks more like total war than mount and blade. It would be great if someone made a total war like game since Creative Assembly imploded trying to make hyenas happen.

I would really like to make a Total War style game after this if it's a success. It's probably something you'd need a few other people on the team to do though - it's at least twice the work. It's also a lot more difficult to write code to handle simulations of 20-40k units and still have the game run at a decent speed.

So far Fall of an Empire has been surprisingly easy to write: everything maps to classic OOP. You have a Unit object and an Army object that extends the Unreal Engine Actor class, the Army has an array of Units, it's got a mesh with animations that it plays based on what it's doing, etc.

But when you're doing large-scale battles like Total War it's totally different. You're trying to do as much as possible on the GPU. You can't have a regular Actor with a regular Skeleton, instead all the soldiers are going to technically be instanced static meshes, with animations that are stored as textures that offset vertices - and that's just the start. It would be very cool to pull it off though.

Cool demo, good job releasing it. What are you hoping to get from demo players?

Feedback mostly - what's wrong with it, what's right, what needs doing differently or should be rebalanced before the main game is out.

Very impressive. Did you create the visuals yourself?

Thanks, I did the landscape materials and some of the UI myself, but the other half of the UI, the models for the trees, the cities (which I'm in the process of revamping) and the armies were all outsourced.

I don't have much to contribute, but the name "Rephsis" seems borderline unpronounceable to me (maybe that's why the empire is crumbling? :P). I don't know whether you had some inspiration behind it, but to me it has a strong "I combined letters until I had a word that looked new" vibe.

The screenshots in the Steam page do look impressive though! As an outsider, I could mistake this for a recent Civ game. Congrats on making it here!

I would assume it's pronounced like ref-sys, which seems not too bad to me.

Unrelated. Does anyone know if there are any strategies coming up that draw from current Russia-Ukriane conflict? Not necessarily the setting but the mechanics of a real world modern armed conflict.

The UI looks great in the screenshots, gives me a warm feeling of 2000-era UIs.

Will definitely check it out, thanks for posting!

This looks very cool. Kind of giving me total war / warhammer vibes. Wishlisted and I'll give the demo a go.

Good luck with the project.

Congrats on making it open source!

was kinda hoping for a open source game when I saw the Github link, but it's just a zip download with an .exe

If you are thinking of open sourcing, it can still be a good idea because users will pay for the convenience of not having to compile/build themselves.

> users will pay for the convenience of not having to compile/build themselves

But another developer could republish the game for half the price, no?

Yeah, that doesn't make sense. Players will pay for your game.

> But another developer could republish the game for half the price, no?

Depends on your license, you can be open source but have a license prohibiting assets usage or even whole code usage. It can be a good way to support mods.

See Barotrauma [0][1] as an example of an open source game that suceeded.

Exerpt from their license :

> The source code, modifications or derivative works can be distributed only if they are intended to be used as a mod for Barotrauma. You are not allowed to create a standalone application, or use the code for commercial purposes or in your own projects. You are not allowed to remove or bypass Steam integration, SteamID authentication or any other DRM measures from the code.

[0] https://github.com/FakeFishGames/Barotrauma

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/602960/Barotrauma/

Most people, I assume like yourself, would just download and build the game for free and not contribute anything back to the project

It’s got a bunch of components and paid libraries that probably wouldn’t let me do that.

I also think that very few people would get any benefit from being open-sourced since it depends on modified Unreal Engine - the project itself and the engine mean that the git repo is over 100GB even when shallow cloned. I could open source the core game systems but they’re almost entirely useless without the rest of everything.

Edit: just thinking of it, I wouldn't be able to distribute the modified UE source either - it's source-available but you need to agree to Epic's licence to get access. Might be possible to only distribute a diff and instructions on which version of the engine to apply it to? In any case it would be a lot of work.

Upload the source on Github, don't link it again to Steam.

Why should I do that apart from some commenter demanding that I do so? If I put in thousands of hours of work and a few thousand dollars into a project, why should I get zero compensation for that and not even be allowed to indirectly benefit?

You said >Github release if you don't have Steam: https://github.com/joe-gibbs/fall-of-an-empire-release

What Github release? You again redirects us to Steam? The description you've put in Github description could've been shared on Steam. You only used Hacker News to self-promote, that's why you shared. Nothing particularly wrong with that but your post came as you meant to open source the game on Github. And like other person said Barotrauma open sourced its game and still sold over 1 million copies....it's all about licensing, nobody will steal your work.

The release is right here: https://github.com/joe-gibbs/fall-of-an-empire-release/relea..., on the right hand side of the linked page.

I said release because it's a release and not the source. I used Github because I have a Github account, and the alternative is either paying for bandwidth yourself or putting it on something like Mediafire that people don't like.

I genuinely thought Github release means release of source code, because when I see Github I see open source. My bad.

You can also release the demo on itch.io and Game Jolt for extra exposure.

This comes across as very rude. I'm not sure if you intended that so I thought you should know.

When someone spends years of their life working on something they get to decide how they release it to the world. They even get to not release it if they want.

I thought he wanted to share the source code with us. Idk why use Github for demo files when you can use Itch.io, Game Jolt, Steam etc. Since this is software engineering forum people would usually share the source code to show off or to teach others game programming. It's all about open source software licensing, nobody will and can take away his work.

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