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
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
Good luck with the project.
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.
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.
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.
You can also release the demo on itch.io and Game Jolt for extra exposure.
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.
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!
Will definitely check it out, thanks for posting!