After last week’s short, cryptic announcement, several of you asked, “Where’s the beef?!” Actually, none of you asked that (sadly, beef-related metaphors have been on the decline), so I will put this in simple, vegan terms: Fred and I have been working on UQM2 full time since Fall of last year. So far it’s just the two of us, with Fred working loooong hours developing a cool new designer-friendly scripting system for gameplay, and me reading old sci-fi, drinking Mai Tais and trying to make something coherent out of almost 30 years of story notes and design sketches.
Our goal is to create a genuine sequel to the game we last worked-on in early 90’s – something that feels like a seamless continuation of your best UQM memories. Selfishly perhaps, we also want to make the game our own way without any bosses, driven only by our own imaginations and that of the UQM community. To that end, we will soon be opening up a forum where the core UQM2 team, volunteers and fans can discuss, debate and collaborate on the new game.
We are making real progress, but we still have a long way to go. We sincerely hope that all of you are up for the journey – it’s going to be a blast!
We did, however, want to give a recap of what we learned and heard last week, which is very, very hard to distill down into a few pithy sentences, but here’s some of what we saw:
Down with the third dimension! Width and height shall reign! Depth in games is an illusion I have attempted to grasp multiple times, resulting in several broken monitors and a bandaged hand. You like 2D! We’re going to ask a question about that this week.
Certain violent species feel melee is the beating heart of the game and we wish to fulfill humanity’s instinctive drive to crush their friends, enemies, and walnuts.
Oh dear. I didn’t like melee at all in SC2. It felt janky and rough, even by the standards of the day. Can’t say I really liked it that much in the Stardock version either. I always thought the heart of SC2 was its story, humour, and exploration leading to more of the first two.
I feel like melee is the heart of the game too. It’s the main gameplay element, and I thought it was excellent back in the day when the game came out in 92. But I agree that it feels clunky now and Stardock version didn’t update it enough to feel smooth.
Combat was never the best part of SC2, but I liked it enough to play just the melee mode for quite a few hours with friends. The biggest problem I ever had was when your keystrokes wouldn’t register because there were a limited number of keys that could be pressed at once!
So combat was fine. But the lander gameplay…? UNIMPEACHABLE.
Yeah, I wouldn’t say I “disliked” the combat exactly (though as with most games there seemed to be far too much of it for my tastes) but I did like the lander phase much more.
The soul of the game was the story/dialogue/world building. The “heart” as in the core gameplay loop was the combat.
I never was much of a SHUMP fan, but the star control combat clicked for me. Though it probably helped that I was in college when SC1 came and had people to challenge in the next room over.
It’s not going to be an easy task to not just replicate the appeal of the SC1/2 combat, but to update it to both a general audience and a fan base that is mostly past it’s prime twitch gameplay years.
