Can we still bring Unstable Space to good port?

I have made burja2's interest know to Joco and GrandpaTrout. Hot4's advice is golden too. It would be immensely helpful to get some pointers from Grandpatrout. He is busy and has moved on, but he always indicated to myself and others that he would be more than willing to lend advice.

Joco still have both the svn server and bug tracker going, so that will be very very helpful if we pick the project back up again. It really is very very close to being 'finished', at least in turn of the Unstable Space goals. However, if Burja wants to lead, than I am willing to take it in different directions.

If anyone else has interest, please post here and let us know.

Hey All!

Glad to see this discussion under way. I have not been by all summer I am sorry to say. I have been doing some volunteer work.

Burja, an Agile trained project manager is just what was needed. Small bites carefully tested is good practice (and my weakpoint was always taking too much!).

As far as completing the "vision" I recommend following your passion. Motivation is the most important thing. However, the basic pattern we were heading towards was to populate the world with stations that spawned ships or fleets that represented miners, spies, war ships, pirates (called fleet operations). The player could change the world by helping build or destroy the stations and fleet operations.

The spawning mechanism is trivial. And some fleet operations can build new stations, so a natural growth mechanism exists. The player just needs a way to get paid for helping or hurting the stations and operations, and you have a pretty dynamic game.

I think USpace just needed some bug fixes to get released. But if I was going to put out another release, I think I would make the player a Navy captain or something combat oriented. And pay bounty for attacking hostile ships and stations. We focused on non-combat roles, and I liked doing that, but then the combat was weak. I think combat should be the first step, and then move out into non-combat games. In the same way that Wing Commander was first, and Privateer was second.

Anyway, just a bit of passing advice. I would be glad to chat if you need some help. POG is a bit of a pain because it lacks structures or objects, but there are tricks for getting what you want done anyway. Glad to discuss them or brainstorm. Cambragol, Joco and Hot4 can find me.

Thanks GT,

Now we have a CO Intent. Time to move on further

We stay in touch

Burja

GrandpaTrout, I am going to go ahead and forward a selection of TS/US documents to burja2, mainly those pertaining to project outlines, goals, design etc. If you have any that you think would help him get a handle on where we left off and where we were going, (I sound assumption as you were the author of pretty much all of them) by all means feel free to forward them to me, or burja2.