Iridium

I thought I'd show a little bit about a game project I was involved in during my studies. The game is called "Iridium: Twenty million leagues above the sea", a title inspired by Jules Verne as some of you probably guessed. It was developed in a project course at the Interaction Design Master program at Chalmers University of Technology and the project group consisted of five people; Richard Fredriksson, Robert Krantz, Olof Millberg, Fredrik Wendt and me, Mikael Nilsson. The project has been postponed, probably indefinitely, but I thought I'd talk a bit about it anyway.

The game is set in space in a steampunk environment, which basically means a mix between Victorian era, unbelievable steam contraptions and general science fiction elements. The player takes control of the captain of a space ship and must control his ship and crew in order to make a name for himself by trading and fighting pirates.

The video below shows a bit of the game, especially focused on the GUI which was my main responsibility during the development. The code actually drawing the GUI was written by Olof Millberg and reads the GUI widgets and layouts from tables in Lua-files, much as you use XML layout files when creating GUIs in Android. The GUI was also implemented in Immediate Mode, which basically means that the properties of each widget (size, position, graphics and so on) is defined together with the functionality in the update loop instead of a init phase. I highly recommend anyone interested in GUI coding to check out this video at mollyrocket,com (if you haven't already) and give IMGUI a try.

Since I can't stand listening to my own voice there is no voice-over for the video, but hopefully you will enjoy it anyway. The video shows the layout of the ship the player currently has (as seen in the game) with crew members going around performing their duties and chatting with each-other. The video then focuses on the menus, where the player fiddles a bit with the captain character and then spends some time assigning duties to different crew members during different shifts, to make the ship operate smoothly. You also get a glimpse at the mission interface as well as navigation map. Also take note of the pirate attack in the game (the ship goes all red) and the crews "frantic" actions during it.. of course the captain does what any level-headed commander would do during a crisis: he goes to the salon to drink tea.



Sadly there is no music or sound in the video (so you can't hear the alarm or cannon booms). We used license-free music in the game, but right now I can't find the names of the music creators and so I did not want to post their music without giving them credit.. perhaps I'll find their names later and post a new video.

The video was captured using CamStudio.