Welcome to the first Development Diary of the Legacy of the Firstborne Empire® game. Today we're going to be talking about the basics of the game, and what its all about.
The game itself takes place in a generated universe with a hundred galaxies each with a thousand stars. It starts with one race in one empire that has just reached the space faring stage of their society. This empire is known as the Firstborne Empire. Every race and every empire that comes after has its roots in this empire and race.
A key trait about the Firstborne Empire is that it is that they are quick to evolve under the light of alien suns, and so are all of their descendant races. This will eventually lead to new races, which could lead to tensions, which itself would lead to rebellions, schisms, and ideology shifts. These offshoot empires then can try and surpass their progenitors or out right annihilate them.
As technology advances these civilizations will begin creating wonders, engineering new races, wage wars, and making allies, eventually even travelling to new galaxies. However technology doesn't always advanced forward. Sometimes it goes backwards. If it goes backwards too far, the civilization may find itself facing a schism, or worse a technological collapse where they once again become primitives.
Each empire itself has a single main trait, be it 'Militaristic', 'Xenophilic', or 'Business' to name a few. These traits govern how they treat other empires, what relics they can build, and what they spend the most of their time doing. Two special traits are Religious and Anti-God, one is capable of being controlled by the Player, the other can lead to a loss of the game. Both can cause other empires to join their side, or turn each other away from their path. All this leading to Awakened and Corrupted empire sub-traits.
The game itself is turn based, though later editions might be real-time. The main way you control empires is by giving direction to Religious or Awakened Empires throughout the Universe. These commands might be as simple as telling one empire to focus on colonizing a system, or as complex as organizing all controllable empires to focus on one war against a group of Anti-God and Corrupted Empires.
The game also has many planned achievements to earn from various things happening in the universe, such as having a max tech level Anti-God empire in the universe, which I assure you will make the game rather difficult at that point. Loosing the game itself can be rather difficult so an achievement has been made for that as well. Many of these achievements may happen on their own without trying, however through some creative commands, you can do some wild things in the universe.
I mentioned losing the game earlier. In the game you have something called a God Core in each galaxy. These God Cores allow you to command Religious and Awakened Empires in the galaxy it is in. If a Anti-God or Corrupted Empire manages to destroy one, you lose control of that galaxy. Though they can be rebuilt, you have no way of directly causing that to happen. Now if you lose all of your god cores the game is over, you've lost.
As for winning the game. That should not be the main focus of the game, however currently a victory condition does exist and that is to rid the universe of Hearts of the Deceiver which are relics found in three systems per galaxy. However, destroying these can prove problematic if not done by high tech level religious empires, as they can corrupt the most valiant of minds. This is not an non-achievable goal, but it is something that will require lots of work and effort.
The graphics of the game are to be simplistic, since I lack the 3D modeling skills, or even 2D graphic design skills to fully created a good-looking game that is highly detailed. Thus, I am going to make it look as good as I can with the skills I have. We'll talk more about that in a far future Dev Diary when I'm closer to working on the graphics themselves.
Tune in two weeks from now for the next Dev Diary, where I'll go more in-depth detail about Empire Traits and what they can do. Tune in next week as I give my first blog post for Avala: Spirits of the Mindscapes since coming back from my year long break.