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Author Topic: Battlestation: Harbinger. Sci-fi space exploration game. Release February 24th!  (Read 15194 times)

AdmiralGeezer

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New update:



We're about to release the game on Steam February 24th! Exciting times ahead:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/396480/

Older update:

So. We've been working for a longer time to bring Battlestation: Harbinger to PC. First we succeeded with our small Kickstarter, raising $18 000 of our $10 000 goal:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bugbyte-ludibooster/battlestation-harbinger-extended-edition

Then we rolled our sleeves and started working, we've updated the game with a lot of new content as promised in the Kickstarter. Now, the PC user interface is almost complete.
I decided to make my first let's play ever, it was quite fun actually! You can watch it below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZbdRPOK7xk

The mobile version has been a nice little success for us, and it's still a top paid strategy game on Google Play. Won't be too long now before we release on Steam. Exciting times ahead!

Screenshot of the game on PC:





Join beta test by sending us a message to support@bugbyte.fi and we will send you an invite!

Old post:

Greetings Commander!

This is Admiral Geezer and I'm part of the crew working on a sci-fi space themed game series named Battlestation.

What is Battlestation?



Battlestation is a game series, consisting of mobile and PC games inspired by Babylon 5 and FTL. With every new game being a new story, Battlestation offers a new, fresh experience every time, driven by modern roguelike gameplay. All the features implemented in Battlestation give you many strategic options and a significant depth to the game for you to explore.

We aim to create games that are both very challenging and offer depth through simplicity. Not an easy task by any means but we like to try :) Our games lean more towards hard core gamers and roguelike/roguelite is the name of the game for Battlestation games. Through them we aim to create games that offer tough challenges but also keep the game fresh.

August 13th. The release of Battlestation: Harbinger (Android, iOS, PC) and a Kickstarter for Battlestation: Humanity's Last Hope (PC)

It is my great pleasure to announce that August 13th is a very special day. We have worked hard and it is time to show you what we have accomplished. Two epic Battlestation games; Battlestation: Harbinger (multi-platform) and Battlestation: Humanity’s Last Hope (PC) will be the center of attention.

Battlestation: Humanity's Last Hope (PC) Kickstarting August 13th 2015



A space station simulation roguelike-like strategy game. Inspired by Babylon 5 and Faster Than Light. Immerse yourself in an alternate universe and take command of the newly built Battlestation, designed to be the last defense for earth against oncoming threat. A sci-fi roguelike game with a rich and deep story - welcome to the Battlestation universe!

In a universe with 4 known species and an unknown approaching darkness you are called upon to defend humanity, with its last best hope to survive. The Battlestation. Not only will you be defending against relentless attacks, but you will also lead away missions to investigate derelict ships, to discover new technology, to assist mining outposts, save crew in distress, deal with traps, and other unforeseen events.

Screenshots:


The build screen in Battlestation: Humanity’s Last Hope, equipped with an updated version of the Battlestation.


The build screen for a Battleships. You will be able to build and customize your own ships, defend earth or go explore the surroundings with them.


Current research screen.


And a screenshot of actual battle.

Battlestation: Harbinger. An epic space roguelike released August 13th for Android and iOS and later for PC.



Battlestation: Harbinger is a mix of turn based star map strategy and real-time space battles. Take command of a space ship in this epic sci-fi space adventure game, combining the game play of games like Faster Than Light, Out There and other space operas. Experience the intense atmosphere of adventuring deep into space and trying to save the human race.

Battlestation: Harbinger is a premium game (No In-Apps) released at a price of $3.99.

Screenshots:


The Battlestation: Harbinger build screen. Red slots for big cannons, blue slots for small point defense cannons and facilities. Green round slots for hangar bays.


The mission screen. There are different missions for you to complete. Escort friendly ships to safety, destroy enemy ships, clear out sectors and so on. The roguelike features make every game its own, so you will always have different set ups of missions in a game.


The star map screen, which you use to travel to new sectors. The mini map to the right shows what your scanners reveal from the sectors. The bigger the red triangles are, the bigger enemy ships will greet you there! You are able to choose the section within a sector to jump into, giving you more strategical choices in your attack approach.


An epic battle between Humans and Trolgars taking place. Battlestation: Harbinger has real-time battles with a pause mechanism. You will be able to change the formation of your fleet, move them individually, target all of your fleets cannons on a certain ship, order your fighter squadrons to attack and so on.

Battlestation: Harbinger is on Steam Greenlight and if this is up your alley we would appreciate a vote immensely :) We have made it easy for you to vote through our home page, where you can open the campaign page directly in Steam:

The base for Battlestation is here: http://battlestation.fi

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BattlestationGame
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BattlestationPC

Hope you like Battlestation so far! Would be great to hear your opinions and I'm here to answer any and all of your questions.
« Last Edit: February 17, 2016, 11:28:14 am by AdmiralGeezer »
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Shadowgandor

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Looks good! Voted yes on steam. Hope the result will be as fun as this looks :)
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Sinistar

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Watched both videos, looks quite neat, yeah. I'll keep an eye on this.

One question for the second game - game screen with battlestation showed combat being just top-down. Any plans for encirclement scenarios, fighting enemies coming from all sides and all that? Then again, this COULD make the action a bit hectic and screen crowded, so probably best as it is. 

Also, didn't check all the videos you have on YouTube, but I hope we see some more boarding action! It's the part I'm extra interested in, at least. :)
Anyways, good luck on your endeavors!
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Darkmere

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Somebody mentioned the first one in the Babylon 5 subreddit a while back. Still posting to still watch.
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And then, they will be weaponized. Like everything in this game, from kittens to babies, everything is a potential device of murder.
So if baseless speculation is all we have, we might as well treat it like fact.

AdmiralGeezer

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Watched both videos, looks quite neat, yeah. I'll keep an eye on this.

One question for the second game - game screen with battlestation showed combat being just top-down. Any plans for encirclement scenarios, fighting enemies coming from all sides and all that? Then again, this COULD make the action a bit hectic and screen crowded, so probably best as it is. 

Also, didn't check all the videos you have on YouTube, but I hope we see some more boarding action! It's the part I'm extra interested in, at least. :)
Anyways, good luck on your endeavors!

The first game (Battlestation: Humanity's Last Hope) is done in 3D. The second game (Battlestation: Harbinger) is made with pixel graphics in 2D. Harbinger does have some occasions where enemies jump a little bit from everywhere, and the possibility for them to come from any side is there. We have a mechanisms where you can jump into a certain area of a sector, and the enemies can do the same. So if there is one ship a bit out of the pack from the rest you can jump in and take it out, then jump out. But then you are probably making the pack angry, and they will be coming after you!

Yes that is all we have on the boarding mechanism right now, but the plan is clear. Blueprints of ships and scannery type of glowing balls for own marines and spotted enemies. Combine this with a set of commands you can give your squads and it will be cool!
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Damiac

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Hmm, surprised nobody got this out of the way yet.  I've never done one of these, so I guess I'll take a crack at it:

Ahem! I see you only registered 10 days ago, and the Bay 12 community don't take kindly to your type... meaning devs with new games, just up and registering only to promote their new game... round here.

So uh... since you already did that...  uh... something!  Yeah!   

At the very least, keep responding to questions here so it doesn't look like you just registered an account to throw up an ad for your game and never looked back. 

With that out of the way, this game looks somewhat interesting.  Any idea when we might see a playable demo? 
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Retropunch

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Hmm, surprised nobody got this out of the way yet.  I've never done one of these, so I guess I'll take a crack at it:

Ahem! I see you only registered 10 days ago, and the Bay 12 community don't take kindly to your type... meaning devs with new games, just up and registering only to promote their new game... round here.

So uh... since you already did that...  uh... something!  Yeah!   

At the very least, keep responding to questions here so it doesn't look like you just registered an account to throw up an ad for your game and never looked back. 

With that out of the way, this game looks somewhat interesting.  Any idea when we might see a playable demo?

RABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLE!!!! Congratulations on your first dev-pop Damiac!! (I just coined that, lets make it a thing!)

Seriously though, please do keep posting Admiral, and it'd go down well if you posted on a few other topics that you're knowledgeable/interested in. Your game fits into bay12 well, but we have a lot of devs just come to promote and then leave which does get a bit annoying.

This looks interesting - although I'm left a bit confused why you've decided to do a series of games rather than just concentrate on the one, especially until you've taken it as far as it'll go?



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With enough work and polish, it could have been a forgettable flash game on Kongregate.

AdmiralGeezer

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Hmm, surprised nobody got this out of the way yet.  I've never done one of these, so I guess I'll take a crack at it:

Ahem! I see you only registered 10 days ago, and the Bay 12 community don't take kindly to your type... meaning devs with new games, just up and registering only to promote their new game... round here.

So uh... since you already did that...  uh... something!  Yeah!   

At the very least, keep responding to questions here so it doesn't look like you just registered an account to throw up an ad for your game and never looked back. 

With that out of the way, this game looks somewhat interesting.  Any idea when we might see a playable demo?

Man, you sure found a way to put me in place in the best way possible. This cracked me up. I am guilty as charged, and I will accept whatever faith the jury will cast upon me. I will hang in front of the townspeople, from my little toe upside down in shame! But if you so find it in you, I ask that you give this old man a chance. I might just be alright. I will not let you down, I will contribute to this fine community! I will give life advice to the young ones and I will praise every fine game I see here.

Well then! The second game Battlestation: Harbinger is a multi-platform game and we will release it for Android and iOS devices August 13th. I just found out it has been greenlit on Steam 6 hours ago, so that is fantastic news!  We will have to shape a new user interface for PC but once that is done we will release it on Steam.

On to the first mentioned game in my post, Battlestation: Humanity's Last Hope. This one we aim to release in Q4 of 2016, but surely we can arrange testing before that! I think this community right here would be fantastic for it. Players with a lot of wisdom I sense here, a lot of good ideas possible to come. Yes!
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AdmiralGeezer

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Hmm, surprised nobody got this out of the way yet.  I've never done one of these, so I guess I'll take a crack at it:

Ahem! I see you only registered 10 days ago, and the Bay 12 community don't take kindly to your type... meaning devs with new games, just up and registering only to promote their new game... round here.

So uh... since you already did that...  uh... something!  Yeah!   

At the very least, keep responding to questions here so it doesn't look like you just registered an account to throw up an ad for your game and never looked back. 

With that out of the way, this game looks somewhat interesting.  Any idea when we might see a playable demo?

RABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLE!!!! Congratulations on your first dev-pop Damiac!! (I just coined that, lets make it a thing!)

Seriously though, please do keep posting Admiral, and it'd go down well if you posted on a few other topics that you're knowledgeable/interested in. Your game fits into bay12 well, but we have a lot of devs just come to promote and then leave which does get a bit annoying.

This looks interesting - although I'm left a bit confused why you've decided to do a series of games rather than just concentrate on the one, especially until you've taken it as far as it'll go?

I like this community already! You tell people off in a nice way, you give them a chance. Thank you. I totally understand and I will invest my time to further keep this community as a good place.

You have a very good question there! We have been developing games with our small game dev company for 3,5 years now. During this time my brother has been coding on our own game engine, which is very well suited for Android and iOS platforms. This game engine and the experience we have gives us the possibility to develop games for mobile faster. This will be relevant a little bit later in my story :)

The whole idea for Battlestation began only 1,5 years ago, when we made a simple prototype and just released it to see if it interests anyone. And it did! It was more loved than our previous games, which we had been working for a year on. This new prototype was made in a couple of weeks. It was a game that we really could see ourselves playing as well. Well then we really kicked things into high gear. We have a big vision for Battlestation, one day I want to see Robert Downey Jr. be Admiral Geezer in a movie. That is my dream.

The mobile game industry is super hard for indie game developers, it is almost impossible. This is why we wanted to go cross-platform, so that fans of Battlestation would find us through PC. It's so hard to find us through mobile, like many other indie game developers we are swamped by Clash of Clans clones in visibility.

We tried to Kickstart our PC game in the end of last year:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1190981065/battlestation-humanitys-last-hope

Back then it was mostly a concept, our vision for the game. We failed with the Kickstarter but there was a clear potential for the game that could be seen, we just didn't want to give up because of this. But we were faced with a decision now, we were out of money and there was no way we would be able to complete the PC game in time before our money runs out. So we decided to take another route, we decided to make another mobile game (Although now it is coming for PC too) which we knew we could make faster because of our awesome game engine. We could also develop the PC game on the side using other members in the team, supervised by our main coder. This is how we pushed forward two projects side-by-side and I have to tell you it was a bit tough but we pulled it off.

The plan was to finish one new Battlestation game with our game engine and good material for a new Kickstarter. And here we are! Now we only hope that our new Battlestation game and the new Kickstarter are a big enough success for us to continue finishing Battlestation: Humanity's Last Hope.
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Retropunch

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-informative post snip-
Thank you very much for such an informative post - I definitely get it now and love your vision for it. I was a bit worried before that you had just planned out loads of games in succession without finishing the first (my mistake in not reading carefully enough!).

So I just wondered if HLH had any non-combat'y elements to it? I know there's research, but will there be any room for diplomacy? Part of the appeal of space stations in sci-fi has always been that they've not been purely combat orientated, so it'd be interesting to see how that could work out.
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With enough work and polish, it could have been a forgettable flash game on Kongregate.

Astral

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Posting to watch. I've always sort of wondered why Battlestar Galactica hasn't had a simulation game adaption, in which you guide humanities' last hope for survival (or so they think) through the Cylon attacks.
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Retropunch

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Posting to watch. I've always sort of wondered why Battlestar Galactica hasn't had a simulation game adaption, in which you guide humanities' last hope for survival (or so they think) through the Cylon attacks.

I've wondered the exact same thing. More than that, I don't get why there aren't more bridge commander/base commander games. I mean everyone wants to be Picard, Adama or Reynolds but instead we're always FPS grunt #301895151.
I know there are a few (artemis, STBC) but I've always felt that there's an absolutely massive gap in the market for a proper 'commander/captain' game.

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With enough work and polish, it could have been a forgettable flash game on Kongregate.

AdmiralGeezer

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-informative post snip-
Thank you very much for such an informative post - I definitely get it now and love your vision for it. I was a bit worried before that you had just planned out loads of games in succession without finishing the first (my mistake in not reading carefully enough!).

So I just wondered if HLH had any non-combat'y elements to it? I know there's research, but will there be any room for diplomacy? Part of the appeal of space stations in sci-fi has always been that they've not been purely combat orientated, so it'd be interesting to see how that could work out.

Yes there is diplomacy! Although it is still a bit open how complex it will be, we will start simple and go from there. Have to see how we get it balanced with everything else in the game. The plan has been that your choices during the game would affect the final fight, so you would either have allies on your side or be faced with an even more formidable force in the end because you pissed off another alien race or two.

We actually have a book written of Battlestation, 100 pages of background stories for the different races in the game. By an actual author, we did not write it ourselves ;) Once we get that in shape and I have read it myself I would be happy to share it with you. Anyway, in the Battlestation universe there is one race, or an unknown entity that is causing havoc all around. They will enter human space in the final fight of Battlestation: Humanity's Last Hope, and if you have been very non-diplomatic you might get some more hostile visitors besides the unknown.
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Retropunch

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Yes there is diplomacy! -snip-

Great to hear! In my opinion, one of the ways that I think you could differentiate yourself most would be to get some really awesome (and complex) diplomacy working. So many 4x/whatever games are far too basic with it, and proper diplomacy has so much to offer both in terms of fun gameplay and in terms of giving the player some really interesting/hard choices that they'll keep thinking about way after they're done with the game.

 
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With enough work and polish, it could have been a forgettable flash game on Kongregate.

AdmiralGeezer

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Yes there is diplomacy! -snip-

Great to hear! In my opinion, one of the ways that I think you could differentiate yourself most would be to get some really awesome (and complex) diplomacy working. So many 4x/whatever games are far too basic with it, and proper diplomacy has so much to offer both in terms of fun gameplay and in terms of giving the player some really interesting/hard choices that they'll keep thinking about way after they're done with the game.

I have to say you are right! It is also a major challenge in game dev terms :) We will promise to try!

I must say I really believe every game developer out there deserves recognition, making games is no small feat. And I salute you my brothers if you happen to be here. We decided to make an epic video of us gearing up for our upcoming launch August 13th:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFy-kNovEkU

Watch us in action!  ;)
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