Ten Years Left - coming soon(ish)

jonmulcahy

I've been working on this game for the past few months. It's been on hiatus with the birth of my son, but I'm starting to get back into it, and I figured what better way to build momentum than to show some screenshots of the latest design of the game (it's 7th).

The game is designed to have massive replayability with little to no repetition of outcome.

Each run through will take 5/10 minutes from start to finish.

The_Gamesalad_Guru

Very elegant nice!

FallingBoxStudios

Love the simple design

mhedges

Congratulations on your son!

I like the title - it's very intriguing. You chose an interesting topic. Looking forward to the eventual release.

jay2dx

looks good but what do you do in it! and congrats on your son

Adrenaline

Very nice!

quantumsheep

Lubbly

Braydon_SFX

You really like your space games don't you?
Love the preview you gave! Stunning!

jonmulcahy

thanks everyone, the encouragement is nice, helps keep the fire burning on these late night with a baby sleeping nearby

After todays announcement I went ahead and redid all the graphics at 1920x1080 instead of the 1036x640 they used to be. It took about 2 hours, so it wasn't too bad, and now I have a high resolution set to work with that should look great on everything.

back into design mode, working on a metrics display scene that shows infographics on game stats! I'll post a preview once i flesh it out

jonmulcahy

Well, it's been a long while, but Ten Years Left is finally back in active development. I had hit a mental roadblock back in October, mapping out a large number of potential outcomes and different opportunities to mitigate them was difficult. At last count there were 980,179,200 different combinations.

The game is actually about 80% complete. I'm not ready to give out too many details yet, since I am a one man operation it takes awhile for me to accomplish anything, but it's going again. I'm hoping to boost the total different combinations to over 1 billion, which I should be able to do pretty easily.

Once I have those combinations nailed down, I have to work out how certain combinations can be mitigated depending on what the user does. Think of a giant choose your own adventure game where are presented with choices that will directly impact the path you are on. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.

There is also a server side component that needs to be designed. This game will upload the combination that was generated, along with what options the player chose, to a giant infographic online.

I've been playing the alpha of the game, and I think it'll be pretty fun.

gingagaming

@jonmulcahy said:
Think of a giant choose your own adventure game where are presented with choices that will directly impact the path you are on. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.

Choose your own adventure books were my fav book to read at school!

jonmulcahy

I managed to get it up to 1,069,286,400 different combinations!

jonmulcahy

haha, never mind, I added a 10th level of options, there are now 6,415,718,400 possible combinations.

Today I'm working on coming up with the % chance of each option occurring, and what their effect will be.

jonmulcahy

Ten Years Left is designed to be brutal, not in difficulty, but in their chance to survive. There is an end goal, but the odds of you actually making it there are around 50%.

To greatly over simply things, from start to finish there 9 different 'stages' you have to pass to be successful. Each stage has a number of different outcomes, many of which can be mitigated or outright bypassed based on your decisions earlier in the game. These stages are randomly generated at the start of every game, and you don't know what will happen when you are making your decisions (more on that later).

Like I said earlier, there are over 6 billion different combinations of these outcomes (including the epilogue options), but some of these outcomes are weighted to happen more often than others. The actual order of the stages can be switch as well, which increases the total number of combinations by some magnitude I can't comprehend . So, the odds of someone playing the exact same game twice is pretty small.

robertkdale

I can't wait to play it.

WarpSpeed

Love the idea. I love space games too, hence my username in gamesalad.

jonmulcahy

I did a bunch of work on the logic last week, still have a few major hurdles to cross however. There are three main sections of logic that happen when the game ends

1. selection and order of hazards
2. application of user choices to those hazards
3. display the outcome

Number 1 is just about done. I have a few bugs to work out but that should be done today.
Number 3 is almost done as well. It was actually finished a few months ago before I took a break, but since then I've added a few major new features which I need to address.

Number 2 is going to be the hard part. I have a massive visio diagram that maps out all the choices available, but this was before I doubled the number of options, so not only is it out of date, it's not even close to as complex as it should be. But it gives you some idea of the logic/choices behind the end game.

That's it for this update. I'll post again when something changes.

Summation

@jonmulcahy Random Idea:

So if you buy the consumable IAP you get an extra year to make choices for that particular playthrough or the non-consumable to add the aforementioned additional year permanently.

jonmulcahy

Well I finally dove back into this project after an extended hiatus. I was dreading tackling the logic that makes the game so replayable, and I was right to be afraid. I've been working on this every night for a few hours, and I've gone in circle after circle . I finally made a breakthrough last night and was able to display a number that is generated through options pulled from 5 different databases. It doesn't seem like a lot, but you should see the connection string...

there is a light at the end of the tunnel!. It's just a pinprick right now, but it's there!

The_Gamesalad_Guru

@jonmulcahy said:
I did a bunch of work on the logic last week, still have a few major hurdles to cross however. There are three main sections of logic that happen when the game ends

1. selection and order of hazards
2. application of user choices to those hazards
3. display the outcome

Number 1 is just about done. I have a few bugs to work out but that should be done today.
Number 3 is almost done as well. It was actually finished a few months ago before I took a break, but since then I've added a few major new features which I need to address.

Number 2 is going to be the hard part. I have a massive visio diagram that maps out all the choices available, but this was before I doubled the number of options, so not only is it out of date, it's not even close to as complex as it should be. But it gives you some idea of the logic/choices behind the end game.

That's it for this update. I'll post again when something changes.

Now that is planned logic! I like it. That's what it looks like in my head..

Thunder_Child

I wouldn't give away all your details...it looks great but "someone" with more time on their hands might make a template and sell it. It's only happened to me three times now. My lips are forever sealed on my WIP.

jonmulcahy

@Thunder_Child said:
I wouldn't give away all your details...it looks great but "someone" with more time on their hands might make a template and sell it. It's only happened to me three times now. My lips are forever sealed on my WIP.

Oh yea, I'm not showing anything until it is 100% functional and ready to submit.

jonmulcahy

I hired a writer on upwork this week, i tried to do it myself, but I am not a writer . Once that's complete I need to rework some of that crazy logic above to make it a little simpler, and the game will be almost done!

jonmulcahy

I can't believe I'm actually writing this post, but that massive pile of logic is finally done. I'm on the other side of the mountain.

The writing is done.
The artwork is done.
The logic is done.

I have a few kinks in the epilogue to work out as some button presses are registering multiple touches. I also have a few UI issues to sort out, but it's so close I can taste it!

SLOCM3Z

HOW?! How do you get that many possible outcomes?! HOW?! This looks really cool. Please tell me it will be on Google Play. Looks great so far!

jonmulcahy

@jdlcrater said:
HOW?! How do you get that many possible outcomes?! HOW?! This looks really cool. Please tell me it will be on Google Play. Looks great so far!

math! i found an old note that there are actually over 6 billion total combinations, but i suspect it's even higher with the latest changes I've made.

when it's all said and done, there are 10 major components of the ending. each component has 8-15 different sections, and each section can have up to 9 different versions based on your choices during the game!

On top of that, of the 10 components, 6 of them can come in a random order:

1, X, X, X, X , X , X, 8, 9, 10 - where X could be component 2,3,4,5,6,7

It's so complicated I don't even know how to figure out how many different combinations there are

SLOCM3Z

@jonmulcahy said:
It's so complicated I don't even know how to figure out how many different combinations there are

Math. Psh who needs that

SLOCM3Z

Very neat @jonmulcahy Sounds addicting

jonmulcahy

this game is going to break my head. I'm working on a particularly complicated piece of logic and it's driving me crazy. I am taking the value from 1 table/column, using that to lookup a value in another table/column, and using that value to looking the value in a different column of the original table... but only if the value of another table/column is 0. lots of fun

SLOCM3Z

@jonmulcahy said:
this game is going to break my head. I'm working on a particularly complicated piece of logic and it's driving me crazy. I am taking the value from 1 table/column, using that to lookup a value in another table/column, and using that value to looking the value in a di different column of the original table... but only if the value of another table/column is 0. lots of fun

Sounds crazy my friend...

wayback_gamer

@jonmulcahy you should be able to make your logic respond and calculate all using a real attribute and words which will act as a database and cause changes in other real attributes to create the outcomes in real time. If game.scene1_decision1 is Run then. I could make the logic with a free flow