Astro Tycoon - GGJ 2025
For the 2025 Global Game Jam, I wanted to try something different. I’ve been very inspired by Prosperous Universe lately, and I wanted to see if I could replicate certain key elements of that experience in a jam.
Since I was planning such an esoteric project, I couldn’t in good conscious, drag anyone else into the project. My Astro Tycoon project page is on GGJ, and the source code is on Github .
I am pretty exhausted by long reload and interation times in Unity, so hot reloading was a priority. I didn’t want to use an engine because most of what I needed for the game could be created from scratch in less time than it would take to learn a new tool. I did end up settling on SignalR to send messages from the C# backend to a very lightweight web frontend. I wanted the game playable on the web with just a normal browser, but I didn’t want to do much javascript or web dev of any sort. Fortunately, a very small amount of setup gave me all I needed to write the actual game.
I sat down and wrote out a few guidelines to form the heart of the game:
- Everyone occupies the same shared world, everything happens in real-time.
- The world is always saved, and persists between hot-reloads during development.
- Always migrate data forward without wiping player data.
- Choose mechanics that drive players to interact and cooperate.
- Esoteric text entry is part of the charm.
Then I made a gameplay mechanic feature list I would try to implement:
- “Exploration” as a mechanic to get a planet site.
- When exploring, you might also find an item to start a research collab.
- You can invite another user to join you on a planet you explored. Then you both benefit from planetary infrastructure improvemnts. There’s no downside to sharing!
- Construction of a production building on the planet site.
- A production building can pick a product. It makes those forever until you change it or it runs out of materials.
- Buildings cost money to construct, but resources to upgrade.
- Ship construction at different levels for better exploration ships.
- Inventory of goods implemented.
- Exchange Station is where bids and asks are placed for player-to-player trading.
- Manage the logistics of moving items. (I ended up shifting away from this idea early in the jam, and all items are available through your entire empire magically.)
- Your –research– headquarter upgrades limits the number of buildings you can construct.
- Players can engage in Retail sale of goods- a slow and low price, but guarenteed sales- this is how money is introduced into the economy.
- Research Cooperative. Send a proposal to someone and they accept it- you share the benefit of the research. You can’t research without a research buddy!
I never quite got all the research cooperative done- ran out of time. It was a key feature, but it required a ton of back and forth between users to set up the agreement, and it was a lot to track in the backend. Shared planetary infrastructure ugprades were an early feature and that was well enjoyed by the players.
Astro Tycoon was made by the team:
- Andy Korth, Programming and Design
- Beth Korth, Game Logo Art
