Starwards is now open-source

Hello world!

We've been working on our custom spaceship simulator on and off for 3 years now. Starwards differs from other SBS games by being designed for LARPs first, though other events may benefit from it as well. We put in all of our experiences of running larps with EE (vanilla and custom), and hope to make a real improvement in realism, player focus and engagement, and organizer operational needs. We've detailed our experiences with EE in this blogpost.

Today we've open-sourced the project and made it public in hope to recruit help from the community. It still shows signs of being a closed project (not enough automated tests, missing documentation, missing communication of principles and vision, etc.). However, we are eager to fix things to make it more welcoming to newcomers and would appreciate your help and feedback.

Come and have a look

Comments

  • Will have to download and check it out.

  • please feel free to approach us in our discord chat if you have any trouble. Link is in the readme.

    I assume some guidance is needed.

  • edited June 2022

    Is the game currently playable?

    I'm able to run the CI build. I can see the GM screen, the Debug Screen and the Empty Screen. The Empty Screen doesn't seem to do much at the moment, unless I'm just doing something wrong.

    Course that could be why it's called the Empty Screen...

    Will a GM be required to play a game?

  • @kwadroke

    In the GM and empty screen, the list to the left represents UI widgets that can be *dragged into the main screen*. so you build your own screen. this way each game can have their stations set up the way they want to. later we will support saving the screen presets.

    https://blog.starwards.space/2021-03-06-modular-peek/


    Other than the GM screen, we try to avoid interactive UI elements altogether (see this blog post) so that players screens only display information, and the input is done wia hotkeys and joysticks. I like joysticks the best because in the OS level they are agnostic to which screen is focused - all applications get the joystick events all the time.

    The idea is to make it easy to break the 1:1 ratio of station-computer. allow a single computer to run multiple game stations.

    The controls today are pretty hard coded. the main control interface is a gamepad (I'm using a cheap speedlink one), and there are redundant hotkeys for movement and rotation (WASD+EQ).

  • edited June 2022

    Currently Starwards is aimed as an engine for LARP games, where we assume a GM is preset. This assumption sometimes helps us trade complex automatic code with simple alerts to the GM for manual intervention when we write other larp systems.


    However this may not be the case here. I dont expect it's going to be a big effort to support a fully automated map with quests etc,

    Since the entire game is written in a script language (typescript), the map can just a part of the server code that is not bundled in the .exe file. and then this code can do anything - from manipulating the game objects, through stopping and starting a game, and maybe even connecting to internet services

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