Greetings Star Explorers!
There's been a long, dark silence from our end, as we've been doing a ton of redevelopment on Lord of Rigel. While it's been a long road, we're quite pleased with our progress and we expect to have some big updates for you quite soon! In the meantime, we wanted to take a look back, at the history of our work on this game...
Work on Lord of Rigel in one form or another has been ongoing for nearly eight years. One spring weekend in 2014, we were discussing 4X space strategy games. At that time there had not been many in development for years. A few we had followed in the early crowdfunding era changed scopes or didn’t appear that they would ever release. So we sat down and worked out the basic outlines for what we wanted to see in Lord of Rigel, drawing on influences including Babylon 5 and Star Trek Deep Space Nine. We wanted a more in-depth tactical combat system, and some ideas that might help with pacing the end game such as adding in elder species locked in a cold war and grand menaces.
Early Unity Version
In July of 2014 we started Rhombus Studios LLC formally and started sending out game pitches. We assembled a small team and work began in early 2015 in earnest in the Unity engine. Art and music for the project moved at a good pace and programming wise we had basic galaxy generation, economy, and the basics for a turn based tactical system.
In fall of 2015 we launched a Kickstarter campaign with our galaxy generator and tactical demo ...which did not meet its goals. We reached out to Iceberg Interactive in 2016 and partnered up! As we made some adjustments based on their feedback, the interface style changed and tactical turned to real time combat.
In June 2018 we began First Access testing with a small group of testers. One issue we faced was relying on third party tools in Unity, some of which were obsolete. We had to choose between engine updates to fix critical issues, and losing backwards compatibility on tools we were relying on. As time went on, it became increasingly difficult to fix minor issues as we were implementing systems, like the AI. This took a significant strain on the team.
Main Menu 2018 Unity version (Left), 2022 Early Access 1 (Right)
Planet View 2018 Unity version (Left), 2022 Early Access 1 (Right)
Over 2019 we had been experimenting in Unreal 4 for what would hopefully be a future project. In the fall of 2019 we had built galaxy generation and the core data structures in Unreal for a revamped version of Lord of Rigel. With the challenges we were facing with maintaining the Unity codebase we started fresh. We had a few ground rules such as using UE’s blueprint system and not relying on third party plugins or tools. C++ is used for some functions such as galaxy generation and data sorting -- but Lord of Rigel is built from blueprints and made it possible for non-professional programmers to prototype and flesh out a complex game. The transition let us rework art assets, and rebuild systems from the ground up.
Galaxy Map 2018 Unity version (Left), 2022 Early Access 1 (Right)
We worked slowly but surely through the COVID-19 pandemic, and by the end of 2021 reached the end of our build schedule. Our First Access testers for the Unity version have been present through redevelopment. Early 2022 was marked by adding a tutorial system, QA/QC testing, and preparing a demo version for the public.
We are pleased to announce that after two and a half years of redevelopment, we will release the Lord of Rigel demo to the public together with a Steam Early Access date soon!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/437440/Lord_of_Rigel/