Old Light: a slow strategy game in a shared galaxy

[MrLinxed]

Hey! Some of you saw me mention this in my [introduction](https://makewebgames.io/topic/43078-my-introduction/), so here's the proper writeup.

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Old Light is a PBBG about building your own space empire. It's multiplayer, and it's set in one big shared galaxy where everyone plays at once. If you've played Tribal Wars or OGame, you'll probably feel right at home because it's a bit of both, smashed together into something of my own.

No download, no signup. Just open a tab and you're in.

Play it: oldlight.io

 

 

The idea

The whole thing runs in real time, but measured in hours, not seconds. Your mines keep producing while you're offline, and your fleets take real hours to cross the map. So you're not meant to sit and stare at it. You check in a few times a day, see what happened, and queue up your next moves.

The other half is not knowing things. You can see the whole galaxy and who owns what, but that's all you get for free. What someone has actually built, their economy, their fleet, and whether they can hurt you, you only find out by sending some probes to go look. So most of your decisions get made on half the picture, and honestly that's the fun of it.

 

What you do

- Claim a star and grow it out. I tried to make every upgrade a small "do I want this now or the other thing first" decision.
- You build probes and send them at people. They will tell you what's actually there. That's the only way to know.
- Marauders are your hitters, Sentinels are your wall. I didn't want  a "bigger number wins" combat system, so it leans on you scouting first and picking fights you've actually got a read on.

Every system runs on two resources, palladium and iridium, and then there's credits across your whole empire to keep the fleet paid. Underbuild your reactor or let your credits hit zero and things will slow down. So keep your economy in check!

 

Under the hood

For the devs here: it's TypeScript top to bottom. Pixi.js v8 on WebGL for the frontend, Express + socket.io + TypeORM + Postgres on the backend. It's all server-authoritative, so the client only ever draws what it's told.

Where it's at

It's still in development, but the base of the game is all there and everything from here on is wipe free. So think of it as an early 1.0. Playable now, your empire sticks around, and I'll keep building on top of it.

I'd really love some feedback. Tell me where the first ten minutes lost you, where it dragged, and whether anything made you want to come back the next day.

Cheers,
MrLinxed

oldlight.io

also checkout the galaxy map and the leaderboard!