Shattered Stars

Shattered Stars is a turn-based strategy game of a galactic civil war. It features an area-based map modeled as cells in a Voronoi diagram. It's written in Java and has animations, sound effects and music. It originally targeted only Windows but it is possible to get it working on Mac and Linux as well, since Java. Its a completely original design, though inspired by countless other games I played before, including Risk, Axis & Allies, to name a few, as well as a few others I made myself as hobby projects in the past. I designed the game play, the UI, the software architecture, did all the coding, wrote all the creative/flavor text, documentation. I created several generic Java frameworks and libraries to help make this game, as well as re-used some other ones I had made for previous apps.

The code is OO, comprised of 22 app-specific .java files, X classes/interfaces, and 10k app-specific LOC, and (roughly) 17k in-house generic library LOC. It is multi-threaded. It uses several public FOSS Java libaries and a few custom in-house ones. Note that I'm not a fan of reaching for OO first when it comes to designing software (I think you should pick the simplest and easiest to understand architecture that also fits the problem space well) there are certain situations where OO is a great fit. OO is a great fit for games and GUIs, and ShStars is both.

I came very close to publishing this game with Manifesto Games and got great feedback and guidance from both Greg Costikyan and Johnny Wilson, the founders (and both famous guys in the game industry). But we never ended up launching beause I got cold feet and didn't like the DRM system they required. All the code still exists, it still runs on my Mac and plays just fine (as of 2013 Feb 4), but is on the backburner until I have the time and energy, and most importantly the vision and willpower again to productize it. I might open source it on GitHub instead for cap feathering purposes. One of the generic libs I personaly created was called Grio, which is a simple Terminal/shell-like widget for use inside graphical Java apps, both Swing and AWT. Grio lets me hit a special key and an interactive text console appears, during the game, which lets me enter special debug or devtest commands, or cheats, but can also be used by power-users for ordinary gameplay. Grio was very helpful both in this game and other Java apps I made, so I might dig it up, clean up the source and publish it by itself someday as well. Time, so little of it; cool ideas, so many of those. In the screenshots you'll see a few cases where I had Grio up.

Link is to a preview by Johnny Wilson (of 80's Computer Gaming World editorialship fame), which does not seem to be available on the web anymore. During that preview it was called Galactic War, because that was my name for the project while under development. I originally settled on Shattered Stars as the launch name, and Johnny and Greg liked it better because more unique, more personality.
Johnny's Review

If you think you'd like to play it, and especially if you'd be willing to pay anywhere in the $5-20 ballpark for it, please let me know. I can make a special release for you, and it helps me guage whether there's enough total interest that I should productize it for the public.

TODO open source it and/or productize it again
TODO record screencast of gameplay w/audio and put here
TODO discuss the technical architecture, and give counts of my libs (eg offhand: Grio, BGA, Splat, FSM, maps, Voronoi, graphics, sprites, progress bar, Bresenham, bitmasks, async actions engine, Javert, skins, laxml, CodePoint, TypeHint); finish those counts and put into a nice table

Note that some of the screenshots are from early in its development history, when rough, and some from later when more polished. Also in the earlier shots it was still named Galactic War, whereas in the later it's Shattered Stars.

Screenshots: