galcon
Latest
Rule the galaxy with an iron triangle in Galcon Legends, now on iOS
Need some mobile space-themed strategy to tide you over until the successfully-Kickstarted Galcon 2: Galactic Conquest releases? Galcon series creator Phil Hassey has released Galcon Legends, a pseudo-sequel to the 1995 RTS Galcon, for iOS devices. Galcon Legends presents a different kind of star war than you might be used to - instead of spaceships, lasers and super-serious space marines, in Legends, you wage war and conquer planets using swarms of neon triangles. If only every hostile takeover was so colorful. Galcon Legends is now available on iTunes for $2.99. [Image: Phil Hassey]
Laying the groundwork for Galcon 2
Developer Phil Hassey kicked off our meeting at last week's GDC by showing me a necklace and a fridge magnet set both based on his oft-remade game Galcon, just two of the different rewards in the Kickstarter that recently raised him over $25,000 for development. Hassey has remade Galcon quite a few times during his years of development (including for a few popular iOS versions), but Galcon 2 promises to be his biggest work yet. Not only will it bring multiplayer to the title, but Hassey has a whole bunch of wild ideas about how far the gameplay can go. The basic idea of Galcon is that you have a series of planets on your screen, and you can drag your finger from one to another to send ships to attack. Make sure you control more ships on that planet than anyone else, and you own it, with the eventual goal being to take over the whole screen. But that simple gameplay has spun off into dozens of variations for Hassey. Armed with his Kickstarter money (not to mention the extremely dedicated fanbase that comes along with a successful Kickstarter), Hassey has turned Galcon into an engine, essentially. He's created a mod system that allows anyone with the tools to dive in and tweak the Galcon ruleset as they see fit, and this has brought about lots and lots of interesting new twists on the old Galcon gameplay. For one thing, Hassey was able to remake all of the previous Galcon modes with his mod tools as mods, so all of the different modes from Galcon Fusion (including Stealth, where ships can be invisible, and Assassin, where a round of different players each needs to take out just one other target at a time) are already ready to go for Galcon 2. Plus, he's passed off the mod tools to his alpha testers, and they've made some really incredible stuff already, including a map of Earth you can play Galcon on (by sending ships around to different cities), and other ideas like dual Galcon (where two players can play on the same screen), and a turn-based variant. All of these mods are already up and running, and while Hassey hasn't optomized any of it, he and his community have basically built an infinite Galcon machine. When the game finally does come out on iOS, Hassey will be able to take the best of both his and users' mods, and update the game with them as he sees fit, which means he'll have an endlessly replayable, ever-evolving Galcon title. Currently, the graphics on the game are fairly basic, with simple shapes for ships and planets alike. But Hassey's also working on making those look better -- the fridge magnets, in fact, are the first colorful signs that planets will each have their own colors, renders and flavors. Hassey says he plans to work more on getting the world of the game to look just as impressive as the mechanics running behind it already are. And then, says Hassey, he has even bigger plans. He told me that he envisions not just a multiplayer game, but essentially a Galcon universe, with a galaxy of stars in various clusters, each of which makes up a multiplayer Galcon map. Guild functionality is already something he's working on, so the idea is that players could form up in clans, and then battle across this virtual map, earning victory points to conquer stars in each constellation. In this game, players could have different classes (with different abilities like invisible ships or faster moves), and would have to work together to try and take over the whole galaxy together. It's a wild idea, but Hassey says he's never been more excited about development. Working with the Kickstarter community has given him no shortage of excitement and creativity, and the sky is the limit on what this game could eventually become. It's hard to say when we'll see the "final" version of Galcon 2, but maybe there doesn't need to be one. Hassey says he's released seven different beta builds since January, and that's the current plan for the game going forward: just to keep feeding his Kickstarter backers new game content and see what they do with it. Whenever the game does officially arrive, it's sure to be very impressive indeed.
Galcon 2: Galactic Conquest hits Kickstarter
The sequel to space-themed RTS Galcon recently landed on Kickstarter. The series' creator Phil Hassey first made Galcon in 1995, and continued improving and re-releasing the game over the years with standout versions available on iOS and Android.Hassey recently took to Kickstarter to fund development on the game's true sequel, Galcon 2: Galactic Conquest. The sequel would include expanded modes, an auto-match feature for online play, a trophy system and clan support. Hassey's goal is to launch the free-to-play game on PC, Mac and Linux, with plans to port it to iOS and high-end Android devices. The Kickstarter project is seeking $23,099 by January 7.
Phil Hassey's Anathema Mines renamed Dynamite Jack, gets a trailer
A little while ago at GDC, I sat down with Galcon creator Phil Hassey. He showed me a game he called Anathema Mines that was a stylish take on stealth action, with a fun mechanic of blowing up walls (as long as you could keep out of the reach of flashlight-wielding enemies). Apparently he's done a lot of work and a little bit of brand tweaking to the title, because it's now called Dynamite Jack, and you can watch the official trailer below. It looks fun, and also looks basically the same as the game I played at GDC (though obviously then it wasn't quite as done yet). Hassey told me the game would be ready for iOS as well as Windows and Mac around release, and he also said that he was aiming for iCade support as well. The latest launch date on the project is sometime in May, so we'll keep an eye out for it then.
Daily iPhone App: Chickon
You might have already played Galcon, it's a solid realtime strategy game from the early days of the App Store, where you guided little ships from planet to planet, eventually swarming over all of the planets in a certain galaxy. That game was fun, but it was a little more abstract than anything else, so creator Phil Hassey has decided to tweak the formula for just a little bit more fun with Chickon, a new free-to-play app on the store. Chickon, as you might imagine, takes the Galcon formula and brings a much goofier battle of chickens vs. robots, with a fairly deep metagame to play through as well. This is much sillier than Galcon's abstract shapes were, but the gameplay is essentially the same. You need to direct your troops (in this case, chickens) around from nest to nest trying to beat out robots. And while Galcon (the Labs version especially) mixed up its gameplay with various AI multiplayer modes, Chickon is an experience built much more for singleplayer -- as a chicken, you need to wander an overworld, fighting your battles, collecting various objects and powerups, and then accomplishing certain goals in the ongoing battle of chicken vs. robot. That campaign does a great job of putting a little more structure on the Galcon experience, and even if you tried the original and didn't find a lot of longevity in it, Chickon's worth a look. Plus, it's completely free, in a universal version no less, and while prompts to purchase in-app items came up a few more times than I'd prefer, that's a small price to pay for a free game with lots of fun, colorful content (and likely more coming). Chickon is a great download that really builds on the ideas that Galcon laid out, even while transferring the setting over to a much more looney framework.
TUAW's Daily App: Knights vs. Aliens
Knights vs. Aliens is a brand new title to the App Store that serves as an interesting update to one of my early App Store favorites, Galcon. Instead of sending triangles around between planets, though, you're pointing squads of knights around the world, trying to take over castles from aliens, of all things. There are a few updates to the gameplay, mostly in the 30 various maps that offer strange combinations of routes and castles to fight through. There's also a fun sense of humor throughout, and that always makes for a good time. There's no Game Center or OpenFeint integration, and there's no multiplayer either, so those will have to wait for any updates. The game is out right now in a universal version for US$2.99, and if you're a big Galcon fan, it's definitely worth checking out. If you've never played this kind of game, Galcon does have a lite version, and the great Galcon Labs (featuring a few other twists on the standard gameplay) is only 99 cents. I'd love to see some even deeper strategy games on the App Store; if you know of any more solid strategy titles (real-time or turn-based), feel free to share in the comments.
Galcon Labs in the App Store now
Galcon (App Store link) was one of the most popular games of last year -- it presented a fascinating mix of strategy and real-time arcade gameplay onto the iPhone just as it was starting out, and along with games like Fieldrunners and Flight Control, really cemented a place for the platform in the gamer's arsenal. It's been described as "real-time Risk in space." The basic premise is that you can drag little ships around from planet to planet, conquering planets of various sizes and thus producing more and more ships to take over with. And now it's back. Galcon Labs is available now on the App Store, and it's pretty much exactly what you want in a sequel to a game you love: updated graphics and sound, more game modes, more online multiplayer, and just generally more of the same great gameplay, in a nice new package. So yes, odds are that if you sunk quite a few hours into Galcon, Galcon Labs is a no-brainer. Just in case you don't want to make any financial commitment at all, there is a trial available for the original game, but given that Labs is just 99 cents right now, if you have any interest at all in dragging little ships around to fight wars between planets, it's probably worth the buck. %Gallery-74558%
GDC09: iPhone gaming roundup
The Game Developers Conference is on in San Francisco, and game companies are starting to pull out the major announcements on what's coming to the iPhone in the next year. Here's a roundup of all the titles we've heard mentioned already. EA announced a huge lineup of ports from their already popular games: everything from Command and Conquer: Red Alert to SSX to FIFA, Madden, and NBA are all coming in some form to the iPhone. They're also working on bringing over the Wolfenstein RPG and Spore Creatures (which was the DS port of Spore), as well as a big list of casual board games (Scrabble is only the beginning), and versions of Need for Speed: Undercover, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour. And most amazing? All of these are due out before the end of the year. Someone's lighting a fire under iPhone developers at EA. id software announced that they're bringing Wolfenstein 3D Classic to the iPhone in an official form -- that one's already been submitted to the store and should be out soon. Click the link below to read on.
Wired's top 10 reader-approved iPhone games
Our friends at Wired recently asked their readers what their favorite iPhone games were, and their list is a pretty darn good overview of some of the best choices for gamers on the App Store. Some of the picks are already well known -- we posted about Trism way, way back, and of course Galcon has been lauded already. And some of the choices are a little wacky -- Cube Runner is cool, but it's not really much more than a tech demo at this point.Still, there are a few gems you may not have discovered yet -- JellyCar looks like a lot of fun, and Topple did kind of get hidden underneath the shadow of ngmoco's other big release, Rolando. It's worth a try if you haven't played it yet.It's notable, as well, that all but the top two choices are pretty simple. As fun as these games are, there's definitely a lot more room for some deeper gameplay on the App Store.
iPhone is dominating independent gaming
Our friends at Joystiq make a very insightful and very telling discovery: the iPhone more or less owns the finalist list for the 2009 Independent Games Festival Mobile category. 11 of the 14 contestants aren't on the Nintendo DS or PSP -- they're built and played on the iPhone and the iPod touch. The popular Fieldrunners and Igloo Games' Dizzy Bee are standouts, but even innovative games like Galcon and the pseudogame experience Ruben and Lullaby are being honored with nods.Very, very telling -- the relatively low cost of entry into the App Store and the versatility of Apple's SDK makes the iPhone/iPod touch a dream platform for independent game developers, and clearly, even with less than a year of development time, Apple's handheld is making a big splash in the industry. Sure, there's still a few pricing hiccups that need to be worked out to get bigger developers on board in a big way, but for smaller and single person independent game developers, there's never been a better platform on which to make and market your games.
