So it seems I’m back in action, doing many things at once. Most recently, Risujin approached me with the desire to do an innovative Real Time Strategy game. Well, needless to say this is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’ve collected a couple friends of mine to help out, and we’re off to a good start just three days into the project.

What is Plutocracy about? We’ve been having some ideas.

General ideas: * You play as a wealthy merchant. * The game would be mapped onto a miniature planet (a sphere). You will be able to rotate the sphere pretty freely. * A balance between wealth based domination, territory based domination, and warfare based domination. Expect bribery. * You only rent land, and you can only rent land that is adjacent to land you currently control (or your ships). Expect bidding wars. * War is not declared by the player, but rather by the player’s nation on some other nation. * There are not individual land units available. The only kinds of units (thus far) are a variety of ships and perhaps an airship.

Specific ideas: * You build on shorelines using settler ships. From this, you can sprawl inwards (but remember that you can only rent adjacent land). * Nations will mostly be divided into Enemies or Neutral. Part of the game will be being able to bribe nations into wars (or stopping wars). * Design your own ships * Commodity trading & producing goods * Naval Warfare * Taking over town centers (which must be attached to docks) constitutes defeating another merchant’s town/city (and taking it over) * Expect Pirates.

Engine level: * We are building our own game engine to facilitate most of these fairly uncommon ideas. * The engine will likely have some pretty good graphics, but not tremendously fantastic physics (we don’t need them).

Development Infrastructure: * We have an IRC channel: #Plutocracy on freenode. * We have set up a code repository + wiki via googlecode: plutocracy.googlecode.com. * We will eventually have a forum probably. Remember that we’re just starting out, though. Our focus is building the game, not so much community building and fending off rabid people.

Development Status: * We’ve decided that it’ll be in C with a scripting language on top later. * We’ve completely mastered a small part of the naming conventions and agreed on a coding style. * I hear we even have a blank window open for a second or so.

Anyway, I’ll keep you updated, my sparse faithful. We don’t have anything really to show except that top image. My main responsibilities in this project will be the web stuff, organization, art, documentation, marketing, publicity, etc. You know how it is. I can do those things and have done them a lot. Besides, someone to do this kind of stuff (especially when the project is still very technical and hard to understand for “mere mortals”) is rare. I think my skills as an artist are more valuable here than my coding skills. I don’t mind, really. I like doing art-related things.