Kickstarter

 Solar Crusaders is a multiplayer top-down strategy game featuring 4X gameplay elements, sandbox universe, real-time battles, and simulated virtual economy.

You'll control the crews of customizable spaceships and space-stations in a galaxy populated by other players and A.I. controlled NPCs.

Solar Crusaders features in a nutshell:

• Open world space exploration with top-down tactical battles.
• Command and battle against multiple ships, with up to four ships under your command.
• Colonize and exploit strategic locations by building space-stations. 
• Participate in the simulated game economy by mining ores, refining fuels, or manufacturing ships, stations, and components.
• Compete against other players and NPC's to develop faster and more powerful ships, and gain territory for your corporation.

About Us:

Solar Crusaders is being made by Silicon Valley startup Puremana Studios LLC, founded by Hilary Craven, and Ollie JD. We're self-funded and we have enough money to make sure this game happens. Our core team is locked in and committed to this project for the next 2 years.

We're a little over half way through development, and we've decided to come to Kickstarter to raise awareness about Solar Crusaders, and raise funds to accelerate the development schedule by increasing the size of our team.

We're testing the waters with this premise, and we want you to help us prove that there is a significant group of people that would love to play a 2D open world space game!

Website: http://www.solarcrusaders.com/

Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=409453472

Explore the galaxy

As you guide your fleet through each solar system, you'll explore features such as stars, moons, planets, asteroids, and singularities; optionally colonizing strategic locations as you see fit.

Unlike similar games in this genre, Solar Crusaders utilizes an advanced agents system to populate the game universe with persistent computer controlled pirates, merchants, traders, smugglers, and more. The game will never feel empty or barren, because the computer will move into empty sectors.

Once an agent is destroyed, it permanently ceases to exist, and a new agent will be created unless you move in to take its place.

Grow your empire

Colonization will allow you to create items in the game, which will range in quality based on your manufacturing facilities and proper composition of resources.

Anything from small sensor augments, to full ship systems like engines, transporters, and cloak can be created and traded in-game.

Manage your crew members

Your crew will be composed of five different races including Human, Monk, Plantoid, Robotic, and Creature. Each race will have their own appearance, behavior, and special ability; affording each a particular advantage in combat, diplomacy, or a wide variety of other possible enhancements.

Each crew member will be subject to perma-death, although this can be mitigated through insurance, and cloning bays.

Take command of your ships

Your ships will be highly configurable, with many systems being swappable and/or upgradable. You'll have to carefully manage your critical resources including fuel, atmosphere, and ammunition; while at the same time manage your crew as they perform their specialized duties like piloting, engineering, weapons control, and more.

Additional supplies and reinforcements can be salvaged from wrecks, created from resources, or bought from NPCs and other players.

Domination

The advancement system is based upon training individual skills of crew members in fields such as piloting, shields, engineering, weapons, and more. Ultimately, your goal will be to expand your dominion beyond your home system, and into the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

 The game can be played in 3 different ways:

• Single-player Battle Simulations (similar to Star Citizens Arena Commander)
• Local Co-op (much like Minecraft where you host the server yourself for up to 64 players over LAN)
• Connect to Official Online Game Universe (much like an MMO, persistent universe with up to 8000+ players)

Single-player and local co-op will NEVER have any monthly fee to play. You will NEVER have to sign-up or sign-in to anything to play. Simply download and play as much as you wish.

There will NEVER be a fee to play on the Official Game Universe for Kickstarter supporters of $30.00 or more.

Otherwise, the Official Online Game Universe will be $5.00/month, and possibly less with promotions and deals.

There will be a limited micro-payments shop, which will allow players to buy things that do NOT affect the balance of the game. For example, you'll be able to purchase unique decals (skins) for ship and space-stations.

We are currently focusing on development of the Solar Crusaders Official Online Game Universe.

The Kickstarter funds budget above shows where your money will be spent.

We'll be hiring a 3-month contract programmer to help with debugging and and code optimization. We haven't chosen our programmer yet.

We'll be hiring on a contract artist to create more concept artwork. Concept artwork will be done by Becca Bair and Ricardo Van Duuren.

We'll be hiring Megan McDuffee to do our music.

Game development isn't easy, and as any enterprising game developer or startup entrepreneur knows, programming is expensive. Running a company has a lot of overhead, and therefore a project such as this can easily run in to the millions.

So how we can make this game happen for way less?

1) Solar Crusaders has an experienced lead engineer / programmer as one of its founding members. Ollie JD has been working in the Silicon Valley for over 10 years, and has brought many large scale projects to fruition. He's not going anywhere, and he is fully committed to this project for at least next 2 years. This project has been a dream of his waiting for the right moment to spring to life.

2) We're using technology that is much easier to work with. The game engine and servers are built using JavaScript and HTML5, and therefore can share a lot of code. Sharing code is good, because it means less repetitive work, and fewer bugs. A lot of smart companies have invested heavily into JavaScript, including Google, PayPal, Flickr, LinkedIn and more.

3) Many indies use Unity to save a lot of time, and we're using similar frameworks for both our front-end and backend servers. We're not trying to re-invent the wheel, therefore, anything that has been made and open-sourced, we're going to be using. For more information about our architecture, see the technology section below.

4) The Solar Crusaders Online Universe will be hosted on Amazon Web Services. When server demand goes up, we spin up more servers and only pay for what we use. We don't have to pay for an IT department, because the servers are managed by Amazon.

5) All of our team members work remotely, there is no office, we meet and coordinate through Skype. We have practically no corporate overhead.

6) This game is a passion for all of us! We'll use a little bit of money, and a whole lot of heart to get it done.

So where are we now?

We've implemented most of the client engine, and we're currently spending most of our development time on the server. We've ran some preliminary stress tests, and here are our results:

Each Amazon EC2 instance can support 200-400 concurrent connections. With a cluster of 40 EC2 instances, and the artificial load we generated that accounts for realistic read/write operations, we were able to sustain 8000 simultaneous connections, each averaging a ping of 40-150ms.

The approximate cost of this setup was $1500.00-2500.00/month, not including the datastore setup, which would cost an additional $1500.00-3000.00/month.

Overall, it will be inexpensive to run the servers for a user-base of 8000.

Parallel Development

Our architecture is very unique; we can share almost all of the code between the different types of games (single-player, vs LAN multiplayer, vs MMO.)

In fact, the local co-op LAN multiplayer is really just a modified version of the MMO server. Instead of communicating with a database, it'll store everything in memory and serialize to a file upon saving the game. The main difference being that it'll run standalone, instead of in a clustered environment.

• Hilary Craven - Founder / Game Designer - Hilary Craven has a passion for computer gaming that was largely influenced by her older brother. Raised in a family of board gamers she has always been looking to create a game. With a background and experience in business she is creating a game studio that will give back to the community. Currently still addicted to StarCraft and Civilizations.
• Ollie JD - Founder / Game Architect - Ollie is a 10 year veteran of the SF tech industry, and has gained valuable experience working and consulting for Silicon Valley companies. He worked for PIX System developing video software used in HBO shows like Game of Thrones and House of Cards. He was the lead engineer on the Sports Illustrated Snapshot Chrome App.
• Erica Parker - Business Dev - Erica leads our Business Development efforts to target strategic alliances and partnerships. In essense, she helps us make things happen that were previously unimaginable. Erica holds a Masters of Engineering from UC Berkeley. Her advise on legal and business aspects has been invaluable.
• Megan McDuffee - Composer / Musician - Megan holds both a BA in Film Scoring with a minor in Electronic Music from the University of CA, Santa Cruz and a Master's Certificate from the Berklee College of Music in Orchestration for Film and TV. Her music can be heard in numerous films, advertisements, TV shows, and video games including Galaxy Heist. Megan's piece "Kingdoms" is featured on Solar Crusaders first teaser video. We are looking forward for Megan creating unique pieces for Solar Crusaders.
• Federico Pereiro - Programmer - Federico is a full-stack JavaScript freelance developer and open source contributor. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Federico is now taking his work on the road, which brings him to distant and exotic places - provided they have an electric outlet and wifi.
• Aron Gerencser - Writer / Lore Master - Aron is a student and aspiring writer based in Budapest. A passionate gamer for as long as he can remember, Aron is a massive fan of anything and everything Sci-Fi. Be it high-tech space operas, post-apocalyptic dramas or abstract thrillers, if It's Science Fiction, Aron likes it.
• Ricardo Van Duuren - Digital Artist
• Emily So - Digital Artist
• Becca Bair - Digital Artist
• Joshua Kacher - Advisor
• Ruth Pimentel - Public Relations

Create a custom reward and then add on the following prices to your pledge:

+ $30.00

• Unlimited access to the Official Online Game Universe (no membership fee.) This means you get access to play Solar Crusaders for the life of the game.
• Unlimited access to game enhancements as they become available (single-player, and local co-op.)
• add $8.00 - Beta Access
• add $25.00 - Alpha 2 Access
• add $50.00 - Alpha 1 Access

+ $7.00 - 2 Tickets to launch party

+ $15.00 - Name a planet

+ $15.00 - Name a crew member

We are building Solar Crusaders using standard web technologies. Both the backend servers and the front-end game client will share code. This means that we'll be able to add features and fix bugs much faster than otherwise possible with other architectures.

The game will run in a web browser using no plugins, however, it will also be available as a regular game you can download and run (just like with any other Steam game.)

It will be incredibly easy to join the game universe, which means that there will be more players online at any given time.

Web-based technologies such as HTML5 and Node.js have come a long way in the past few years, and it is now possible to create high quality games that are virtually identical to their native counterparts.

Obviously, you won't see the next Crysis or Farcry on the web, but simpler games just don't need to be built using C++ anymore. HTML 5 game engines now support GPU accelerated graphics, and can even be distributed through Steam.

See BabylonJS and Pixi.js to see some tech demos. Also checkout Cross Code, a completed game using this new technology.

 Audio and visual quality in games has improved immensely over the past 10 years, however, game artificial intelligence has been largely overlooked by developers. Nowadays, the quality of the AI can really make or break the experience gamers have when playing the latest titles.

We aim to endue the NPCs in Solar Crusaders with intelligent tactical behavior that goes a step beyond rule-based, or cheating techniques. The agents in Solar Crusaders will be controlled by an adaptive algorithm that corrects mistakes by taking into account previously won and lost battles, on a massive scale.

Every battle in Solar Crusaders will be analyzed and recorded by the algorythm. As more and more data is generated, the NPC agents will be able to to better deal with unknown and emergent human-player tactics.

The adaptive A.I. will only be available in the Online Universe, the single-player and co-op versions of the game will utilize a standard rule-based approach (but not cheating.)