I've been having a bit of a rough time in the past few weeks, having to deal with financial shortfalls from overdue invoices and extricating myself from a project I'd been working on pretty heavily over the last half-year. I've long realized that I like making game prototypes as a hobby and distraction, so I'm going to do that now: make a game prototype, with no immediate plans for making it into a real game. And to make things more interesting, I am going to blog about it in detail.
The high concept? Think FTL minus direct crew control plus ship design - in a dieselpunk airship setting.
These airships aren't zeppelins - they're held aloft by some form of Suspending Disbeliefium, like the ones in Howl's Moving Castle (briefly visible here) or Aetheric Mechanics.
I'm going to write the game using my CatEngine, which is a simple abstraction layer over a bunch of Java 2D engines, and which also underpins Patent Blaster and the new graphics for SE:SS.
The first installment will follow shortly, covering a bit more of the game concept and the project setup.