Galactic Impact
Space exploration ("4X") turn-based MMO
Finally rolled out a community Discord server, for players to interact and help each other discover the Galaxy, swap tips, and perhaps collude with each other on exploration, trade, or combat — we'll see how it goes! I was reluctant to roll this out as a separate channel, but many new players signing up responded to the first "Reply with feedback" email requesting it.
Found the "Persistent Browser Based Games" Subreddit r/PBBG, which is a community for games that operate in the exact mode that Galactic Impact does: Over time, in a browser. The response has been great, and it seems like the game has really found its target audience with this community!
Galactic Impact is an ongoing web based multiplayer game inspired by the space civilization games from the 90s (Think: Master of Orion, Spaceward Ho!, Pax Imperia). It's low time commitment, 15 to 120 minutes per week, and it's at the point where gameplay is quite solid, and a few of the players who have tried it are hooked. Unfortunately, marketing is not my strong suit, and many of the game's features, like trade, diplomacy and war are designed to function best when the galaxy is teeming with various players.
I've tried some word-of-mouth, posting to a few relevant subreddits, and worked a bit of a twitter presence by following other indie game creators and gaming review accounts, but it's been a slow boil so far.
Any ideas or tips on finding communities of nostalgia gamers, or perhaps 30-50 professionals who used to be avid strategy gamers, but now don't often find the time?
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Have you tried finding relevant communities on Reddit? Reddit has one of the most helpful communities out there
Paid subscriptions are still optional for full game functionality, but after a lot of feedback from early players, there was a strong consensus that the entertainment value was there, and several wished they could choose a different, higher amount. So I went through the exercise of creating a new, higher, Stripe "Price" and rolled it out!
With the help of a UX expert and a frontend developer/designer, Galactic Impact finally looked nice enough to invite the public in.
Now working to share with more people, get more signups, and start to build a community!
Development is ongoing, with a full roadmap of player experience improvements and new features to come.
Spent about 8 hours between yesterday and today implementing a basic Stripe integration based on a short tutorial and Stripe's (excellent) documentation. Deployed to production this morning, and completed signup/checkout flow to 'upgrade' my own account with a real CC.
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Hey @woodardj just out of curiosity may I know why it took 8hours for the stripe integration? Did it involve reading or just implementation? I've always heard people say how easy Stripe integrations have been. A product I used to work on recently did their stripe integration as well.
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Thanks for asking @Nakkeeran — I'd say a single workday to roll out a full recurring subscription system is pretty fast! this kind of thing used to take weeks of dev time. Here were the steps I took:
- Data model to store references to User's Stripe data
- Setting up my subscription pricing in both Stripe's live and test mode
- Configure my server to boot up configured to use either test or live mode
- Implement the webhook receiver to get updates from the Stripe
- Test cancellation and re-subscription
I used this article as a roadmap, though I adapted some of the patterns to better fit my application: Recurring Subscriptions in One Day with Rails.
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Setting a full recurring subscription system in a full day just shows the progress we have made in technology terms.
Before Stripe did you look into any alternatives?
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Not for this project, no — it's sort of a slam dunk in this case. At a previous company though, we used Authorize.net directly, and I evaluated both Stripe and Braintree as replacements at that time.
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Authorize.net is new to me, never heard of it. I'm a fan of Stripe, Gumroad and Paddle when it comes to payments (each one suits a particular need depending on the payments type)
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Shared the link to sign up publicly for the first time, both here on IndieHackers, and in Slack workspace for game developers in Colorado, in an effort to get it out there before I'm comfortable doing so and under the philosophy that "if you're not embarassed by your first version, you built too much" 😮
Sent out the signup link to a few friends to try it out, and started getting their feedback on the signup process, and the confusing aspects of onboarding. Used Slack both for collecting feedback and as a proxy for in game communication which is something I plan to build eventually, but not worth the development time at the moment.
First put code to editor for the rebuild of Galactic Impact, after setting the project aside almost ten years ago.
See more of the journey to get this thing rebuilt on the development blog: https://www.galacticimpact.com/2020/06/13/dawn-of-rails/
New codebase, new web framework, and a decade of both software and (tabletop) game design experience to help power it.
I wanted to learn a new web development framework (Django, at the time) and decided to build an online game in the style of classics I loved when I was younger, like Pax Imperia and Master of Orion.
Over the next 8-12 months, I built out a basic version and had twenty five playtesters/users at the peak before some intractable issues forced me to set it aside.
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