Brief History of Star of Doom

Star of Doom is an idea. It is a concept. It is a universe.
A lot of Star of Doom can summed up in the following extremely annoying song:



Anyone who played the second iteration of Star of Doom knows it well. But what is Star of Doom. It is a planned game. One that was never completed. It has gone through many iterations, yet always been too ambitious to survive. Star of Doom is my goal. Actually, the truth is that it was originally called Legend of the Fire Star. Star of Doom just sounded better.

First Iteration

Back when I was in sixth grade (2006), I had just failed at my fist attempt at creating a game when I first conceived Star of Doom. I began by planning out the characters and settings, imagining a whole galaxy filled with planers and stars, and nebulae and all kinds of alien life forms with rich histories and backgrounds. It was months later that I naively tried to actually make this a reality. After almost a month of coding using my own custom built DirectDraw game engine, the Cow Moostache 2D game engine, I had accomplished very little. I had a menu, a first cut-scene, and the beginning of a first area. At this point, my artist, Nick Safford, had to leave the project. Stranded, and not making much progress, I decided to abandon it for the time being. Failure Excuse: Lack of Experience.



Second Iteration

The second iteration was the first 3D attempt at Star of Doom created using the Irrlicht3D engine. It was also not only the most popular among my friends, but also the farthest of any attempt. I started this attempt towards the end of 6th grade, I believe. This attempt featured a full fledged RPG system with items, conversations, a pause menu, and so on. Well, you might ask what stopped me from finishing. Well... After a while, I begin to have massive code organization problems. It was simply too much to work with. My application started to break down bit by bit, and I was unable to isolate any of the causes of the problems. Failure Excuse: Lack of Organization

Third Iteration

I started this version around 7th grade The third iteration was similar to the second, but far more graphically intensive. This was due mainly to a switch over to the Ogre3D engine. I now had access to shaders, post processing, shadows, and much more. I could even have day and night cycles. It was during this iteration that I started a blog for the project: http://starofdoom.blogspot.com/. I began to work on more advanced effects such as water, terrain, and much more. This iteration somehow just dissipated, and I'm not even sure why. It was more of a lack of motivation, due to school, and homework and stuff. Failure Excuse: Lack of Motivation / Too Much Stress

Fourth Iteration

The fourth and most recent Iteration was spawned out of a desire to fully realize the dream of Star of Doom. Imagine if you could explore spherical planets in a dynamic universe, and travel to other planets and back, without any seams. Yeah. That would be awesome right. The video below shows as far as I got. Remember to watch the entire thing, otherwise the sense of scale doesn't hit you. In the video, I fly off the planet, and hyperdrive away to the black hole. I screw around there for a while, then turn back to face the planet. You see the planet as a tiny little speck orbiting its star. Even the star is not static. It orbits the black hole at massive speeds. Failure Excuse: Overly Ambitious.