Tempus

This is a game I spent way too much time making that I can't love it, but it's not a playable game.

It's the first networked game I made. At the time, I was in high school and I loved playing 4X games but I really, really hated how long they took to play -- among many other complaints. So, I made up a 4X game to play with my friends on paper between classes. Eventually, in 2012, I took my first programming class at school and shortly after decided to try my hand at making a video game version of it. I was, frankly, fucking tired of having to manually calculate each turn on my own. I wanted to create a networked 4X strategy game, but I only managed to make a multiplayer lobby that a game could be started from before I ran out of time for the class project.

A year later in 2013, I re-wrote the game from the ground up with a better UI system that was configured using an XML file. It didn't have any networked features and it still wasn't a game, but the UI was highly configurable at least!

Then the project sat abandoned for a while. A few years later, I tried to work on it again several times, without much success. I don't really remember much those attempts anymore; though I do remember taking some time to learn how to use Inkscape to make some vector icons and figuring out how to use those vector files directly in my game.

These icons were for the three resources in the game, cleverly acronym-ed as EMP (Economy, Military, Population), one of the many ideas I had for streamlining 4X games. But, in the end I never really finished the game and even though the many design ideas for what I want to have in a 4X game continue to fester in my mind, I decided to move on.