Here's a fun recent discovery, Songs of Syx an in-development title from Swedish developer Jakob de Laval. It's a city-builder with empire management, tactical battles and rpg-elements and it's looking good.
With an interesting pixel-art top-down view, Songs of Syx reminds me a little of Rise to Ruins, another great pixel-art builder. It's been in development since 2014, with an Early Access release due sometime in March next year with support for Linux, Mac and Windows.
Catching my interest right away was the scale that Songs of Syx is going for. Starting off with a small colony, you will eventually grow to thousands of people where it will introduce nobility, inflation, supply-lines, alliances, vassals and conquest.
Direct Link
Sounds like it will have a fair amount of depth to it too. With big bloody battles, different seasons, religions, research, trading, a justice system, modding support and so on. You can also flip the game on its head and become a "servant of chaos" which has rather different game mechanics including raising the dead. Apparently this becomes a race against time, as everyone will band together against you. All of it sounds like a lot of fun, can't wait to see more.
From what the developer has said, it seems like it will eventually go to Kickstarter. Should do well, considering how impressive it seems already.
Want to try a really early demo? You can find that on Indie DB, simply run the .jar file with your local Java install and it works fine. For all the rest, check out the official website.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: PatolaNot on Steam? :-(From their homepage:
QuoteSongs of Syx is in development since 2014 and early access will be available March 2020 for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Actually, I find this very commendable. Instead of spamming Steam with even more unfinished ****, they wait until they are actually ready for the public.
That said, I do wonder why they did not go with itch.io ...
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 20 July 2019 at 8:52 pm UTC
In general I am very intrigued by the setting and the complexity but wonder how said complexity will be manageable throughout the game and at different scales.
Quoting: NagezahnAlso I'm a bit worried about performance. If there are "30.000 individual and complex inhabitants" to be simulated with all the interactions, that is not an easy task.
Let's wait and see. I imagine an Actor system being used and then this seems totally possible. (See e.g. https://aeplay.org/citybound which features *millions* of individuals - although that's made in Rust. But I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to do it in a JVM language)
Last edited by Maelrane on 21 July 2019 at 8:51 am UTC
Quoting: MaelraneLet's wait and see. I imagine an Actor system being used and then this seems totally possible. (See e.g. https://aeplay.org/citybound which features *millions* of individuals - although that's made in Rust. But I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to do it in a JVM language)
Thanks for the link. From what I have read on the page, it aims at running on more than one machine (server), so "millions" of individuals will probably not be simulated on hardware you play typical single player game on. I've tried a live build and don't believe my machine would be able to run that many with acceptable performance.
The problem with JVM is just the performance hit you have to take in relation to a native implementation. It's very hard to compare because there are so many factors going in. Found some numbers by Google here: https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-Hundt.pdf
But most important is you know your tools. Naturally you can write horrible and inefficient code in any language, beyond a point where no compiler optimisation can help you. So if Java is your thing, Java it should be.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me