Sidus Obscurus


About

Sidus Obscurus was my first big game project that I wrote using Delphi and Win32. Back in the days I didn’t knew about OpenGL so it used some very old DirectX-components for Delphi (called DGC) which gave me a lot of trouble later on as they didn’t work with newer DirectX versions. In total I worked around 2 years on this game, gameplay was a bit like Ascendancy with it’s space exploration, resarch and different alien races but combined with a real-time-strategy part. You had a fleet of space ships and in realtime had to conquer planets, create buildings there and research new technologies. There were four different races each with it’s own set of ships and each planet-type also had it’s own pre-rendered background where you could construct buildings.

Your opponents were controlled by the computer, but back in those days I wasn’t very experienced and so it’s a very dumb and basic AI. But it would conquer planets, construct buildings, research and even attack you from time to time. You could also even get into diplomatic talks with them.

I worked on this game to a state where it was fully playable and only a few things (like a story-based campaign for each race) were missing, but the gameplay wasn’t that fun and since it was my first huge project for Win32 I did a lot of mistakes and bad decisions so I didn’t develop it any further. Besides this (as said above) it wouldn’t work with newer graphics cards (and newer DirectX versions) so I also don’t offer it as a download here.

Tech

Written in Delphi with a DirectX 2D based renderer.

Screenshots