Okay. So I’m sitting here, right? I’m sitting here looking for job offers and waiting for phone calls. And the situation is getting increasingly dire.

So I’ma make a game.

Inspired by Ido Yehieli‘s success porting Cardinal Quest to Android, I’m going to write an Android game.

In three days.

I have until Monday morning to get this game done and get it on Google Play, where hopefully it can help us dig out of our current hole.

It’s going to be called Star Revolution. Yes, I know, I was going to use that name for my huge RPG with tactical space and ground combat…but I’m starting to think it might be a bit hard to write that game myself.

So Star Revolution has been reinvented as a 4X game for Android phones. If you’re not familiar with the term, TV Tropes does a good job of explaining, as usual.

The problem with 4X games I’ve played like Civilization, Master of Orion, and Galactic Civilizations 2 is that they just blow up to become these huge things as you play them. Now, that’s a feature…until it’s time to sleep. Then the game state that you were carefully maintaining in your head during play gets lost, and when you come back, especially if it’s days later, your first thought will be “What the hell was I doing? Why am I researching Improved Toenail Clipping? Why is my fleet on the other side of the map? And why did I think allying with Montezuma was a good idea?”

This may suggest that there aren’t many 4X games on mobile platforms because of the inherent stop-and-start play of portable devices. But I think that by pulling the scale of the game back a bit I can still make a fun game that players can pick up and put down as needed.

I’ll be prototyping the game in C++ using my own development framework, but I’ll be writing the final game in Haxe and NME. And I’ll be blogging and tweeting the entire process.

Wish me luck!