Around 1995 I decided to make a 4X title similar to Master of Orion, one of my favorite games of the time. The project was later heavily influenced by another X4 title called Stars!. The project grew both in scope and scale, and in few years it had evolved into Ruler of the Galaxy, a space strategy game on a massive scale. The project was very ambitious, with support for huge galaxies and complex ship design and combat.
I worked on the game sporadically during the late 90s. The project was temporarily put on hold in the Summer 2000 when I started my military service and restarted again in the Spring 2001. I got a lot of work during that time, but after my university studies started in the Fall 2001 I no longer had the time necessary to work on such a large scale project. The project was again put on hold, this time likely for good. Few years later, the project source code was lost in a harddisk failure.
The final version had most of the basic features such as exploration and colonization of the planets working, and there was also a simple version of the ship design. The game also supported basic multiplayer (play-by-email) even if it was somewhat buggy. However, many of the advanced features such as ship combat were either very unfinished or missing completely.
Legacy
While the game itself is most likely dead, the Ruler universe still lives on. The game was to include a long campaign and a deep storyline and I have written quite a bit of material in the Ruler universe, both technical and prose. While most of this material is just fragments and incomplete, I hope that one one day I can write down at least some of the stories in a coherent form and publish them, at least on the Net and hopefully in physical form too.
Screenshots
