Wing Commander 1 Reloaded (ALPHA)

A complete rebuild of the original game in Unity. New combat and graphics engine based on Howard Day's work. (requires original WC1 game files)

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What this is? Full Vega Campaign. (ALPHA)

Over 7 Years ago Howard Day created a WC1 Tech demo featuring a beautiful upgraded graphics concept of WC1 at 640x400, it was not playable but it was beautiful to behold.  I came accross his work about two years ago and instantly knew I had to play Wing Commander THAT way.  At that time I started on a multiplayer module for it and some basic WC1 game flow. My life got busy with my bread and butter which is VFX work. Then this summer I was re-inspired to pick it back up and it took many months to build it into a playable Vega Campaign. Reloaded mod seeks to give you the FEELING of the original, not be a carbon copy.  

The tech demo though gorgeous didn't have any of the systems needed for a Wing Commander game to be playable. So I've been working tons to get NAV systems, weapon ordinance, new pilot AI's, turret AI, com systems, capital ships, maneuvering, missing graphics, and the whole games story and cinematic mechanics all implemented so we can play the VEGA campaign.

Wing Com Reloaded DISCORD: https://discord.gg/kvCh72A9r

Who am I?

Cryptomax here. I've been a VFX Supervisor and Artist for the last 20 years supervising and creating thousands of vfx shots in dozens of films. About 9 years ago I got into Unity game dev as a hobby and released my first multiplayer VR game in 2020, it has to date gotten over 500k downloads and still has an active player base.  All these experiences put me in a pretty good place to turn Howard's tech demo into a full game.

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Beyond the campaign (in progress) 

Multiplayer skirmish. A dedicated skirmish engine for head-to-head and co-op fights, using the same flight model as the campaign. Pick ships, pick a scenario, go. Rank System.

Full Custom Campaign builder. Create custom rec room dialog and custom briefings, you can even control expressions!

Mission builder. A full editor for nav points, encounters, hazards and objectives — the same structures the imported original missions use, so anything the game can do, you can build.

Built on

Cryptomax  — entire game rebuilt in Unity
All systems have been manually reconstructed in Unity to get close to the original experience. Nothing is carbon copied or converted from the original source. Cinematics and conversations can be experienced pixel uprezed to 640 or played vanilla.

Howard Day — base flight, combat engine and original art look.

Created the baseline engine and the art style and look the combat overhaul is built on, running at 640. Nearly all non-capital ships are sprites he generated. Nearly all capital ships are also modeled by him. (I modeled the Fralthi Cruiser)

  
Source reconstruction projects that helped me particularly with cinematic and dialog integration

- WC1 Source Reconstruction (wc1-re) (https://github.com/neuromancer/wc1-re) — neuromancer
- WC1_clone (https://github.com/delMar43/wcmodtoolsources/tree/master/WC1_clone) — ZOmegaZ
- WC Mission Tools (https://github.com/SemperFu/WCMissionTools) — SemperFu
 (https://github.com/delMar43/wcmodtoolsources) — delMar43

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KNOWN ISSUES:
Joysticks are having issues. Asteroids are visually broken atm. Please report any bugs to the discord bug channel. That said this is an ALPHA and anything could be broken still :)

This is a a free, non-commercial fan project. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders of Wing Commander. No original game content is distributed — you supply your own copy.

If you felt like buying me a coffee for the effort it would be greatly appreciated i've put roughly 2000 hours of my time into this project.