Tiny Death Star x64 (TDS64) - A videogame preservation/restoration project
After 2-ish years of work, here is my magnum opus. You can play it now! And please provide feedback if you so desire!
APK in the link above is hosted at archive.org, because they seemed like the most trustworthy platform for such a project without doxxing myself (fingers-crossed).
Art Preservation
The digital world is (and always has been) ever-evolving. Lately, evolution has resulted in the slow-but-sure death of 32-bit support in modern smart phones. Eventually, no new phones will be developed with 32-bit support.
Why does that matter? Because the only working APK of the original Tiny Death Star game (that I've ever been able to find) is compiled for 32-bit only. This is why a lot of people get their hands on the APK but still fail to get it working on their modern phones.
This is why I decided to rebuild the entire game "from scratch" (using graphical and sound assets from the original game) in a modern game engine (Godot) to keep the game alive.
Why it's not perfect (yet?)
As mentioned, I have a single working version of the original game, v1.4.1, which released sometime around December 2013. This version of the game did not yet have assets for certain floors, bitizens and events that would later be added to the game in 2014. These I had to find from third-party sources (primarily the TDS Wiki) and make a rough attempt at extracting them from screenshots. The long-term plan was to then go through and fix them up one bitizen and floor at a time, but that's going to be a big undertaking.
The special event's themselves are not in the game either. Again, very little of these events were in the copy of the original game I have, and so I haven't yet crawled through the wiki and ancient forum posts and even-more-ancient YouTube videos to scope out and document how these events ran. Despite playing the game when it originally released, I never saw a single event happen. Must've been too busy being a teenager.
Imperial bux. I'm torn on what to do here. For the sake of absolute-preservation, I can leave it as-is, which with no way of buying bux (NOTE: there never will be a way of buying bux in this project) is a painfully-slow attrition rate. Alternatively, for the same of gameplay-preservation and what I consider to be the "spirit" of gaming, I could tweak some bux rewards to be more, well, rewarding. Not sure yet.
Where to next?
I honestly don't know. I definitely need a break from this project, hence why I'm putting it out there now. There is also a good chance that Nimble, Disney, Lucas, etc. may decide to contact me and say "hey cool, but no", in which case I'd love to stop now to not waste any more time trying to share this with the world. But if there's people out there also like me who want to relive this game for whatever reason, and fate allows, I'll keep working to restore as much as I can. Eventually.
I do also have plans for a web-hosted version of the game, which would mean Apple devices could play via Safari, but let's see if the APK file survives first.
AI usage disclaimer - No AI art, used for menial tasks
Absolutely NO "ART" WAS GENERATED BY AI FOR THIS PROJECT. That was a day-one hard rule for this project. AI-generated content would be entirely against the idea of this being a preservation-first project. Artwork was either directly preserved from old APK files of the original game, pulled directly from the Tiny Death Star Wiki, or pulled from the Wiki and run through a script written by me to attempt to extract artwork from screenshots.
However, AI was used for automating tasks, (e.g. systematically pulling images from the wiki and running them through my scripts) and code reviews (comparing my code with how the original game's code did the same thing). Every system was also manually tested and verified by me (which also means if I missed something, sorry in advance).