Thanks everyone for your comments on the last post. You folks posted a lot of useful stuff up there. Ben’s suggestions were particularly inspiring, but what really lodged itself in my brain was Vaconcovat’s comment about scrap hauling. The scrapper stations are relatively simple game systems, but because they interact with several other game systems they invoke complex and interesting player behaviour. In a few minutes of Captain Jameson I might do the following:
- Decide to explore further along bearing 90 from 0,0 (go right)
- Log in to the nearest nav station, and notice that I would need to cross a large gap between oxy stations
- Visit a recently reactivated factory that manufactures Charlie class Mk II Boosters (which should provide enough thrust to get me across the oxy gap)
- Realize I have insufficient credit
- Reconnect with the nav station, and this time bring up a list of ships in the area
- Identify, track down, and destroy a couple of hostile ships
- Rebuild my ship using the newly earned modules, configuring it for fast movement because my oxy is running low
- Crawl back to the second nearest oxy station, because it’s closer to the scrapper station I’m ultimately aiming to visit. I begin to doubt my decision as oxy hits 2%, but I make it there in time.
- Visit scrap station and get a quote for my wares. The quote is very low because some of the modules were damaged in the fight.
- Sell the undamaged modules and rebuild my ship out of damaged parts
- Take the damaged modules to a nearby repair station, and spend the credits earned in step 10 repairing them
- Return to the scrap station and sell of newly repaired parts
- Refill oxy
- Return to the factory and purchase a shiny new Mk II thruster
- Bolt the thruster to the back of my ship and zoom off into the unknown
It’s not a great story. There are no characters, there is hardly any plot, and it says bugger all about the human condition – but it’s a start. You’ll also notice a huge hole in point 1 – why go East? In fact, why go anywhere? This was the question that got me caught up in this stuff, but I think it was a mistake to try to answer it while also addressing generative narrative issues. I’m going to try treating them as separate problems for now and see where that leads me.
I’ll add asteroid fields on Monday.
<3 Farbs
Asteroid fields – sweet.
“why go East? In fact, why go anywhere?”
I see the aim of this new game, Jameson, to not level up your ships to kilo and then own everything, which was the overall “goal” of the previous games, but this one is to survive. Yes you have to go somewhere, you now have the new feature of oxygen. And, to get oxy, you need credits. To get credits, you need to find a preferred “job”. I see you spending 70% of your earnings on surviving, (repairs, modules and oxy), then the remainder you could put towards the levelling-up of you ships, to kilo, THEN owning everything. The addition of asteroids will introduce another survival factor.
Now, i must ask. What’s happening with peacekeepers in this game? Are they once again (faulty?) and only show up once you reach kilo? Is there actually a “Peacekeeping Command”? I would love to actually get escorted by some info buoys to peacekeeping command to get fined, or “exterminated”.
Sounds fantastic, as usual!
Love the use of Oxygen as a limiting factor.
That’s look really nice!! Oxugen for limit, distance between stations, everythings look very intereting.
This probably doesn’t work into the current vision of Jameson, but i was thinking that something like the UHL out of starflight 2 or the borg from tng could be a avenue for an infection game mechanic.
Either the individual modules could become “infected” and need to be blasted off otherwise friendly ships or there could be an interloping command module that has attached and seized control.
the interloping module concept would probably be simpler to implement with in the current framework unless you had already built in something besides health into the tracking of modules.
I was just thinking that maybe a villain is needed to build quests around.
@Vaconcovat
“And, to get oxy, you need credits.”
I don’t think oxygen costs anything. It shouldn’t imo
Well, IMO it should cost, because in space, oxygen is limited, isn’t it? Otherwise you could just sit at an oxy station and survive indefinitely.
The overall goal of the previous games was – in theory – to make less sector-destroying explosions happen. If you want a proper, story-ish goal that can actually be completed, it could be to set things up so that the ship will never explode again. The options as I see them, listed from most to least desirable for the Captain:
-Get back to civilisation. This may require summoning peacekeepers so you can use their [insert maguffin here]s to get home (FTL drives, maybe?). Or it may just require heading east for a long time. Or both could be possible.
-Find an invisibility module, sufficiently fortified starbase, or something else that will allow the ship to remain safe ad infinitum, but possibly at the cost of the Captain ever getting home.
-Find a safe way to permanently destroy, deactivate or hide the ship, possibly with the Captain still inside. Teleporting it past the event horizon of a black hole, finding a wormhole to an uninhabited patch of space (which unfortunately would mean no oxy stations), turning the ship’s sector-destroying energy inwards etc.
-Find a way to permanently destroy, deactivate or hide the ship . . . at the cost of one last sector-shattering kaboom.
-Fail at protecting the ship, causing another mass death.
-Die painfully from lack of oxygen, only to be revived when the ship next wipes out a sector.
There could be a lot of drama coming from the player’s prioritisation. How much faith do they have in the rumors of invisibility modules that get passed on while dealing with starbases? If they find a wormhole, do they choose to sacrifice themselves to save countless lives, or carry on looking for a less suicidal solution? Is it ‘safer’ to stay in one place and summon the peacekeepers by smashing government starbases, or keep heading east while avoiding as much attention as possible? How sure are they that the starbase will be able to keep them safe indefinitely? These questions could be implicit, or the Captain or an NPC adviser could spell them out for the player.
Final note: the endings could depend on choices passed up as well as choices taken. A Captain who had no other options than to get back home, and got back home, would be content. A Captain who decides not to take the black hole option early on, and gets home in the end, may suffer from nightmares when he considers how many lives he gambled so he could have his happy ending.
Great blog dude Thanks
Thx, interesting article