Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Retropunch]

Absolutely into being able to do your own thing around the galaxy. While I understand what FTL was doing by harassing the player forever onwards towards the final showdown, I want to go the other way and have a safe inner core of home worlds where the player can trade and undertake low risk/low reward missions and to ramp up the risk of danger (and rewards!) in clearly marked zones out towards the periphery of the galaxy. So players are allowed to pootle around without being worried that something will smash them to pieces.

Multiplayer is currently working in the starship editor, so players can build together in a shared space but I'm cautious about what multiplayer would be in a game where space travel can take a long time. For now we're concentrating on single player, though I always liked playing games with a friend who would advise, co-pilot, read bits of the manual, swear, laugh and so on. I'd love to be able to share the game with another in this way. Just a thought though!

Fatigue is certainly planned as a feature for the crew.

Thanks again for the thoughts and suggestions!

That sounds fantastic! I really like the idea of a safer inner-core.

As for multiplayer, I'd really, really like to see two (or more) players on the same ship. Perhaps it could be that they control one or more of the crew, or, if boarding/ship-to-ship fighting will be a thing, then one could control the marines and the other the rest of the crew (or sections of the crew). I'm not sure how would be best to divide it, but I really, really think that cooperative play on a ship would be something people would absolutely die for - even if it wasn't constantly 100% action for all players all the time.

[glowingslab]

Both of your comments closely reflect things I've been considering. Space travel would take some in game time, essentially either faster (high g, high consumption of 'fuel') or slower (high consumption of 'air') with an option of using cryogenics to conserve air and further protect the crew.

Current thinking is to provide a 'next event' button that increases the time stepping quickly and returns to real time at the next planned flight event or in the case of an unexpected alert.

I have thought about a kind of hardcore multiplayer that only ran in real time, but that's pretty out there as a very speculative idea. It would depend upon how much other interesting activity the player can do whilst en route.

Pulsar, Lost Colony seems to be doing the 'multiplayer co-operative all on board the same ship' thing and it looks very good. The command decisions in Space Death are the player's own, tension comes from having sole responsibility for how you manage your ship and crew, multiplayer co-op might dilute that too much. Also, I'm very much in favour of the player being able to take time to reach a decision, it's not supposed to be a high click rate RTS, more 'set-up, observe, tweak'.

Eh, before releasing a demo we will finalise a list of planned features. I'm wary of getting unstuck and attracting criticism (see Spacebase DF9 debacle) but I really value being able to post speculative ideas here.

[Scoops Novel]

So you're envisioning multiplayer as co-op RTS? If you're going for that, simply allowing players to form fleets would cut it. However, if each player is part of the crew on the same ship, i highly highly doubt you'd have problems with lack of tension. Division of labour, reliance on good communication, "differences of opinion" on plans (mutiny)- you see where I'm going.

I suppose it depends on how far you're going with the first person mode. If it's sufficiently detailed, I'm telling ya people will get invested in their possessed crewman, and i have to admit, I'd like to see some personality to the AI crewmen.

[Retropunch]

As Novel Scoops says, I definitely think that you could manage to have a few players running crew on the same ship without getting boring/losing the tension. Trying to communicate your plans and divide what you need to do will up the tension enough to bypass any loss from having two players at it, and as most people will no doubt be playing with friends (LAN OPTION!!!) it doesn't matter if there's some downtime or they're just sat planning their next move.

 

[glowingslab]

I'm interested in players being able to share and communicate whilst playing. Giving control to more than one player still seems messy but your arguments are quite compelling. Having a number of players on board is technically fine, and I'm up for doing a build where we can explore that during development. Having said that, frankly I often find multiplayer gaming too much of a responsibility ill suited to my habits of starting a game, pausing and then quitting suddenly though. We will see!

[Scoops Novel]

It sounds like you're going for harder then usual Sci-fi, and the game is pretty open-ended. When you say things like Cryo, are we talking realistic (in-game)  timescales?

[Scoops Novel]

I like what i see in the new blog post! I'm guessing the SOS terminal will end up a bit more interesting then shown, right? May be immersive but as it is might as well interact with pieces from the top-view.

[glowingslab]

Yes, that is one of the issues for direct control via the terminal - that it wouldn't be as effective or as graphically pleasing as using the 3D ship view to select components. However, it may - and I hav le to stress may - end up being a way to access systems on stations and other ships, and an interface for programming systems. Quite ambitious! Glad you like the other screens too, I've spent some time trying to get the radio communications to be potentially exciting. I'm very interested in trying to get mystery and suspense into Space Death, the sense of doubt about a contact and the fear about setting a dangerous course... I always liked the Silent Hunter series so I guess there's a little dash of that in there.

[Scoops Novel]

I would move some of the information to dedicated screens, to prevent information overload/eye strain . Like the system map on the side of that Alert screen, which should have it's own prime-time window. I also think the Condition Report could do with being more visual- say, portraits of the various crew members, frosted over for cryo, icons next to the supplies- as for the bars, the Ship Status side of the screen has visually distinctive indicators, and i think are ordered according to priority. The same thing should happen with the pretty samey Fuels and Containment bars.

[Margrave]

I cannot wait to see what you have in store, definitely going to watch this, keep up the good work!

What's your current thoughts on how large the ships could become and how big the crew size could be?

[glowingslab]

Funnily enough, I'd reached the same conclusions then read your post, so our thinking chimes on this one. I'm moving the Hyperspace Jump Unit to a sidebar of it's own, as it will be directly selectable in the main 3D view anyway. So now there will be a 'Set as H-Jump target' button added to the Cartographic Display. I've been tempted to make the system map full screen too, something like the quite pleasant one in Frontier (now also in Elite Dangerous) although there is a counter argument for not revealing too much before the player gets there, so there's a possibility that it might be dropped altogether.

I'm going to experiment with slightly more detailed crew heads, which may allow for their use in displays. I have tried some icons along with the readouts before and it just added to the clutter. The Life support screen does change quite a bit so I expect that will have some significant alterations in the future. There will also probably be a dedicated Cryogenics Display as well as a Crew Roster, something a little like the DF job/role list I expect.

I've got a big ship going which is very loosely based on the wedge shape of a Star Destroyer. If you check www.spacedeath.net you can see some screenshots I uploaded some time ago. We still need to do some more optimisation for drawing all the parts on screen. I'd like the game to cope with hundreds of crew but we'll have to see how it runs!   I'd like it to be able to deal with an Enterprise like ship at the top end, I think anything more would overwhelm the player and most people's computers. I'd probably try to keep the crew numbers lower than they are in a lot of science fiction, so I doubt we would want to deal with numbers in the high hundreds. I'm aware that the Enterprise had around 600 crew but really, when you have to deal with encounters with other ships I think that it would be unworkable, unpleasant. I'm more a fan of keeping the crew down to between five and thirty so as to personalise and value the crew, but it could be great fun to have a big ship with loads of marines on board.

TLDR: Big ships, lots of crew possible.

[Scoops Novel]

Impressive screens. I preferred the alert screen front and center, though i can't wait to see how you fill up the space. I'm guessing that you'll be plotting navigation in real time?

And just to bump,

It sounds like you're going for harder then usual Sci-fi, and the game is pretty open-ended. When you say things like Cryo, are we talking realistic (in-game)  timescales?

[Scoops Novel]

I see that the crew members have personality traits. Are they going to suffer mental breakdowns, and could there be a HR officer as a result?

[glowingslab]

Thanks! Flight will be pretty slow, players will probably want to keep their ships to less than 3g acceleration, so cryogenics will play a part in that as well as hopefully becoming a nice mechanism for the player to have a kind of time dilation. The actual plotting of navigation will need a little fiddling with when get around to coding it, especially in regard to how to visualise events ahead of time (where a planet will be by the time the ship gets there) so we may need to add a time play/rewind control too. I'm hoping for something on the lines of Kerbal's flight manoeuvre plotter.

The personality traits are something of an experiment that was connected to team work and problem solving by the crew. Not sure if it is going to work out quite as intended so don't get too excited by that . There will have fatigue and stress though - so hopefully we will see XCOM like berserk behaviour on occasion.

[Kaje]

Looks beautiful, and has me uber excited!