It’s been interesting to realize exactly how tied the design of the game and its interface are. I really want to get a layout for Star Revolution, but in order to do so I need to nail down exactly what I want the player to be able to do in the game. And that means making some decisions.
For instance…do I let the player walk around planets? Some games of this genre do, and some don’t. Games that focus on the trading and combat, like Elite and Privateer, do not allow players to walk around planets; they simply abstract the planet out to a series of menus.
But games that focus on role-playing style elements (conversations, quest objects, etc) tend to allow the player to run around the surface of planets. Starflight 1 and 2, Star Control 2, and the MegaTraveller games all do this. In the case of the first three, planets are barren except for minerals, random lifeforms, and the occasional trade post – there’s no indication of the settlements of sentient beings at all. MegaTraveller takes the exact opposite tack – visiting a “planet” means visiting one city on that planet, with all of the cities in the game being constructed out of stock buildings in different arrangements. You can’t leave the city and walk around in the wilderness…I guess the designers don’t know why you’d ever want to.
Now, the reason I need to hash this out is because of a derived question: what is combat on the surface of a planet like? Or perhaps I should generalize: what is combat outside of your ship like?
Shall I just ignore it and say you can’t get attacked outside of your ship?
Pros: Very simple to write.
Cons: I learn nothing. Doesn’t feel particularly realistic or satisfying to the player.
Should I have the player stay in a land vehicle the whole time and perhaps allow that vehicle to fire lasers on enemies?
Pros: Still pretty simple to write. Could be fun if I do it right.
Cons: I learn very little. Could be not fun if I do it wrong. Doesn’t feel very realistic. Means the player’s characters can never go inside any building in the world.
Should I allow the player’s characters to walk around individually and create a man-to-man combat system?
Pros: Could be very fun if I do it right. Been wanting to write this combat system for a while. I’ll learn a lot.
Cons: This means that I will be writing two completely different combat engines for this game – one for space combat and one for man-to-man combat. Not only will this be a lot of work, it could raise the complexity of the game too high (I have been wanting to try to keep the game simpler and more accessible).
Another serious problem will be helping players keep track of the immense amount of data these types of games typically throw at them. I don’t just want the interface to allow the player to call up old conversations (that’s easy); I also want it to help them remember where that particular planet with particular features was. Remember, that’s how Lister lost the Red Dwarf: “They’re all the same, those little blue-green planetoids! Blue-green and planetoidy!” This means special indicators on the starmap for which systems have been explored and which haven’t, as well as screens for calling up the data on every planet in an explored system. Lots of complex stuff, but the alternative is to require the player to take tons of notes, which most players aren’t willing to do any more (and let’s face it, neither am I). Besides, if you really were in the 27th century, you’d have computers to help you remember all this stuff.
It just seems like the more of these questions I answer, the more I have to do. This game is shaping up to be far bigger than Inaria, both in programming and in content, and I certainly hadn’t anticipated this.
Some people will argue that the interface is the game rather than simply a part of it. I am inclined to agree, but I’ll admit that I haven’t read arguments to the contrary either.
Good luck!
Okay. Firstly, My suggestion for ground system…
I like, very much, the third and most complicated system you’ve described. I don’t think it has to be two different combat systems if done right, but it might be. Earlier this year, I had been designing this exact game and I’ve come to some conclusions.
Firstly, the best way I figured around the two different combat systems was to design the systems to be run by the other method. So, I had a radial menu system (because it’d be best if your ground units only had a couple of abilities). And you could basically drive the units by radial selecting them and moving on. The ship was best played with a toolbar and clicking on targets. However, both systems exist in both modes. You could radial menu the ship around and you could toolbar the units around (like playing Baldur’s Gate). The only difference is controlling one unit or many (pause and play makes the world go ’round).
Secondly, with regards to planet info. I’d have to go with star map with top-level information on a rollover/small window. Right-clicking or alt-clicking on the planet loads a Full screen info window with data in panes. Then it’s about letting the player decide what information he or she wants active.
The other advantage to the fact that the groudn combat is a second system entirely is that you can leave it out until you need it. However, if you want to have a crew of units that go out on the ground (Firefly instantly springs to mind as an example), I recommend having that crew be useful on the ship. Your ship, in addition to equipment slots, would have “crew slots.” Putting Kaylee in Engineering makes her go faster. Putting Wash in the pilot slot improves turning speed or something. You get the general idea. Then, you really have to worry about your away missions, because you could lose the +5 bonus to stealth because your Rogue/Navigator died disarming a trap on Rigelius 5.
Oh, yes. I was planning on having the player recruit characters with different skills to fill crew slots on the ship…the question was whether those crew would be allowed to leave the ship, and I’m leaning towards “yes”. The Law of Fives demands that there be four crew members (since the fifth thing the player will have to keep track of will be the ship itself, of course). This appeals to me, I always thought four was the perfect size for an RPG party.
And you and your radial menus 🙂
Well, it’s certainly the classic party size: Fighter, Thief, Mage, Cleric.
And radial menues is the fastest way I can think to actively control an RPG party in a game paced more like an RTS (what we might call squad combat strategy). I had what I think was a cool system that dealt with it and was quite pretty. I love squad combat games. I’d love to see a game like Myth but with the kind of quick, intuitive interface that allows you to play it at the pace people play C&C or Warcraft games. But Myth didn’t have all that crappy building and resource management. It was more like playing Warhammer.
Radial menus are effective, only not the way they were done in NWN. If you can call them up instantly, like by alt-clicking or shift-clicking, then they become basically a simple gesture system.
I would accept a radial menu if it popped up instantly and a standard item in the menu was always in the same place (“Get” at the top, for instance). But the way they are normally used in games like The Sims, you have to visually parse the whole menu every time you use it to figure out where that command you want is.
A radial menu that pops instantly and has menu items always in the same place would basically be a movable command card…which is definitely doable, since my new GUI system (which is immediate-mode) can handle movable GUI elements very easily. I’ll think about it.
And you’re right – I won’t really need two combat systems. I’ll only have one, just with very different units involved depending on whether it’s ground or space combat. On the ground, you’ll have four highly mobile units that can only do one or two things. In space, you’ll have a single, much less agile unit that can do a whole bunch of different things. So even though I’ll be using the same system, the combat should feel different enough to be interesting to the player.
Now, this system isn’t real-time. It’s going to be more of a simultaneous turn-based kind of thing.
If you keep making me think like this, Dave, you’re going to end up with a designer credit on this game 🙂
Hey, I need a credit on something. Hit & Myth “shipped” but I think I may be counting eBay sales.
And, like I said, a couple of months ago, I was designing a very similar game. In fact, I think a couple of us were. Tom had some kind of space trading game.
Tom’s still working on it. But it’s more of a fast-action Elite/Privateer type thing, where the fun comes from getting paid for blowing things up and using that money to make it easier to blow things up (note that I am not disparaging this mechanic; it’s an excellent one and I’ve played great games based on it). While you will be able to get paid for blowing things up and you will be able to use that money to improve your ship, my game is going to be more of a “figure out why the universe is about to end and stop it” kind of thing.
Always a good one. I like a slow, story-based RPG. At one point, I wondered if it were possible to build a campaign world in a PC RPG. Oblivion has a constant through line and central plot, but around it are all of these mini plots and missions. Well, as a designer, I just want to throw billions of bites of content at something.
So, I thought that if you were building a game that was simple enough and didn’t require the complicated art sets of something like NWN, it might be possible to make a game that is like a personal MMO. It’s a static world that doesn’t have an earth shattering, universe-ending problem but several things that threaten empires or kingdoms or the rise of an imprisoned god or something. Basically, within the game, you’d actually have several campaigns that were made up of mission chains. These campaigns could be played or not depending on if you ever ventured into them.
Basically, it’s like building The Forgotten Realms instead of building Icewind Dale. The art would be less specific to the story because the story itself is just one of 5 that you can hook on to.
Then, you could keep releasing new campaigns that worked within the world. I’m a glutton for punishment, so I love the idea of overdesigning a game with tons and tons of missions and content and the like.