Monday, November 7, 2011

Gameplay programming notes

Last Friday we had an internal meeting on this topic: all engine features are already 99% done, so now we are focusing entirely on the gameplay. These are our notes for the next month of development:

Top priorities:
  • Harvesting ore
  • Building, protecting and upgrading space stations
  • Fighting
  • Traveling the solar system
  • Inventory
Solar system and all its sectors will be procedurally generated

Small ship parameters – health, armor, ammo, inventory/cargo, radar, credits/money, etc...

Persistent world

Schedule solar wind

Dying, re-spawn, checkpoint

Factions – friend, enemy, neutral

Simulating actions and interactions on higher level (above real-time sector level) – e.g. faction A attacked factions B, hero X goes to kill enemy Y.

Mother ship
  • If you own the mother ship
    • Move stuff between your small ship and mother ship cargo – foundation factory, ammo, weapons, tools, etc.
    • Traveling the solar system
  • If you don’t own it
    • Buy or sell stuff: prefabs (or maybe only the foundation factory), blueprints, ammo, weapons, ore, etc
  • In both types
    • Recharge small ship fuel, oxygen, etc. - Maybe automatic and free of charge?
Building your station and mother ship (in the editor "builder mode" – not the editor "god mode")
  • Place a foundation factory somewhere and that is going to be the center of your container
    • Foundation factory = current green cube in the center of a prefab container – but we will make some pretty prefab for that soon
  • For all other prefabs you need to purchase their blueprints and also deliver required ore
  • Creating prefabs requires time - first you place an order to your foundation factory, then it’s created and you can use it
  • You can own more foundation factories
Later: transferring stuff between foundation factory and your small ship (e.g. if some prefab created new ammo for you or other stuff)

Basic “mission scripting” – the player needs to be pushed to actions
  • You start the game and you will appear in some sector – as it’s right now
  • Your mother ship will be somewhere close
  • The enemy will attack you and your mother ship – you have to guard yourself
  • After you kill them, new mission pops up – travel to some other sector and buy foundation factory
  • You travel, buy, etc.
  • You come back, place factory at desired location
  • Start building your base, build prefabs if you have their blueprints and after you have collected required ore
  • If you need better prefabs (e.g. more advanced ore refinery) – you can travel to other sectors and purchase blueprints from some other mothership
Later we will find a way how to add building into our MW1 story – because story doesn’t need it and we can’t just throw it out.

Default weapons needs to be user friendly
  • Problematic aiming with auto canon
  • Guided missile as default one? Make better HUD for it?
Try to make every in-game interaction generic – we never know if we decide to allow player to sell or buy a new mothership, whole prefab container ... and crazy stuff like that.

Inventory screen
  • Buying and selling with other mothership or players
  • Looting other players
  • Transfer between the mothership or foundation factory and your ship
Finishing weapons and tools

Radar and HUD – ore locations, custom position marks

AI / bots
  • Investigate current AI status, what’s wrong, what’s not finished
  • Factions
  • Spawn points
  • Aiming, fighting, shooting
  • Movement
Multi-player / networking

Destructible prefabs

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