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
