Project Porcupine: Design Document | Project Porcupine | Forum

Post edited 12:38 am – February 8, 2012 by Demonac

quill18 said:

I'm working on the iteration of the design document based on this feedback, but I've found a "bug" in the story: It doesn't make sense that the player is getting exclusive rights to a system.  We need rival corporations and such to be present so that we have a consistent source of appropriate enemies to fight.  It doesn't make sense for every planet and moon (and asteroid?) to have dangerous native creatures, and precursor bots shouldn't be omnipresent either (because why weren't the omnipresent anywhere else)?  I suppose it's possible to explain that the Wormhole Nexus is leading to an area of space that is specifically heavy on the Precursor presence, but I'm not sure I like that feel.

 We may just want to throw out the 'license' idea, interesting as it was. It's new territory, the wild wild west. I'm starting to think that the 'tutorial' is just that you get dumped into a crap system… one with only one (mediocre) planet, a couple moons and a gas giant. The system is still randomized, but it is randomized with much narrower parameters than normal, so that there's a consistent set of steps you have to go through to explore it all and get the needed resources. [Gas giants may be useful - even essential - later on, but right at the beginning you don't have the resources, so it's just a waste of space to you]

The first part of the tutorial is getting what you need to establish your beacon (so you can send information and so they can locate you to send supplies). Part two is exploring your system, but where that's normally a big job, your system sucks enough that it doesn't take too long (and there are no competitors to make it really hard). Part three is; okay, now I KNOW my system sucks, I've got to get to a better one, and that's when you get enough stuff built up to enable interstellar travel, and start to explore nearby systems. I think that in order to keep the feel, rather than an easy-to-use hyperdrive like Star Wars or Star Trek, initially you are limited to expensive one-shot means of jumping to a new system. So in the randomizer, we have *some* parameters on the second system; limiting its difficulty somewhat. And the idea is that you have no choice but to go there first, but once there you can get enough stuff together to make smaller (much cheaper) unmanned interstellar probes, and send them off to scout nearby systems before committing to the expense of getting there. Most systems are guaranteed to have enough stuff to do a warp jump (there may be some 'dud' systems, but never the first one you jump to, and you can determine that via your probes before you go there).

Obviously, this "stuff you need for warp jump/probes" is parallel to the other forms of loot planets might have. Searching for your warpdrive components should be interwoven with your normal exploration, fighting, quest finding/completing and exploitation efforts. If done right, it helps set the pace and give you a concrete objective in each system. As soon as you get the stuff together to leave, you should feel like you've cleared most of the place out, but the choice is yours to either rush for your next warp jump, or explore and loot every inch of every moon before actually using it to leave the system. This appeals to both 'powerleveling' type gamers (for whom achievement means to "progress" as fast as possible) and the type of people who explore every inch for secrets in an FPS or grind levels in Final Fantasy games until each boss is trivial by the time they actually fight it.

So maybe early on your just go from system to system, taking with you what you can. Maybe there's an Act 2 upgrade where you get the ability to build shorter range fixed-location transport systems, probably involving the use of a gas giant's gravitational field (like a mini version of the one Farpoint Station used to send you out here in the first place). This lets you spend effort to build a network of systems within which you can travel (or just transmit cargo) repeatedly and inexpensively, which in turn makes it viable to build a new beacon and establish a permanent base in one system from which you can send stuff to and from the big international station. But it still takes a lot of crap to get to a system for the first time. THEN maybe in Act 3, you get enough precursor tech together to build yourself a Real Warp Drive, and suddenly you can explore the rest of the galaxy quickly and easily, looking for the main precursor star systems, and go for the gold.