Onboard energy management in a space adventure game (screenshots inside)

sitwind · 2009-11-29T11:19:59

Hi, I am working on a space adventure game. It lets the player engage in space combat or fly to different planets to find missions, recruit new crew members or trade in commodities. One of the goal I really want is to treat the ship more like a NPC and the home of the crews, not merely a form of transportation. For that purpose I think it is important to give the components like weapon, shield or generator on the ship and the ship herself more individuality. As a developer and a person, my opinion is no doubt very biased. So I would like to hear some different opinions from people who are also interested in game design. An idea is to implement some mechanism for the generatos, which supply power to all other components on the ship, in order to make it interesting and fun to play with, but at the same time not too complex. Ideally it should also play a role in the gameplay. So the the standard design that generators differ only in price and output will not suffice. What I have at the moment is give each generator unique characteristic, it is basically the energy output in relation to the damage taken. And the player decide how much energy is distributed to certain component like weapon or shield. Below are two such characteristics: The one on the left looses power capacity at an even pace when taking more and more damage; While the one on the right is hardly effected by light damages but looses capacity very quickly when a certain damage threshold is reached. I hope it will have some impact on the style how the game is played. If the player has good gunner in his crew and enjoys space combat (which means he will get hit more often) the generator on the left is better suited. The generator on the right is maybe for someone who has an able pilot in his crew and prefer to outfly the enemies. In this case shield and engine are more important than fire power. And a generator which stays in peak performance as long as the damage is relatively light is more desirable. So that is what I got so far on the generators, any feedback is appreciated! Thanx for reading. P.S. For those interested here is some additional info about this game: The content is seperated from the game engine itself, the actors/missions/buildings are added via Lua script. I use C# and Truevision3D, so far the graphic engine / physics / path finding are mostly finished. What's left are the mission system / crew management / space combat. And of course quite some 3d modeling and animation. I will create a small game world to have some fun :) Those interested in creating his own sceneries could use lua script to do so.

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by sitwind November 18, 2009 04:33 PM

20 comments, last by sitwind 15 years, 2 months ago

Wavinator

2,020

November 28, 2009 10:15 PM

I was wondering about how you were going to display this as a summary in battle. How will the player know without referencing their generator screen what's about to happen to them as they reach the threshold?

--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...

sitwind

Author

137

November 29, 2009 11:19 AM

Since the really affected components are weapons and shield,
i think it is not so difficult. The reload rate of weapon and
strength of shield are easily visualized. In case of the weapon
if the firing rate is halved it will surely get noticed.

Then the player could go to the generator screen to do some adjustment.

Onboard energy management in a space adventure game (screenshots inside)

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Onboard energy management in a space adventure game (screenshots inside)

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