This is an upcoming game I'm going to be building in NIFE that has a bit of outside interest. I'll also do a limited advertising run on it.
Basic details:
Space-themed. Similar to Aliens in that it takes place on a space station, has Aliens.
Fully cooperative. Players must collaborate to solve puzzles and achieve the game objective.
Round-based and limited in some way. Possibly movement, possibly actions in general. Rounds are pretty short, the idea with limiting things is to give players time to discuss things and plan strategies.
Fully automatic, uses a lot of NIFE systems.
When a player dies, they respawn in the Cloning Bay. The Cloning Bay has a limited amount of blank clones, so players share a global life total. There are ways of resupplying blank clones. I can also add some at my discretion.
I will be playing as several aliens with nasty attacks and abilities. My goal is to make things challenging and dangerous, not to win.
When you first enter the game you'll be able to choose your class. There's a couple human classes and robot classes available.
The map will be quite large for an Aliens game, somewhere around 20-30 rooms. It isn't necessarily fixed; there are ways of shifting room relationships around.
Story
A work in progress, but basically your ship got shot down by system defenses and you hobbled to the Lost Station, where you can hopefully find the resources needed to repair your ship and escape. The solar system (and station) are inhabited by malevolent Aliens and things aren't as they seem.
Goal
The goal of the game is to repair your ship with the materials in the Lost Station and surrounding moons and asteroids (provided you find a way to get there).
The aliens knocked out a bunch of different ship systems.
Conclusion
This game will basically be a hybrid of the The Maze concept I outlined earlier and the Aliens game we play a lot. I'll be posting stuff in this thread from time to time. If you're interested in general, let me know below :)
The Lost Station was originally an Outpost but as more strange alien relics were discovered, more modules were built to study them and provide more infrastructure.
About 10 years ago the Station vanished entirely. No traces on the subspace internet, no system sweeps could discover it. When the Aliens conquered the system, it was suddenly visible again, but the shipboard clock indicated that only a few months had passed on onboard. Sweeps indicated that the original crew was aboard with few casualties, but almost all links to the subspace internet had been severed.
Your ship was one of the ones sent to do sweeps, but probably because you guys were private contractors you got a bit too close and were shot down. At least now you guys can discover what happened to the Lost Station.
While some relics were kept tightly under wrap, the following discovered relics are public knowledge:
A perfectly spherical rock with slight magnetic potential
A container for a small sun (different contained physics allow it to be a sun even while the size of a very small black hole)
A room-sized crystal complex containing an absolutely enormous amount of data -- it dwarfs the size of the entire 78-system subspace internet. However the data seems to be almost entirely facts and figures for a star system that doesn't exist.
A single-celled organism that doesn't require energy and is effectively immortal. It's very well contained within an Elarian microjar.
humans/robots -- somewhat interchangeable; a lot of humans have cyborg implants, a lot of robots have human tissues. In general robots are more able to withstand extreme conditions while humans are better at self-repair when injured or sick. Despite improvements in AI, humans are still more creative than their robot counterparts.
aliens -- since they are discovered on planet euthimius these nasty guys have been in a war with humans. While they can use technology, they prefer to instead just evolve whatever they need. They take on a variety of forms, many that look humanoid, to blend in. it's unknown what their original form was. Reasoning with them is impossible, destroying them all seems to be impossible, but at least they conquer systems slowly and they fall to innovative weaponry they haven't evolved against.
Elarians -- these guys are a nomadic group of aliens (not the same race as the other aliens) that move their giant Arkship to another galaxy every so often. While here they've taken on the appearance of red-skinned humanoids with very dark hair. They have shared their Pocket Universe technology with humans, and trade objects made with it for anything human-made that has an equal weight (including junk and sometimes straight garbage). Their technology allows for small enclosed areas that operate on different physical laws, including space that curves into itself but still allows outside observation (the microjar of that organism), and many other useful things.
The Elarians claim to know of every system in the Universe, but won't share that knowledge, only to say that the system that's talked about in the crystal complex doesn't exist and never has. A few of them joined the Lost Station's crew 10 years ago to study it.
Flux drive -- without this you can't navigate a system effectively. You made it to the Lost Station through ion thrusters and jettisoning material at key times when that ran out, but that's obviously not ideal. Flux drives are pretty common so you should just be able to find one.
Ion propellant -- you used up all of this. Without it you can't refill space suits and vehicles, and would be absolutely screwed if your drives go down again.
Scanners -- without these you can't see where youre going so could easily warp into solid matter. You dumped your satellite array out of desperation so you can't salvage scanners from them.
Helium-2 -- always a good idea to refuel especially in enemy territory. Your nuclear cells are fine but they're slow and steady, you need to be able to overload the fusion egine.
Weapons -- they're basically just disabled. Should just be able to replace some fuses and reroute power to get them working again.
Algal nodes -- the Clone Bay is okay but otherwise these guys were fried when the ship got shocked. Without them carbon dioxide can't be turned back into oxygen and life support is down.
Hyperdrive -- this is the biggest project. 90% of your warp nodes are fried, energy routing pipes have melted and the superconductor ring is no longer circular. Computer models indicate that in its current state it would create a free black hole that would eat half the ship before evaporating.
Hull -- most of the shielding layer has ablated, otherwise you could probably just patch it up. Without the shielding, moving through interstellar gas and debris will deal even more damage to your hull and eventually cause atmosphere leaks.
Cryostatic Generator -- without this, high gee force maneuvers would instantly kill everyone on board. These are Elarian technology and relatively easy to repair fortunately.
So you guys have a bit of a project ahead of you. There will be a nice set of Lore knowledge that details these technologies and should give you ideas on how to fix them. Thorough exploration of the Lost Station will give you the materials you need. A good bit of crafting is involved.
All players start in the Cloning Bay, which is also where you respawn. This room is the only room in the game that's totally safe from enemies and bad effects, however using it as shelter won't necessarily always work.
Engineering Room -- here is where you add fuel, ion propellant and fix most of the ship's systems.
Hangar -- there are a couple small vehicles here that may be useful, though the Submarine probably won't be. This is also how you access the Lost Station.
Bridge -- there are some useful computers here that will help you track things that are happening elsewhere. When everything is fixed, you'll be able to pilot the ship to win the game from here.
Outside -- you'll need to repair the hull and weapons from outside. Wear a space suit or be a robot or suffer the consequences.
Hyperdrive Complex -- this room is where you'll get to repair the various things wrong with the Hyperdrive.
The Hyperdrive complex, engineering Room, bridge and hangar are connected in a diamond with the Cloning Bay connected to all of them. The sole airlock is in the Hangar.
The Lost Station is subdivided into six floors that have a modular grid-like structure to them. A central elevator connects all floors, however it starts out disabled so you'll have to navigate from outside or by going through Transport Portals that might switch around randomly. Rooms may also become detached from the Station entirely and will have to be reached from outside.
If you can fix the Elevator, you can go between floors more easily, and if you can fix the Portal Hub you'll be able to teleport to almost any room in the game from it. Fixing it one more time will give you an infinite supply of Portal Rings, equippable items that let you teleport anywhere from anywhere. These are all optional projects however.
