Text-based space game with a verrrry limited scope and generative mechanic. Should be stupidly easy to program.
You're in an Asteroid field and have to mine asteroids in order to build add-ons to your ship (including new Rooms to house them) with the materials you get here.
Your focus will be split between the base building mechanic and the moving/mining mechanics, the latter of which take time. However the timing can be improved via a Modulation system which allows you to fractally change your output speed on that one particular instance or for that material. Similarly, fixtures in the base can be modulated to eke more power out of them over the long term -- modulation gives you a means to do something other than sit on your hands.
Component output is also derived from the position of other fixtures in the room, so you could also move stuff around to try to eke minor amounts of power out.
Movement occurs within a range of integers -- each integer has random links to other integers in a one-way relationship. That integer dictates the type of Asteroid and its mineral composition, etc. Thus no complicated mapping is needed. You can't backtrack, but that isn't a huge deal since the game is nomadic anyway.
Asteroid Movement
You can move around an Asteroid in a fractal way -- via an Orientation mechanic which is an angle from 0-360 (in 90 degree increments) which scopes down forever. At every level the range of properties shifts randomly according to the top level but within whatever the overall range of the Asteroid is. You can thus explore as deep as you want to find more favorable conditions.
Each Asteroid gets assigned a material and a range of various properties, then the Orientation dictates them within the range:
Hardness -- basically how hard the surface is to mine through.
Magnetism -- how hard it is to collect materials you've mined with your tractor beams.
Yield -- how many materials you actually get.
Stability -- how likely the Asteroid is to detonate when you mine it. Detonation won't hurt you but will prevent you from mining that Asteroid anymore.
A Console, which allows you to interact with the environment around the Ship.
A life support unit large enough to sustain two rooms.
A Spacesuit Chamber
A Fabricator placed somewhere really random.
A Virtualizer.
Piping set up like this:
Fuel Piping from Hydrogen Scoop to Fuel Tank. Also from Fuel Tank to Thruster and Space Drive and Reactor.
Material Piping from the Tractor Beam to the Containment Chamber. Material Piping also runs to the Fabricator.
Power Piping from the Reactor to the Drill, Laser, Console, Life Support. Also to the Fabricator.
Each room in the ship has a Life Node -- oxygen pipes run from the Life support to it and CO2 pipes run from it back to the Life support.
The spacesuit chamber also connects to Life support both via oxygen and co2 pipes.
A bunch of Pipes start out broken. Part of the early game is fixing up your ship by moving pipes around between systems that no longer need them for whatever reason. Over time you can build more pipes and make your ship work altogether.
You'll always start out in the room that has the spacesuit -- this room will have a working Life Node and the spacesuit chamber will also be connected to Life support. Everything else is randomly bad however.
Rooms
Rooms have a Size -- this determines how much can fit in them and also how long the pipes are. The bigger the room, the more pipes you need -- pipe amount is sqrt(size).
Rooms are gated to other Rooms via Airlocks -- if you open them up entirely there needs to be working Life nodes in all rooms or you can't. Otherwise you have to take a spacesuit around and take it off or return to a Life support room before you run out of oxygen.
Pipes and fixtures can be Virtualized -- this removes them from the environment and allows you to place them elsewhere. Pipes and fixtures that are crafted via Transformers work similarly. However, there are Virtualization limits which are at least upgradeable by the number of Virtualizers.
The Virtualizer takes up a good bit of space but doesn't require power or anything else. However you can't virtualize the last virtualizer.
A complex base-building game mixed with an Asteroid mining game. Basically you travel around and mine asteroids, but the complexity lay in the materials and Shipbuilding systems, which contain Piping mechanics, shatterloopian components and various other limiting mechanics.
You start off with a ship that has a few rooms with stuff scattered around them and a bunch of stuff that's broken. It'll take a heck of a lot of work to do anything at all, but from there you can fix and/or expand your ship.
Various stuff in the game takes real time -- this promotes working on other tasks in the meantime. If however you don't want to wait, you can play a fractal "Modulation" minigame that will eke more performance out and speed things up. Modulation will variously slow or speed things up on each slider, so you have to find the optimum range of each one. Additionally it's a fractal and you can alter the power of each slider by turning it itself into a set of sliders and go down as deep as you want like this.
Generally though it's better to just get certain tasks queued and then work on other stuff while you wait. The components/materials system is a very free Alchemy like in shatterloop so you have a lot you can experiment with. Room fixtures are also harmonic with other room fixtures so you can change layouts to take advantage of that. All in all you have a heck of a lot of (very random) gameplay mechanics to explore.
I touched on this in the last post but would like to hammer it out some more herein.
You start off with a single room that has life support and a spacesuit. There's a lot of breaks in the Piping elsewhere. You do start out with a Refiner and a Fabricator -- you need these for bootstrapping. The base room building fixture is renamed to the Constructor. Both the refiner and Fabricator have materials pipes from the Containment Chamber but both networks are broken.
Your first main goal is collecting materials so you can start to rebuild and expand in a real way. Once you can Fabricate components or Pipes you're good to go.
Collecting materials requires mining asteroids -- however you'll need to reroute your supply of Pipes in various ways to accomplish this.
Step 1 is getting fuel to the fuel tank -- to do this you need to attach the Hydroscoop to the fuel tank via a completed materials pipe, a materials pipe to the Reactor, and power from the Reactor back to the Hydroscoop. This will bootstrap you being able to collect fuel -- you can cannabilize whatever you need to or just virtualize fixtures and move them closer together to allow for this. You can't virtualize a fuel tank with anything in it -- I mean you can but the materials will be lost.
The next step is getting fuel to the Spacedrive and power to the console. Worst case you can cannabilize the Piping that connects to the hydroscoop once you have a good reserve of fuel.
From there you can use the console to go to the nearest Asteroid, probably modulating in the process since it'll be slow otherwise and you have nothing else to do (or maybe the initial asteroids are close by).
Once you're at the Asteroid you can blast it where you are or direct fuel to the Thruster to reorient.
Gaining materials requires blasting apart the surface with Lasers (which require power), drilling it with the Drill and power, and then collecting materials with the tractor beam (power). These materials also need to make their way to the Containment Chamber.
From here you need a materials link to the Refiner to turn the Ores into metals, which go back to the Containment Chamber.
Then you need a materials pipe to the Fabricator. The Fabricator will allow you to construct Pipes out of homogeneous materials or Components out of several materials -- it's probably wise to start with Pipes so you can make your ship make more sense and then go to another Asteroid to get the materials for components.
Once you can make components, you can upgrade various fixtures, build new rooms, or make new fixtures altogether.
Ship navigation is text-based. You can do the following:
Move from room to room obviously.
The room description tells you what's there as clickable links. You also see the size and pipe length of the room.
You can add new fixtures assuming they don't bump against size limits.
These links will tell you the fixture, its stats and components. You can swap components out here for ones you've Virtualized, or just remove components so you can recycle them into materials.
The fixture will also conveniently tell you where its pipes go (which Room) and if they terminate in air (broken network) or another fixture (and which fixture). They'll tell you the requirements for the fixture and if they're met.
You can view the pipes in the room -- there will be pipe networks that run between exits as well as pipes that connect from an exit to fixtures in this room. I'm not sure what the detailing is yet, I'm still working on the details in my head. You'll definitely get some kind of visual outline of pipes and breaks however. You can add or remove pipes as well, including along new "lines" (though building from an origin probably makes way more sense).
I think the last thing to cover in this chaotic set of notes is the Materials system, as it underpins much of the game.
Materials are pulled from asteroids. There's a variety of them, but they're all essentially metal Ores.
Metal Ores are processed in the Refiner into ingots, however the refiner has other functions such as allowing you to create alloys or variations on existing metals.
Materials form the basis of Components, which can have their properties built in an Alchemy way from the Materials used to craft them. This is however predicated on certain metal "tags" being active, like you need conductive Materials for wiring. Through refining, you can apply or remove tags in a weird procgen way, idk what the actual systems are there but there should be a heck of a lot to experiment with -- it may inform Fleet to some extent or vice-versa.
Components have a variety of properties which are then put together in fixtures or can be used to hot-swap into existing fixtures. Again I have no idea what the actual systems will look like yet but there should be a lot of overlap between fixtures on their Components so you can cannabilize stuff from totally unrelated fixtures.
Your ship exists in a 3d space -- rooms can be added in all six directions.
Rooms exposed to space are defined as "Edges" -- certain fixtures have to be placed in rooms with at least one edge, such as Drills, Lasers, thrusters, sensors, etc. Whatever makes sense in context.
If adding a room would turn the existing room into a non-edge and it needs to be, you'll get prevented from it.
Assuming it doesn't increase the scope too much (famous last words), your inter-asteroid drive (the gravdrive) works like this:
Obviously things that are closer are going to be faster to travel to.
Going from a smaller Asteroid to a bigger one will be faster than the other way around. Your first jump will also be reasonably fast since you're not at an Asteroid.
Mining an Asteroid until it breaks apart doesn't prevent gravity stuff since the mass is still there. And also I don't want to overcomplicate other mechanics, this scope change should stay self-contained.
So both distance and Asteroid size relative to current size are key. Various components of the gravdrive can change these formulas.
