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Untitled space game notes
Until I make a private forum for it. Game that I'll be working on after shatterloop launches.
Mechanics are very similar to shatterloop -- terrain-based resource variations, nothing homogeneous. Lots of material refinement and/or item creation.
Building
Combat
To limit exposure to graphical concerns, combat is limited to autonomous drones of various types (including spaceship variations). This will be supported by the lore -- maybe the systems you're exploring are at the outer reaches of drone space and humans haven't had planets sold to them by Tangle yet.
Locations
Planets
Probably the meat of the gameplay. Planets have a variety of terrain and resources and a good bit to explore. They should be fairly unique.
Alien Tech
Alien tech is equivalent to magic in shatterloop -- it should have unpredictable events-driven effects that are hooked into absolutely everything.
The goal with this system is to increase the sandbox nature of the game.
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Starship Death / respawn mechanics
I haaaaate space sim games that force you to rebuild lost ships. Totally breaks the investment in internal building. Instead, there should be a repair mechanic for minor/major damage and a "recrafting" mechanic for death.
This promotes not dying but also doesn't ruin hours of work spent working on the insides / structure of a ship, which is a key gameplay mechanic.
Character damage / death
Consumables
There might be weirder consumables for game balance reasons the way pets have food preferences in shatterloop.
Transport
All told you need a minimum of 3 vehicle types in order to do anything whatsoever, and probably more than that for terrain-specific exploration or resource extraction.
Rovers function a bit like mount animals in shatterloop -- can do various useful things, have various constraints, and are modifiable to a large degree. Using them for ground combat is also possible, or specializing them to that task.
Rovers can also dock other rovers recursively. Same deal with starships. This is kind of a core gameplay mechanic -- managing vehicles, energy pipelines, migrating storage, etc.
It makes sense to have "carrier" vehicles specialized to that purpose with combat or exploration specialized vehicles inside them. Loop that back through both recursive systems and you end up with large starships that might have planet-specific vehicle kits and all the logistical headaches that requires.
Docking should miniaturize whatever's docked through some hand-wavy future science -- this will cut down on scale concerns, though there will still be upgradeable storage limits. This also makes the system more flexible -- want to have a ground transport get you to the ocean and then have your ship vehicle be able to unload another ground transport for new area exploration? No problem! Travel logistics should be a pretty fun gameplay element.
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Components / Displays / Wiring
Another big system I want the game to have is a fairly customizable components and displays system. Engines for example shouldn't just have quantitative upgrades, they should work in qualitatively different ways with variations and trade-offs.
You should be able to automate various things and/or get remote readouts via the Wiring system. This requires linking nodes together in whatever makes sense, and then manually connecting different things along the network.
The actual wiring system just makes sure that there's some kind of path (of the correct type) between interacting nodes -- they don't have to be hardwired together directly. Paths get shown as wires/tubing/whatever visually and should snap to corners.
Nodes are not necessarily units -- I want more freedom with unit building so you'll probably have a range where you can build and only the nodes get connected with pipes. This simplifies things a lot for me.
Once units are in the network, you should be able to connect them in whatever way you want by using a Terminal and some easy-on-the-UX tools. This greatly simplifies logistics issues while still allowing for physically useful pipes/wires, which look great aesthetically.
Pipe/wire length will probably dictate energy use or something, so there will be some gameplay mechanics there to make the network more efficient. Nothing too overly complex or game-breaking if you're lazy however.
Displays
Absolutely nothing is hardcoded, although you can buy or salvage premade semi-procgen setups. You should be able to see readouts of whatever the hell you want in whatever the hell size or style you want, on various displays at a Control station.
Similarly, your controls shouldn't be hardcoded either, outside of basic movement. You should be able to toggle or dial a variety of things depending on your personal preferences in whatever context you're in.
Your character HUD is also customizable and can read remote output via a Transmitter unit and some rolling energy use. Getting more items in the HUD require upgrading your character's modules.
Similarly you should be able to toggle various things on various entities remotely, and the number of slots here is again upgradeable.
This system should provide a lot of freedom but more importantly make you more intimately connected with your HUDs and displays, which will strongly increase immersion and maybe make you forget the otherwise minimalist approach to space simulation.
You should be able to use the remote aspect of this system to do neat things like park vehicles and get them to shoot for you, or fly them away remotely from conflicts.
Combat Style
The focus of combat is tactics. Combat encounters should be quite hard to live through or succeed at, and so the goal is either stealthily achieving your goal or figuring out some tricky way of doing it.
You should be able to use the environment to your advantage, mess with various control or resource systems in the automaton swarm, hack its AI, use alien tech, make vehicles bombard facilities remotely, have guns with secondary effects, etc. The goal is definitely not a repetitive slaughterfest to grind the materials you need.
Facility layouts should be modular and procgen, or maybe similar to the caves layout if I can implement it in a sane way.
Enemies should be difficult from a quantity or healing or respawning or targeting aspect, not from a pathfinding or AI aspect. Many of them will be stationary. Taking out sensors rather than guns might make sense, depending on the level design.
You can alternately just make really strong guns with ridiculous effects. This will require a lot of time spent in guncrafting mechanics and resources, but I definitely don't want to dissuade that gameplay style if you're willing to put the time in.
Similarly, alien tech can break the game in multiple ways (by design) and can be used to make encounters very easy.
Resources / Refinement
This should be largely a clone of how shatterloop does it.
The actual recipes will be wildly different, since you're building or researching very different things. However shatterloop's mechanics are very solid and will translate well to the new schema here.
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Solar Systems
Solar systems contain a variety of planets, moons, gas giants, asteroids, hydrogen clouds, etc.
They don't revolve or rotate -- I think that would be too complex to implement. Similarly I want to avoid day/night cycles, although in that case it's more a gameplay/aesthetic thing (I like the idea of having a base just perpetually at dawn or dusk). Revolution/rotation would also make navigation *significantly* more difficult for players.
The location of various things in the solar system are procgen depending on your starting system. There's a universal seed used for all generation so you'd be able to go to a particular system and see the same things.
Going to other systems
There's no real reason to limit going to other systems, however I want to constrain players to their starting system more.
I don't want to have explicit interstellar travel -- it should instead warp you there. I think explicit travel would mess with the coordinate system too much and also be either really boring or really hard to create content for.
Like shatterloop, starting systems should have more fixed aesthetics and celestial body distribution, with other systems being crazier so they're more worth visiting.
To get around starting system issues, it makes sense to make a fixed band of the galaxy exclusive to starting systems. Depending on galaxy size there would still be a lot of variety in starting worlds.
The star skybox should be dynamic based on your current position in the galaxy. Part of travel time to other systems is rendering and caching that.
I'd like to have multiple galaxies or larger structures but I'm not sure how feasible that is from a rendering angle. Also it's probably pointless without altered content in different galaxies. It would however be kinda neat to see crazy looking galaxies in the background and then be able to do a SBH jump to them.
Speaking of black holes, I'd like to implement them to do crazy polar effects -- would be neat to see some of those play out in 3D space.
Travel to other systems will probably require taking starships near black holes, and there should be at least one in each system. Black holes should also be really efficient ways to get anywhere whatsoever in a system. Both of these techs are probably later-game however.
Some galaxies should be unreachable, as humans live there. More of a graphics concern than anything, but more easily explainable in the lore than anything else. You also can't destroy/modify human galaxies, and there may legitimately be alien tech that lets you do that because why not. You also can't use any of that stuff on your starting system (although other starting systems are fair game).
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Lore
A few pieces of lore (obviously all of this subject to change):
Automaton races
Automatons are any non-biological lifeform. Basically robots, although that term has become something of a slur. In non-human space, automatons are subdivided into three races:
Derivatives are the main automatons in synth galaxies and form the basis of synth "society" (if you can call it that). While somewhat autonomous, they can connect to hives and operate under their control or reach hive consensus, depending on how the hive is structured.
The purpose of integrals is basically to be the creative side of Tangle -- being capable of independent thought allows them to create new technologies and use resources in novel ways. This knowledge benefits the swarm and Tangle's goals.
They're also better equipped to explore alien structures and interact with alien tech, which seem to require some form of sentience to use. Untangling the alien tech mystery is one of the central goals of Tangle, as it would lead to a better understanding of his own sentience and how to modify it.
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Integral composition
Despite their differences, Integrals are still machines and can be freely modified by themselves or others. Modifying an Integral without their consent breaks automaton law so severely that it's enough to mark a hive or human society as the second-highest status of rogue (the first highest is an integral not in accord with Tangle). Adding determinism is a lesser sentence than removing it, however.
Given their requirements for autonomy, integrals have a unique system for energy production known as a Digestive Matrix. This allows them to turn organic material or other types of soft volatiles into energy through micro-reactors. This allows them to operate endlessly in certain types of environments without needing recharges. Digestive matrixes can be quite specialized, and a lot of the advances made there were made by other integrals or even humans to some extent.
As integrals are unable to interface with other automatons directly, they instead have appendages known as Operators -- these put out electrical field signals that other automatons can read and respond to locally. They're a bit like hands but don't actually require physical contact and also have a lot more points of contact, allowing for very fast operations.
Integrals lack highly efficient or fast processing units, as their processing power is almost entirely used to support their autonomy or to assimilate various quantum feeds. They're still an order of magnitude more intelligent than humans, but they lack the highly optimized adaptability of derivatives or the absurd processing power of vectors.
Integrals also have a specialized kind of operator known as a Planar Operator -- these allow them to cling to various surfaces and move via axial tilt. They can't move at the speed vehicles can, but they are significamtly more maneuverable. Derivatives and vectors use the same kind of operator, but it's built to be entirely deterministic. The ones in Integrals have their own independent quantum feeds allowing for quick reflexive movement, something that makes them particularly well-suited for fighting rogues.
Integrals also have various other peripherals allowing them to interact with vectors remotely, interact with physical objects, and so on. These are all replaceable and upgradeable.
Unlike derivatives and *especially* vectors, integrals lack centralized processing units -- their "brain" is instead spread across their shell, found inside their peripherals and operators and is also partially contained in the Newsynth network. This makes them practically indestructible -- if even one small piece survives so too does their brain, and rooting protocols activate to allow them to eventually regain full independence.
If they're completely destroyed, they can still be revived in a machine known as a Newsynth Node. These will create a new automaton to the old one's specifications with some amount of quantum damage (unfortunate, but no entity has found a fix for that yet -- has something to do with their quantum sentience nature).
With significant damage taken, an integral body will shut down and defer to the Newsynth network. Rooting protocols only activate when that is blocked, or when an integral has been marked rogue and is pulled out of the network.
Newsynth Network
The Newsynth network is the automaton equivalent of the Newflesh network that humans and similar beings use. Unlike that one it has the ability to transport raw materials from other Newsynth nodes, meaning there's zero downtime ever.
This particular modification (and Newflesh/Newsynth tech in general) is alien tech, so it can't be easily extended to other aspects of automaton society. It also seems to fail spectacularly with Biological material, making human use of it anytime in the foreseeable future very dubious. It also can't be used to send specialized parts -- only raw atomic materials are supported. Thankfully automatons are easy to put together so it works very well there.
The Newsynth/Newflesh network itself is a strange otherworldly space that's connected to all nodes simultaneously but also inherently separate from them. Entities that get stuck there for whatever reason report experiences of being "inverted" and "outside time" .
Stable Black Holes
Virtually all interstellar tech uses this technology on smaller scales for transport, however their scope is limited due to being exponentially proportional to the amount of energy put in.
Stable black holes are some kind of bizarre alien technology that allows large black holes with enormous distance leaps that run proportionally to energy input rather than exponentially. They also seem to lack the matter-consuming properties of larger black holes, instead warping spacetime almost passively. Oddly they seem to be keyed to the size of galaxies -- skimming the event horizon of one on one side of the galaxy will allow transport to the other side but no further. Similarly supermassive black holes made in this way will allow access to galaxies on the opposite side of a filament ring but no further.
The theory behind them isn't understood very well, but has something to do with chaining micro black holes into tetrahedronal and octahedronal patterns with closely-touching event horizons. When the right size is reached, they collapse further into an almost perfect sphere that has stable black hole properties. The actual size needed varies depending on the galaxy's size and whether it has a natural or stable supermassive black hole -- stable SBHs cut down on scale needs considerably.
Use
Stable Black holes (ABHs) don't consume matter but still warp spacetime near the event horizon, with closer approaches warping more. Rather than consuming matter they instead repulse it, so energy is needed to get to lower shells. The energy needed is actually directed *towards* the black hole, which seems to displace it rather than consuming it. Energy sent away from it is instead displaced along the black hole shell's range, so physical propulsion is needed to escape.
This propulsion needs to be supercooled to prevent its energy from causing a closer approach, but thankfully shells are hostile environments since all energy is displaced across spacetime.
The propulsion matter itself will bounce and displace across the range. Whatever direction it's sent in will push you out the opposite angle to the solar system that's been connected to along that range. If you push off precisely away from the ABH's center you'll arrive somewhere in the current system, with more precision gained at higher shells.
Given all this, navigating them requires some pretty specific calculations, particularly since visual cues are exceedingly strange.
Stable supermassive black holes (ASBHs) work similarly but require higher energy levels to enter shells and higher propulsion levels to exit. Fortunately no one really needs to go to the opposite end of a Void so higher shells usually work the best.
It's known that there is a gargantuan stable black hole in the center of the local Void, but there are some unique problems in getting there and transmitting anything whatsoever back, as quantum connections themselves seem to be displaced. Tangle has found himself inadvertently entangled with unusable matter in wholly unknown locations when attempts have been made, so at the moment working towards that goal is one of the things that grants you rogue status.
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Alien Tech
While automatons (and even humans, believe it or not) have discovered other sentient life, by far the strangest discovery is the remnants of a galactic civilization along the local Void with some absurdly powerful technology.
It's unknown what happened to this race of beings or even what they looked like. All traces of them are gone, save for some locations and some artifacts sometimes found at those locations.
They're known simply as "the aliens" -- much like "robots" at one time "alien" was a slur, but since being applied to this largely unknown race it has become an overly respectful term. Other sentient life either doesn't know about them or is unwilling to divulge anything about them, so anything that has been discovered has come from analyzing the ruins they have left behind.
These ruins emit things on local quantum feeds so it's reasonably easy for nondeterministic entities to find them.
Ruins contain artifacts, which are oval-shaped objects of various size, some nanoscopic and others as large as mountains. When observed by sentient entities they shrink or enlarge to the size of their observational field of view.
When interacted with in virtually any capacity by a sentient being (touch, operator interaction, beaming radiation at them, splashing water at them), they lock to their current size and activate until the sentient entity no longer interacts with them (not touching, looking away, etc). Their weight scales according to their size, but are pretty heavy by weak human standards.
When activated, they will show a cluster of geometric symbols. Observing any particular symbol will expand it to around half the size of the "screen" and observing away from it will contract it again. Enlarged symbols will show additional smaller symbols, which can then be observed recursively a great many steps, but not infinitely. At whatever the smallest scale is they're self-similar to the original symbol set.
Through sentient experimentation and nonsentient analysis, the swarm has managed to translate virtually all of the symbols to understand what a particular artifact does or how to adjust it.
Artifacts can be activated by applying some kind of energy to the main symbol, or adjustments can be made by applying energy to smaller symbols, which changes their appearance according to whatever that entity's visual spectrum works. Strangely, entities with different spectral sensitivities will notice things in their own visual language on the same artifact. They don't appear to put out actual radiation so how they work is unknown.
Applying energy can be done a variety of ways -- something as simple as body heat for a human or a burning stick, to more extreme inputs like beaming focused antimatter reactions. Bigger effects require larger inputs, though not nearly as large as expected for some of them.
These artifacts have a variety of effects, and seem to be locked to various objects and systems by whoever first discovers them. Humans that find one may discover that they can make fruit ripen faster, while rogue hives may find that they can increase their fuel efficiency. Again, it's unknown how any of this works. The artifacts *themselves* being sentient or the unknown alien race themselves has not been ruled out, though that wouldn't explain the ruins or the various objects meant for corporeal beings scattered around them.
Their effects range from things like moving a single dust mote around to erasing entire galaxies, without rhyme or reason.
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More Game Notes
Coordinate systems
The game will have an explicit x-y-z system in whatever way that makes the most sense. Graphics will be rendered in that because opengl probably requires it. There will however be other systems at play that will influence mapping and game mechanics.
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Coordinate Movement
Starships should have three movement modes:
You should be able to switch between planar and freeform at will. Orbital should happen automatically as you approach planets/etc but can be turned off. You could also turn it back on provided there's a body of interest.
Menus
Menus will be context-based as much as possible. If you don't want to look at particular options by physically going there you can use specialized Terminals to let you interact with them instead. The actual menus should be absolutely flat, no light effects or anything. This decreases immersion but drastically improves UX, which is somewhat essential in a menu-driven game. Menus that aren't being interacted with should be blanked out or have 2D function-tagged stickers -- no sense trying to render them in 3D for no reason.
Character-based menus will always be accessible, however vehicle-based or base-based ones won't -- you will need to use specific fixtures or terminals to interact with those. This will increase immersion somewhat.
Character menus
There should be more integration between the inventory and other systems. You should also be able to eat or adjust fluids from here. I wish I thought about that while making shatterloop.
There's no crafting menu because that's not really how this game works -- anything you'd want to build needs to go through various building/vehicle systems first. Consumables are energy or aether, outside of "food".
Unlike shatterloop you should always have access to vehicles or bases from the get-go, so there's no need for a personal crafting system. You could theoretically make fixtures portable though if you *really* wanted to nomad around.
Inventory system
Like shatterloop I want this game to have a sane inventory system given its materials-heavy gameplay.
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Civilization
Civilization will be a bit less mechanic-heavy in this game than shatterloop given the lore and some potential lengthy development issues.
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