It's not uncommon (in fact, highly common) for my dabbling with game design experiments to run across something that's been done already.
Case in point: lately, I was thinking of really more of a trade wars style game. Except you'd have greater detail to the space and planets, being able to control each unit in a RTS fashion. You'd build your own flotilla of ships and your own bases on planets. Of course, the whole thing would be massively multiplayer. How cool would that be?!
Then I realized that Mankind had done that back in 1998. (Not to be confused with Face Of Mankind, a completely unrelated game.)
So, at this point, there comes a question of, "why am I not playing Mankind of that's the kind of game I want?" Of course, the answer is, "because there's things I'd rather do differently."
Mankind bored me when I last dabbled with it (very briefly). It was perhaps half a decade ago, perhaps so many of the things I dislike about the game may have been resolved. From my position as an aspiring game designer, I'm most interested in evaluating what thing bothered me the most when I played it.
Originally, I thought what bothered me the most was perhaps a matter of perspective. I was really hoping that Face of Mankind would play out a bit more like Escape Velocity Nova or Flatspace - a single ship against a backdrop.
Then I reconsidered. My expectations really had nothing to do with the intrinsic capability of the wider perspective to entertain. To an extent, the single ship perspective is bit limiting, because there's only so much you can do from the controls of a single ship, and once mastered you might wish you could control more.
Instead, the foremost among those things that bothered me about the game was that the universe is saturated with a bunch of lifeless units that pretty much sit around and idle as space junk. It was really off-putting as a new player to see a bunch of units sitting around doing pretty much nothing. It felt lifeless, like an interstellar ghost town: how can I care about this lifeless-feeling universe?
So that got me thinking that maybe what needs to happen is the universe plays out a conflict constantly, even without the players, and then allow the players to play a part.
I have a plan about one interesting way to go about this, but I hate to tip my hand prematurely and psyche myself out again. If I get so far that a playable version is made, and looks like it's going to work, I'll reveal more.
That's what I'm thinking - that kind of life is more like it.
Mankind bothered me because there was absolutely nothing going on. Fly around space, and there was just a bunch of ships belonging to other players sitting there doing nothing. Land on a planet, a bunch of buildings and ground units doing nothing. Now, it has been years since I played the game, maybe things have improved since then. However, my point is that I'm not going to repeat that mistake if I can help it. | |
I'm not sure how you have your game planned out, but it would be cool if you had companies operating in certain sectors. You could figure out their trade routes, steal their cargo, and manipulate the market by creating shortages in some areas.
If you plan of letting players walk around inside the ships and space stations it would be really cool if you could do a little covert espionage. You could steal vital documents such as company shipping records, shady business deals, and trade routes which would be used to blackmail the company for "exclusive trade deals." If walking around in ships isn't an option you could find these sorts of things by hijacking corporate ships or buying the information on some sort of black market. | |
Many of those same thoughts have crossed my mind, to the point where I definitely put a lot of thought into walking around on ships.
The trouble I ran into is making a compelling game out of it. It's not that it can't be done, it's just that it's a whole part of the game to build that needs to be done right. Basically, a ship is a backdrop. Something like taking records of illegal activities is a goal against that backdrop. The game, however, is what you do against that backdrop to accomplish the goal. If I had the time and inclination, I'd probably make it a full X-Com-style squad infiltration. With players able to design their own bases and defenses so no one infiltration is the same. | |
You could scale down ships to small hubs with specific sections rather than having large empty hallways just for the sake of making a big ship look big.
You would enter the cargo hold and speak with the chief about which supplies you want to purchase/trade/sell and stuff like that. From there you would enter a central chamber leading to the cockpit, engine room, and crew quarters. In the cockpit you could speak with the captain about course corrections, shipping schedules, and other shipping-related issues. In the crew quarters you could ask about local conditions (Any bandits in the area), mining prospects, and company troubles. In the engine room you could buy/sell/trade ship parts and upgrades. You could upgrade the ship so it would perform better and have a greater chance of avoiding being hijacked. The whole point of it would be to secure certain trade routes in order to make the area safer for your own ships or just lowering demand for certain markets. Basically everything could be done via simple menus, but the point is to give the lifeless ships some faces and a chance for some interaction. You could have the crew actually doing their jobs and walking around the ship! It would also open the door for side missions where certain people on certain ships have packages or information for other people, but that's another can of worms. You could really flesh out your universe by making every ship unique down to the crew's names, but it could also end up being an annoying gimmick. I think it really just depends on how much time you're willing to invest in creating all that content. Or, you know, randomly generate it all. | |
Totally - ever since my abstraction is good epiphany last month, this has very much been a focus of mine.
This is a very good point: if I'm not going to actually use that space, why not just minimize it to a chat room with functions? If I'm not going to actually use that planet surface, why not just represent it as a member of an array? The "if I'm not going to actually use" is the unified answer: I have to decide what's really so important that I really need to have it. So it basically comes down to the kind of game I want to make. I've been seesawing a lot between RPG and Strategy game. An RPG game has a more interior-focus - from a single (or party) perspective, knowing how they occupy the ship is important. From a more strategy focus, we have a more exterior-focus - it's not important where people are in the ship, it's just important how the ship functions to the universe around it. Right now I've actually about 4 or 5 projects sitting open that are basically different mixes of the strategy/rpg genre. As I go forth with developing them, I'll have my answer as to whether or not ship interiors really proved something I wanted to take the time with, but no sooner. | |
You could always have NPC ships going from station to station in real time, loading and unloading cargo. You could also have them be destroyed or hijacked en-route.