Though this idea has been a lot of fun to play around with, and it could realistically be done by a single person if the hurdle of the game engine's mathematics is overcome.
>basic concept
Multiplayer airship combat, with elements of piracy and factory engineering.
>gameplay
Very little gameplay would be explicitly programmed, there would preferrably only be the following:
- A number of basic components or materials. Preferrably the latter, though the former would likely be a placeholder early in game development.
- The ability for those components and materials to be worked into far bigger things.
- The ability to place a microchip into a machine and assign the microchip to a beacon, and a player looking to spawn somewhere would see the beacon listed on a map and could then inhabit a microchip.
>setting
Venus, for two reasons:
- Vehicles, land or air, are effectively islands. This encourages players to actually integrate with each other, which is really fun and interesting when it happens.
- People attacking anyone they see by surprise or with superior firepower in these kinds of games is far too common, because all they see when they see another player is "waiting to be looted". Looting an enemy aircraft is much more complicated when blowing it out of the sky means it lands on the Venusian hellscape, so battles become much more interesting.
>engine
Although I'm still having fun planning out a very unique engine, the core concept of it is to have it so that a complex system, when not observed, will be treated as a single object with a simplified (though probably slightly inaccurate) formula determining the relationship between stimulation and response. Further details depend on what is mathematically possible.
>Multiplayer airship combat, with elements of piracy and factory engineering
Will we able to build our craft like in starmade, or it will be like "Airships: conquer the skies"?
>>333873698
Custom-built craft.
Potentially the way it could work is that you wouldn't be able to build from a template (Unless you had cleverly figured out how to do it), but you could make a factory to mass-produce a ship.
Which has the interesting effect where small ships can be factory produced by medium ships, which can be factory produced by big ships, which can be factory produced by huge ships, and those huge ships will have to be put together manually from factory-produced sections.
>page 10 with one reply that isn't mine
Can i have a group a ragtag raghead pirates with plasma muskets to shoot at enemy ships?
OP adding a bit of information:
An important implication of having player built spawns is that one could have a ship that usually operates by having a small number of people working as engineers, but when the ship enters combat a large number of people join to fight.
This allows the game to be played with complete disregard for the engineering aspect if one wants, able to be played as a game where you join fights as they happen: much like PlanetSide 2 except with more control in the hands of the players.
>>333875707
Yes.
If the target is an airship with orientable engines, your strategy could be something like riddling the balloon with holes so they're forced to direct thrust upwards, reducing their ability for lateral manouevering.
>>333875912
As long as people aren't as retarded as in Guns of Icarus...
>>333876060
Elaborate?
I know the basics of the gameplay of Guns of Icarus but I'm wondering what you mean by the problem of having retarded players join you.
By the way, the number of players that could join your ship would only be limited by how many robots for players to inhabit you've built.
One could perhaps prevent players from berserking as soon as they join a ship by cleverly designing a gun cannot fire while pointing at someone with a certain transmitter.
So is this going to be a strategy type game?
Would i be able to form a fleet with my brehs and hunt in a pack?
How deep is the custamization?
>>333876690
Customisation is intended to be as deep as possible, although for early development the game would probably use have to use components as the base-level parts, the engine's concept works in such a way that you can replace any base-level component with something built out of even more basic stuff and not end up breaking anything in the game.
As for strategy, it could be played like that, the idea is that the game has appeals to many styles of play by allowing those styles of play to arise naturally.
Forming fleets would be fairly easy since to create a ship you'd have to already be on a bigger ship, rather than just having players scattered randomly across the map.
Should the game have an ultimate objective?
Just gonna throw a random idea out there:
What if to keep the game world interesting, the developer would interfere?
For example hacking "artifacts" into the game: One special thing about the engine I've suggested is that if you tweaked the game data you could make an item that has an impossible function until it is damaged.
Which, of course, would give the players something to play for: Collecting treasure they can't make.
>>333873205
so wait, you want to simulate both physics and chemical reactions?
e.g., instead of building an internal combustion engine and having it put out a certain amount of power that's pre-computed based on various factors (like fuel quality) you want to simulate each explosion, the piston pushing against the camshaft, etc and get a "real" amount of power from it?
that's a shitload of work, not to mention that building anything is going to be a massive pain in the ass unless you manage to make a good interface for it
why is Haiti such a shit hole while the Dominican Republic is normal?
>>333882597
Yes, and I see what you're saying about the example of building an engine.
My solution to that is to have it so that something complex like an engine would be a base-level component (i.e. a thing that's not made out of other things), then work backwards from there making more basic base-level components (all the way to chemicals and metals) and converting pre-existing base-level components into things built out of the new simpler stuff.
Unfortunately you're right about building things being a pain if you're given complete freedom.
The only solution I can think of is to have things like 3D printers and assembly droids as a base-level components at first and then removing easy stuff like that if players figure out a way to legitimately make construction easy.
