I’ve been thinking about other space-based, sandboxish games set in large universes. Privateer, freelancer, X3. Maybe I can have the player set up bases on planets. Some planets are worthless, some are good for mining, and some are good for building a colony on with defences. I guess there are two styles here: Either the universe is already inhabited and you find mostly already-settled neutral planets that are already trading with each other, like freespace, or it’s mostly empty, and it’s all about expanding your empire and claiming territory and taking resources, and the computer is doing the same thing. Like master of magic, or most space-based RTSes.
There needs to be a story for the player, too- they have to start out somewhat weak for purely gameplay reasons, but have the ability to improve themselves drastically- and if the universe is full of others in a not dissimilar position, why isn’t everyone else doing the same thing? It’s a question left unanswered by most RPGs, but in an open universe, it can get a little ridiculous. Further, if you can improve yourself significantly yet still find yourself in danger, what was stopping that danger from stomping you when you were starting out? The popular answers to this question also tend to be a little contrived.
There’s always the “self-improving nanomachine technology” card to play, which could mesh well with the “absorb powers from your enemies” concept I already have going. Or maybe the standard “Collect resources, use them to research upgrades at your base” option. Maybe you’d have to tow crippled enemies to your base to steal their tech, then reverse-engineer it before you could use it. I definitely want to make it hard to steal tech, I want it to feel really special when you get a new weapon type to mix with all your others. Like that feeling when a rare item drops in an RPG, picking it up and identifying it is like opening a christmas present.
On the more technical, immediate side, there’s the problem of the enemy getting up far too much of a head of steam and blasting past the player at ludicrous speeds. It’s just a result of intentionally not having a maximum speed set. Not having a max speed also makes predicting collisions a lot harder. To counter that, I’m planning on having multiple star systems, and setting the AI a slow maximum “combat speed” for when it’s fighting you, slow enough that it can avoid planets without having to make the AI too smart, and a higher “in-system speed” for when it’s not fighting anything, and an unlimited “inter-system speed” for getting between solar systems, where it speeds up half way there, then slows down the other half, like the player would do.
Another immediate problem is the inability to find the enemy- space is large, and if you zoom out enough to see a reasonable distance around you given the speeds attainable, everything is too small to see. Some sort of radar is definitely called for. I’ll be working on that shortly.
