Subset Games Forum

Good afternoon.
I got together with a friend and started talking about what we'd like in the game. Being big Sci-Fi fans we have lots of ideas, I thought it would be better to compile them into a megathread.

Doors
Doors are great, but upgradable doors with different features and styles can be an interesting addition that most games seem to lack. Evil Genius had some nice looking doors. The doors could have different stats. You have your basic door but then for the the alternative doors (they don't have to be straight upgrades) one door could take a lot of damage but then it uses more power and it takes longer to open (being a heavy door) so your units take longer to move around the ship. And then on the other side of the different doors could be just be a force field which can't take as much damage but it doesn't have to open, which means your units can get through your ship faster.

Laboratories
This idea stems from wanting to visulise the research in the game. The laboratory wouldn't be mandatory for research, but it could help increase your rate of research or generate new technical abilities. Of course this room would only work when being manned by one or more of your crew, meaning that you'd have to manage that room.

Pods
The classic escape pod could be uterlised for some interesting game mechanics. First it could be a form of save system. I realize that the game is rouge like but that doesn't mean you have to stick religiously to the genre, sometimes it can be fun to mix it up. What I mean by save system is that you can save your characters at the expense of loosing your ship. In the final few seconds you have left, you can gather the remaining crew in a tiny escape pod at the back of your ship (they physically have to walk there, anyone too slow could get left behind) and then you fire the pod away and your crew from that game starts again, in an standard ship. It would cause epic moments of trying to rush your favorite guy to the pod but then having to escape without them.

The second idea is that you could have an assault pod. This pod would be fired at the enemy ship with your best fighters aboard and crack their hull. Your guys pour in guns blazing and you avoid the costly power expense of the teleporter for a more archaic battering ram approach. Once your guys have rampaged the ship they hop back on board their pod and attach back to the ship, leaving a massive hole in the enemy's ship, pulling out any air and survivors they had left. The disadvantage compared to the teleporter is that they can't come back at anytime so easily, so it could be a risky endevover for your brave soldiers to take.

Repairs Outside
Say if your shields are down and your taking damage, an exposed anteneer on the side of the ship could break off and float away. I propose that you would have to send one of your crew outside of your ship in a spacesuit. They would be vulnerable to enemy fire and it would be a risky thing to do if you were in battle, but vital ship components might be needed for the tactic you want to perform.

Hull Breach
When you have taken a certain amount of damage to a specific location on the ship a hull breach could accecr and air and any crew would be sucked from your ship. Depending on if your doors are working or not, the rest of the ship could start to depressurize. Like repairing outside of your ship, one of your crew could suit up and fix the breach on the outside of the ship. You could even have a race that could survive depressurized locations for a longer period of time.

Specific Limb Damage (Cyborg Crew)
This idea consists of two points. First the crew on your ship could take specific limb damage (think Project Zomboid style). For example if they are working on a computer console and it blows up, it might take off one of your crews hands or if your fighting a boarding party one of your crew could loose a leg. Instead of being useless on the ship, they could be fixed up with cyborg limbs from your med centre and join your crew. Of course there would be consequences of this, the cyborg appendages might be stronger but slower, they might even be hackable by enemy ships and you could have limbs going rouge.

Thanks for reading and I hope you like the ideas.

Those are very interesting ideas, but...

Look at the dev team. See? Only two people. And then again - look at the game design. Limb damage? Nah. Or any overly complex detail management will not fit in here.

Don't get me wrong, I think giving ideas is great and helps with inspiring others but lets be reasonable.



The boarding pod idea got me thinking - you target a room on enemy ship, then fire the pod, like a regular gun. If it hits, then great - your crew is on the enemy ship getting slaughtered. But imagine the moment when you see this lovely little "miss" text when firing the pod. Off goes your crew

Avanti wrote:Look at the dev team. See? Only two people. And then again - look at the game design. Limb damage? Nah. Or any overly complex detail management will not fit in here.

I am well aware there are only two people in the dev team, but I'm also aware of that they got $200,000. I'm not suggesting these ideas should become priority and be used straight away, but surely it's worth being creative and not dismissing it due to the "it's only two people" argument.

You say limb damage is overly complex but managing stats of your crew isn't? Care to explain why detailed management won't fit in the game, because from what I've seen the game strives for detail in creating that authentic starship feel.

Avanti wrote:Don't get me wrong, I think giving ideas is great and helps with inspiring others but lets be reasonable.

One thing I've learned from creating ideas is not to be reasonable but to think outside your limits. Otherwise why should they add teleporting to the game, or boarding parties, or more than one type of weapon. After all they only have two people working on the team and all those ideas sound like a lot of work and aren't really needed, but they sure are going to create a much more creative and interesting experience.

Avanti wrote:The boarding pod idea got me thinking - you target a room on enemy ship, then fire the pod, like a regular gun. If it hits, then great - your crew is on the enemy ship getting slaughtered. But imagine the moment when you see this lovely little "miss" text when firing the pod. Off goes your crew

I can imagine the interview process for finding such brave crew members:

"So on a scale from 1 to 10, how much do you like the color red?"

Avanti wrote:Those are very interesting ideas, but...

Look at the dev team. See? Only two people. And then again - look at the game design. Limb damage? Nah. Or any overly complex detail management will not fit in here.

Don't get me wrong, I think giving ideas is great and helps with inspiring others but lets be reasonable.

Have you ever heard of a little game called dwarf fortress?

It's a roguelike being developed that not only has procedural world generation - meaning that every map you play on is completely different - but it also has specific limb damage, and it's only being worked on by one guy.

Then again, it's been in development for quite some time.

I like to think of ToadyOne as the exception, not the rule. The man's a beast, but don't forget how long we go without updates; with enough time even the smallest team can do a range of impressive work.

@Orange, the problem with your dwarf fort analogy is that the game has been in development for an very long time, where as this one hasn't, and also dwarf fort can run like that because the graphics are so low, it'd be very hard to make a game as complex code wise as that with anything better than asci graphics

@TheDr Run Doctor, the Daleks are coming!

Mczosn wrote:@Orange, the problem with your dwarf fort analogy is that the game has been in development for an very long time, where as this one hasn't, and also dwarf fort can run like that because the graphics are so low, it'd be very hard to make a game as complex code wise as that with anything better than asci graphics

Actually, given that Dwarf Fortress does not at this point manage to use the GPU to assist in its simulation of the world, upgrading the graphics significantly would be purely a graphics engine problem. One that ToadyOne himself doesn't really have the knowledge to solve.

So if a team could be brought together to generate a graphics engine and the assets for it, Dwarf Fortress could easily have much better graphics. In fact, there's a few projects meant to read DF's memory that try to do exactly that as external programs despite the overheads that this implies.

Personally I think the graphics add to the charm of the game, but I do prefer the LNP to the default ASCII. If nothing else I would prefer a better interface. I think we're getting off topic though.