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the_taken
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### [FLASH] Tartaros Station

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Post by the_taken » Sat Mar 27, 2010 4:07 pm

Before going to Paris, I got news of a contest: Make a resource/time management game, apply the Mochi Ads API and submit it before midnight GMT, April 30th. I spent the last month working on some game play concepts, and I'm pretty set on how the game will run, though I'm uncertain about game balance. I'm not sure I can program it in time for the contest, but I gonna keep working on it 'till it's done anyway.
The kind of game I'm making is a Tower Defence game with a Sci-Fi theme. The premise is as simple as anyone can come up with: Aliens want to conquer earth, and you are put in charge of a modular space factory with the instructions to transform it into a fortress of doom against the incoming invaders. My inspiration for this game comes from Dwarf Fortress and Mud and Blood 2. If I can't get a graphic artist, this game will use ASCII graphics like Dorf Fort.
I'm putting my whole thought process here both as a way to organize myself, and to get some feedback. Having people bounce ideas back is motivating.

The game play area is divided into two screens:

- Station Layout
- Star Field Battleground

The Station Layout is the interface you use to manage your station. It consists of a Grid displaying all your station modules, the Resource Priority Catalog (RPC), the crew manifest, the inventory log and the production queue.

- The Grid displays the current state and positions of modules, and can be used to place new station modules or manipulate existing modules (repair, dismantle, weapon targeting priority). Each play session begins with the Command Module in the centre of the grid.
- The RPC you use to determine the kind of resources you wish to accumulate, the ratio of each. Resources come and go in cycles.
- The Crew Manifest shows the current personnel and their state, and allows you to request or dismiss personnel if you don't like your current staff. You should to request more personnel to run a bigger station or you will find that things aren't getting done as fast as you need it to. Just to be mean, you have to manually dismiss incapacitated and dead personnel.
- The Inventory Log simply displays what kind of things your station has in the various storage modules, as well as unplaced station modules.
- The Production Queue is the list of things you want your factory to produce, in the order in which you want them produced. You can create new production orders, change the priority of current orders, copy current orders, or cancel orders.

The Star Field Battleground is where all the action takes place. It contains the Advanced Holographic Radar Screen (AHRS), as well as several buttons you use to control the various weapon systems on your station.

- The AHRS takes up most of the screen. At the bottom is a small pulsating white dot which represents your station in the vastness that is the corridor of space you defend. Enemies also appear as dots as well, Red dots, though if I get a graphic artist, I can have an image appear when the mouse hovers over the dot. Friendly ships will appear as Green or Blue dots.
- FAW is a button that toggles weather or not your station's weapons will default to shooting every enemy based on their priorities. Default is off.
- Engage is used when FAW is off. Click this button (which will change the cursor) then click an enemy dot, and your weapons will gleefully fire upon it, then the cursor will change back to normal. Click Engage and hold shift to attack multiple targets. Enemies that shoot your station are automatically targeted.
- Disengage. Works like Engage but tells your gunners no to shoot instead.
- Priority Target changes your cursor to select an enemy target that your really want taken out. You can only have one enemy selected as the Priority Target, and selecting a different enemy simply reassigns the Priority Target tag. If weapon module has the option to fire at many targets, it will target the Priority target regardless of it's own priority settings.
- Launch/Recall Fighters is a bit self explanatory. Fighters are a versatile weapon, but also very expensive and vulnerable to certain enemies and friendly fire.

I had a signature here once but I've since lost it.
My current project: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56456
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the_taken
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Post by the_taken » Sat Mar 27, 2010 11:09 pm

Station Condition
Independent of the any individual module's condition are a few numbers you need to manage and pay attention to.

- Orbit Decay - Getting hit, firing a weapon, launching and landing friendlies, and crashing enemies all contribute to this stat, and this stat is bad. You can make thruster modules to reduce your orbit decay.
- Mass - You don't to manage this stat, just take into consideration. Everything on your station contributes to it's mass, modules, munitions, resources, parts, personnel, and visiting shuttles from earth. The more mass you have, the less your station's orbit decay is affected.
- Threat Level - The game will be programed take this stat in consideration when spawning enemies and assigning their behaviour. Having active weapon modules and destroying enemies increases this stat, while removing weapon modules (or having them destroyed) and letting enemies reach the bottom of the AHRS reduces it.
- Risk Level - Taking on an enemy is a personal risk, but letting it past you means your second line of defence has to contend with it. Enemies behind you are a danger to your supplies, and HQ is not willing to send expensive and rare materials into a zone that is too hot. The more enemies you let by, the lower the chances you have of receiving resources and the cheaper those resources are. Don't expect to get a shipment of anti-matter with several doom-cruisers between you and HQ. It's a game over if you have a zero percent chance of getting anything at all, and risk goes down over time.
  That said, having a high risk level is also a good thing. Exceptional people rise to the occasion when evil's a foot. Every time you receive resources there's a random chance that one of your personnel will spontaneously upgrade into a hero unit. The higher your risk level, the higher the chances.
- Power - Modules consume energy, generators generate energy, batteries store it. Displayed will be the station's capacity and available power.

Inventory (unfinished)
Theoretically, anything can be brought up to the station factory and converted into something halfway useful. But I don't want to do that much work, so instead I'm just putting together a list of some famous materials and some vague materials put that you can use. Materials show up in denominations of 100 units, and are consumed in denominations of 10 units.
Materials have three levels.

- Raw Materials are the resources gained over time from Docking Port Modules.
  - Gas - Only material used in an atmosphere component. Cannot be used in a structure component. Only materials that can be consumed in single units.
  - Metals - Materials that cannot be used a fuel component.
  - Conductor - Material that allows electricity to move.
  - Plastic - Material that can't be used in a hull component.
  - Radioactives - Material is radioactive and causes damage to poorly protected things nearby. This means you will need a storage module with a sufficiently tough internal structure to contain it, while aliens damaged by radioactive weapons will take more damage over time.
  - Tensile - Non-volatile material. Cannot be used as a fuel component, nor in a hull component.
  - Petroleum - Various materials with vastly different properties. All can be used as fuel components, though a few are actually supposed to be.
- Constructed Materials are compositions of several raw materials.
  - Circuits - Constructed material used in the computer component of modules and weapon systems.
  - Robotic - Constructed materials representing the moving devices in modules and weapon systems.
  - Alloy - Two raw materials combined to create a different material.
- Parts are materials you can put together and take apart to make modules and ships. This includes incomplete module sections. Unlike Raw Materials and Constructed Materials, parts do very specific things.
  - Thruster - Makes something move. One or two on a missile, a few more on a ship, and whole ton for a module section dedicated to using these to stabilize the station.
  - Computer - It will compute. Every module needs one, as do ships.
  - Plating - Large impermeable surface. can be used as a hull component, or armor component.
  - Clamp - Machinery that hold things together. Every module needs at least 4. Docking ports need 5, while Hangers need a total 7.
  - Chemical Generator - Device that produces power from the fuels used.
  - Fission Genrator - Device that produces power by destroying nuclear forces. Can use any material, though some are better than others.
  - Fusion Generator - Device that produces power by mixing matter with anti-matter.

All items have attributes that affect what they are made into.

- Density - How much a single unit of this material contributes to the ship's mass. If it is used as an armor component, it affects how much damage it can take. If used to create a weapon component, higher density increases range and maximum damage at the cost of accuracy. Higher density ammunition increases damage and the cost to fire the weapon when used as the structure component. When used in a fission reactor, it determines how much energy is produced.
- Strength - How resistant to physical change the material is. As the structural component , it affects the amount of hit points the object has. In a weapon component, it affects the maximum damage. As ammunition, it increases the damage when used as the structure component.
- Volatility - How easy the material releases energy. The higher the volatility, the more energy it gives. When used in a fission reactor, it multiplies the amount of energy produced from density. It also affects ammunition's range and damage as the firing component, and just damage as the payload component.
- Special Attribute - Unique things the material does under certain conditions.
- Cost - How expensive it is for HQ to get the resource to you. More expensive materials won't show up the more risk you have.
- Size - How much inventory space the item takes up. Raw materials have a 1 to 1 correspondence of unit to size, while everything else doesn't.

Crew
An integral resource is the abilities your crew provides. Crew members man weapons, pilot ships, run factories, and repair everything. They probably eat and dream, but I'm not gonna program that in. The only thing you need to maintain your crew is breathable air, security, and a place to sleep. Each crew member has seven stats.

- Health - Adverse conditions take a toll on your crew's health; atmosphere problems, being in a module when it takes damage, alien intruders. The less Health a crew member has, the less it can contribute to your stations functions to the point where one can become incapacitated and can't contribute at all. Crew members can be healed, unless they are dead.
- Efficiency - How much a crew member can contribute to any one task. Health is a factor, but so is the presence of other crew members and performing a task they were not trained for. You can organize crew into teams, and the more crew assigned to a job, the more they get done, but the less each contributes. And seven (7) is the breaking point; eight crew working the same job are just as productive as seven crew.
- Training - When requesting new crew members, determines the kind of stats the crew member will have when they arrive. Also determines how effective the crew contributes to a task.
- Cost - Just like any other resource, HQ will not send personnel they've invested billions into training into a death trap. If you want quality crew members, get your risk level down.
- Might - How mighty your crew member is.
- Brain - How much brain power power the crew member has.
- Spry - How much speed your crew member can do stuff with.

Training types are divided into three professions: Techy, Military and Neither. Crew trained in a profession are better at it than a crew with the same stats trained in the other.
Techies - Good at actually running and maintaining the station.

- Engineer - will have high Might and Brain. Us them to repair your station.
- Mechanic - will have higher Spry and Brain. Use them to construct, install and dismantle.
- Technician - will have higher Might and Spry. Use them to process materials.
- Manager - Has average stats, but when assigned to a Tech task, does not contribute to the team's work output. Instead increases all the other members' efficiency.

Military - Good at everything that has to do with combat.

- Commandos - Might and Spry are the higher stats. Makes them good at fighting back against invaders.
- Pilots - Spry and Brain are the higher stats. Makes them good at flying their ships.
- Gunners - With a high Might and Brain, to run your station's weapon systems best.
- Sargent - average stats, but increases a military team's efficiency. Doesn't contribute to a gunnery team's work output, and fighters can only be assigned teams of one.

Neither - Crew not trained in either of the previous professions, but are useful none the less.

- Doctor - Very high Brain. When unassigned to tasks, will heal other crew members.
- Draftee - Crew with average stats, and untrained in any profession. Lowest cost.
- Android - All high stats, but still untrained. Stupid high cost, to boot.
- Hero - You can't request this kind of crew member. They only show up during a very intense battle, replacing the crew member they though they were. When a hero is revealed, they flare with a golden aura, and angelic chorus springs out, and you get a small pop-up window informing you of the event. Their Might, Brain and Spry doubles what it was before, and they count as both trained in Techy and Military professions. A team with a hero in it also gains a boots in efficiency. A hero unassigned to jobs will attempt to perform first aid on injured crew members. You also get to name your new hero.

Last edited by the_taken on Sun Apr 11, 2010 7:00 pm, edited 7 times in total.
I had a signature here once but I've since lost it.
My current project: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56456
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Parthenon
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Post by Parthenon » Sun Mar 28, 2010 12:07 am

A couple of things:

- Why would you not want to shoot at the aliens? Seems to be a lot of fuss about whether or not to shoot. Unless of course you can't immediately tell whether ships are human or alien or if a large blob is several small ships or one big ship, and you have to keep upgrading your sensors to find out if the incoming group is several miners or an alien battleship. But that contradicts your plan of having the friendlies automatically coming up as blue or green.
- In the risk level section, you say that it resources are cheaper when the risk is higher which doesn't make a lot of sense. Did you mean that you get a smaller amount of resources when the risk is higher?
- For the raw resources, instead of liquid Y/N why not have a state of solid, liquid or gas. That way you can have oxygen or hydrogen resources for fuels, using the thrusters and for breathing. You could, for example, have to shuttle out hydrogen for fuel to gun turrets or fighters since they're too small for fusion or antimatter reactors, or have the station run out of oxygen and everyone asphyxiate. After all, you already have the mindset of screw over the player by making them remove dead bodies from their posts, so making them worry about several fuels and carbon monoxide poisoning seems normal.

Otherwise it sounds like a pretty cool idea, and I like the idea of having to worry about orbit decay and that if you send out all your fighters at once then you're likely to send the station crashing into the planet.
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the_taken
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Post by the_taken » Mon Mar 29, 2010 12:56 pm

In every single defence game I have ever played, the goal is to create such a spectacular defence system that enemies never get past you. You had a set number of lives, and you gained resources per kill, so every time a creep got by, it started a death spiral.
In my game, your station is going to be relatively fragile and enemies do not automatically engage you. You may want the option to forgo attacking to buy yourself a breather (to repair modules, let the factories produce something key), at the cost of quality resources the next time the shuttles show up. That's called "Risk Management", something many games do not allow you to practice. I'm giving you the option to pick your battles, since your goal is to win the war, not fight every battle (though if you figure out how to break my game and can hold off every enemy wave in succession, props to you.)

Cost represents what it takes for HQ to obtain and send the material too you, and affects the likelihood you will receive all the material you requested. If you want a shuttle full of plutonium, and but you X-Level risk, you may only get half as much plutonium as you asked for. The rest of the shipment might be uranium, though you won't get as much of that to compensate the lack of plutonium. If your risk bar is full and you're still in the game, the shuttles may as well only be delivering buckets of margarine and copper bars.
Also, heroes.

I'm now considering having every material have a Typing, as opposed to a boolean liquid tag, which determines what the material can be used for. It would interact with the Cost. When you order a material, but you have too high a risk level, the game will select a material with a lower cost for you to receive.

What model to use for atmosphere management? The station could have one shared atmosphere, represented by a new station condition variable array. Basically, it will tell you the ratio of things in the station's atmosphere.
The alternative is to have each module (and fighter) have an atmosphere array instead. This would let you individually manage the atmosphere in each. Normally, you would want Air in every module, but since the game is going to include alien boarding parties, having the option to switch from Air to Vaporised Uranium would be fun. Or tedious. Then there's the question of weather adjacent modules share atmosphere any way, making regular use of poisonous atmosphere a health hazard to your crew... Yep. Definitely adding individual module atmospheres that leak into the connected ones.
I had a signature here once but I've since lost it.
My current project: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56456
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Parthenon
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Post by Parthenon » Mon Mar 29, 2010 3:00 pm

Deliberately allowing aliens past as part of the game changes it a lot, as well as making it pretty interesting. If only we could have a flash X-Com game.
How exactly do you get the money to buy stuff from HQ? Is it a budget over time that gradually increases with time and risk? Or is it based on collecting resources from mining ships you own, or from killing aliens, or what?
I worry that there are too many types and are too complex. Personally I'd either keep to the solid/liquid/gas or I'd type it by what it's used for, so have:

- Life Support: oxygen, water, possibly plants
- Conductors: copper, gold
- Construction: steel, concrete,
- Fuels: antimatter, hydrogen, kerosene, uranium

This way you don't worry too much about the tensile strength, whether it can conduct or whatever. Otherwise you have to worry about seven different groups, and materials could be in multiple categories, and it would get way too confusing for a flash game.
In terms of personnel, is the number of people going to be small enough to care about individual names of the non-heroes, or are you going to only have names for people in charge of modules and have things like a module getting damaged and 30 people getting sucked out into space?
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Rejakor
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Post by Rejakor » Tue Mar 30, 2010 4:30 am

Excellent. I like a lot of the ideas here. This sounds like a game that I would play.
Crew, though. It seems like you want to give the player the ability to micromanage the crew, especially how many doctors or techies or whatever he has, and how he wants them organized (which compartment they're in, say).
I think having hundreds of uncontrolled crew members would work a bit better. If a compartment is damaged and you're not on Red Alert little spacesuits start swarming over it (in the back end, you'd be tracking how many crew are in each 'compartment', and military would swarm to areas being invaded by aliens (a certain percentage remaining at their posts though, make it semi-intelligent - you could also have alien fighters avoid firing at section their boarding parties are in), doctors would head to areas with 'wounded' (each section would have separate integers to track each type of crew 'wounded' and 'unwounded' - wounded return to their correct unwounded category when they recover, but don't add their stats to the compartment's total stats while wounded - you could even have them add a minus).
If you set it up so that different compartments have different stats depending on how many crew remain in them, and those stats are remain invisible to the player except via certain visual clues (quick rate of damage repair, heavy quick resistance to alien incursion groups). You could even have some kind of colour coded 'how well an area is staffed' check, where the player mouseovers a button and certain areas go bright red (lots of crew, mostly military) or different alphas of white (well or less well staffed, balanced crew assortment (defined by you, obviously, you wouldn't need to make it 1:1), a red cross symbol means doctors are present in the compartment, orange more than white or red means there's a lot of technicians there... a key could flash up on mouseover too.
The key to this, like every flash game, is making the interface intuitive. The gameplay can be compelling as hell, but if the player can't make sense of it/access it, they're going to run into trouble. Basically, the idea to a successful flash game is paring back the gameplay elements to the solid core and automating/simplifying as much of the rest as you can.
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Vebyast
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Post by Vebyast » Tue Mar 30, 2010 2:02 pm

This is starting to sound like Dwarf Fortress Defense in Space. Which would be awesome.
I really like the crew idea, but the player needs to have at least some way to control them, if only so that the player can evacuate compartments before flooding them with vaporized uranium. Even something as simple as rally and anti-rally flags would work. "Everybody get in the compartment with the radiation shielding" and "Everybody stay out of the deathtrap that used to be the kitchen".
Also, how does crew production work? I assume that they'd arrive on shuttles (unless they're robots or rabbits), but what are their proportions? I'd let the player set some sliders and then have the shuttles try to keep the crew compliment at those levels, but that might be really bad interface design (I'm a command line guy, so don't listen to my opinion). Another option would be to let the player requisition crew counts at the same time they requisition resources. Yet another option would be to make the "crew" more like little service robots, and you can just manufacture them when you want.
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Rejakor
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Post by Rejakor » Tue Mar 30, 2010 6:18 pm

Shuttles arrive regularly, like, every 5 minutes(faster) regularly. Sometimes they bring goods you want to build your base (some or all of which could be random due to having failed your requisition check - random could even be good/awesome stuff you want, governments are crazy like that, but most of the time it'll be shit). This is autodecided. If you have 0 Metals, you want metals, but if your req is low, you'll get food or plastics instead. It'll let you build compartments out of plastics, but they'll have much lower stats (so a stray kinetic round and poof! All the crew in there are now dead, watch the little bodies stream from the rapidly multiplying cracks in the structure and float around your station as they are sucked into the gas giants close orbit). Shuttles bring the multitudes of crew, again req gets you what you're short of, low req means you get like 50 doctors when you want techs, or a shitton of basic crew when you have one overworked doctor tending to 1500 people.
Also you really need to decide the level of detail. If you want the player to be micromanaging how many computer chips he's got and how many fighters he wants to build and how many missiles and stuff, then you are looking at a very small scale - don't plan for hundreds of fighters or it'll either be a huge job or the UI will be hard to decipher.
If you want a more strategical view, automate lower parts of the micro. So if the player attaches a 'hangar' compartment to part of his space station, it will automatically start filling it's hangar spaces with spacecraft using up raw materials to do so unless the player brands it with the 'Stop Production' tool which leaves a big roadblock symbol on it until he hits it wth the 'Resume Production' tool and it keeps filling it's slots. And a missile bay has the cost of missiles already appended, but eats up resources each time it fires.
Having the ability to create ancillary space stations to act as defense platforms for the main 'mother' space station would be absolutely awesome. Even just a 'defense platform' freeflying module, but the real awesome would be in putting together a bunch of mini stations with their own 'living blocks' and 'shuttle docks' and 'manufacturing stations' all to support a plethora of weapon emplacement sections.
Don't forget, you also need to do this without massive menus. Ideally it should all be clickthrough. So that means no Small Living Quarters(Poor), Medium Living Quarters (Poor), Large Living Quarters (Officer) and no crew morale that isn't represented by a single bar with a happy smile at one end or a frown at the other and only goes down when people die. It means Living quarters are 'big' when you add three of them like connector blocks, and they're 'small' when you add a single one.
Weapons is a bit different because you want to have different types, ship bays as well (fighters, frigates, corvettes/destroyers(expensive)). So if you click 'weapons block' it takes you to another 4 blocks with 'laser, kinetic, missile, ECM' options. Likewise, clicking 'science' gets you a manufacturing centre, shuttle dock, lab (slowly adds to your efficiency etc integers, consider dropping) and med bay (increases efficiency of doctors, recovery rate of wounded in capsules 5 'joins' from it). Living i'd say just leave living, and the other is hangars, which have different types of hangar for different types of ship.
Have another switch between context menu with 2 sets of 4 commands - stop production, start production, fire at will, don't fire --- --- Crew Rally, Tech Rally, Military Rally, Flee (crew commands that are like pings - they rally or flee but then slowly come back).
Hahaha, I can just imagine some key section module getting it's ass handed to it and ripping apart, and the 2 parts of the station falling apart, techies going out in shuttles to tow the 2 pieces together... you'd need to have it autodetect when 2 pieces are next to each other and have them automatically attach and 'bulkhead' together. Hm... this is sounding like a massive project, and I was trying to make it simpler...
Anyway, feel free to ignore me, i'm just thinking out loud into the thread.
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Rejakor
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Post by Rejakor » Tue Mar 30, 2010 6:27 pm

Shuttles arrive regularly, like, every 5 minutes(faster) regularly. Sometimes they bring goods you want to build your base (some or all of which could be random due to having failed your requisition check - random could even be good/awesome stuff you want, governments are crazy like that, but most of the time it'll be shit). This is autodecided. If you have 0 Metals, you want metals, but if your req is low, you'll get food or plastics instead. It'll let you build compartments out of plastics, but they'll have much lower stats (so a stray kinetic round and poof! All the crew in there are now dead, watch the little bodies stream from the rapidly multiplying cracks in the structure and float around your station as they are sucked into the gas giants close orbit). Shuttles bring the multitudes of crew, again req gets you what you're short of, low req means you get like 50 doctors when you want techs, or a shitton of basic crew when you have one overworked doctor tending to 1500 people.
Also you really need to decide the level of detail. If you want the player to be micromanaging how many computer chips he's got and how many fighters he wants to build and how many missiles and stuff, then you are looking at a very small scale - don't plan for hundreds of fighters or it'll either be a huge job or the UI will be hard to decipher.
If you want a more strategical view, automate lower parts of the micro. So if the player attaches a 'hangar' compartment to part of his space station, it will automatically start filling it's hangar spaces with spacecraft using up raw materials to do so unless the player brands it with the 'Stop Production' tool which leaves a big roadblock symbol on it until he hits it wth the 'Resume Production' tool and it keeps filling it's slots. And a missile bay has the cost of missiles already appended, but eats up resources each time it fires.
Having the ability to create ancillary space stations to act as defense platforms for the main 'mother' space station would be absolutely awesome. Even just a 'defense platform' freeflying module, but the real awesome would be in putting together a bunch of mini stations with their own 'living blocks' and 'shuttle docks' and 'manufacturing stations' all to support a plethora of weapon emplacement sections.
Don't forget, you also need to do this without massive menus. Ideally it should all be clickthrough. So that means no Small Living Quarters(Poor), Medium Living Quarters (Poor), Large Living Quarters (Officer) and no crew morale that isn't represented by a single bar with a happy smile at one end or a frown at the other and only goes down when people die. It means Living quarters are 'big' when you add three of them like connector blocks, and they're 'small' when you add a single one.
Weapons is a bit different because you want to have different types, ship bays as well (fighters, frigates, corvettes/destroyers(expensive)). So if you click 'weapons block' it takes you to another 4 blocks with 'laser, kinetic, missile, ECM' options. Likewise, clicking 'science' gets you a manufacturing centre, shuttle dock, lab (slowly adds to your efficiency etc integers, consider dropping) and med bay (increases efficiency of doctors, recovery rate of wounded in capsules 5 'joins' from it). Living i'd say just leave living, and the other is hangars, which have different types of hangar for different types of ship.
Have another switch between context menu with 2 sets of 4 commands - stop production, start production, fire at will, don't fire --- --- Crew Rally, Tech Rally, Military Rally, Flee (crew commands that are like pings - they rally or flee but then slowly come back).
Hahaha, I can just imagine some key section module getting it's ass handed to it and ripping apart, and the 2 parts of the station falling apart, techies going out in shuttles to tow the 2 pieces together... you'd need to have it autodetect when 2 pieces are next to each other and have them automatically attach and 'bulkhead' together. Hm... this is sounding like a massive project, and I was trying to make it simpler...
Anyway, feel free to ignore me, i'm just thinking out loud into the thread.
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Rejakor
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Post by Rejakor » Tue Mar 30, 2010 6:33 pm

> If I can't get a graphic artist, this game will use ASCII graphics like Dorf Fort.

Get a graphic artist. I know a few. Seriously. Get an artist.
Dwarf Fort works because there are people insane enough to use its incredibly unintuitive interface due to the sheer amount of work that has been put into it's back end to simulate in minute and terrifying detail the life of insane dwarves in a fort in a mountain. And a lot of the time they do it because they're obsessed, it's a cultural phenomenon, they've read boatmurdered, and because they're waiting for disaster to strike in hilarious unpredictable ways.
A tower defense game like this, unless you're going to focus specifically on micromanaging the station, will work a lot better with a lighter less detailed focus than dorf fort, and that almost demands at the very least a graphical interface.
Also, for some reason I assumed you were working in flash, which, looking at your OP, doesn't seem to be the case, meaning some of my suggestions are defunct. A lot of them hold true regardless of development system, though.
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Vebyast
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Post by Vebyast » Tue Mar 30, 2010 7:05 pm

Depending on the level of detail you want, it might be interesting to make the player manage cargo mass and volume. Shuttles radio up their cargo manifests two minutes before they get there, and if you don't have enough cargo modules available when they get there, you're out of luck (and any dudes without space to live die and kill morale).

> Rejakor wrote:Having the ability to create ancillary space stations to act as defense platforms for the main 'mother' space station would be absolutely awesome. Even just a 'defense platform' freeflying module, but the real awesome would be in putting together a bunch of mini stations with their own 'living blocks' and 'shuttle docks' and 'manufacturing stations' all to support a plethora of weapon emplacement sections.

This could be handled easily by creating a "command" block and decreeing that stuff only works if it has a solid connection to a command block. Want a new station? Grow the new station off the side of your current station, and when you're done with it just sever the scaffolding and you're done. Easy as that.
That would also make station command easier: just drag-and-drop the command block and the station it's attached to will move in that direction.

> Rejakor wrote:Weapons is a bit different because you want to have different types, ship bays as well (fighters, frigates, corvettes/destroyers(expensive)). So if you click 'weapons block' it takes you to another 4 blocks with 'laser, kinetic, missile, ECM' options. Likewise, clicking 'science' gets you a manufacturing centre, shuttle dock, lab (slowly adds to your efficiency etc integers, consider dropping) and med bay (increases efficiency of doctors, recovery rate of wounded in capsules 5 'joins' from it). Living i'd say just leave living, and the other is hangars, which have different types of hangar for different types of ship.

I think it'd probably be more interesting if you just had a "armament" or "weapons" block, and (depending on the level of control you want) either an upgrade system (like in standard TD games) or an equip system (like in an RPG). If you wanted extreme strategic view, you could even have an "upgrade all" button that orders techs to start upgrading every energy weapon block on the station. Or you could have your upgrades system take the form of feeding new fuel or different amounts of fuel to your guns.
Whatever you do, though, you have to be able to eventually upgrade weaponry somehow. Just building gigantic formation of popguns isn't very fun.

> Rejakor wrote:Hahaha, I can just imagine some key section module getting it's ass handed to it and ripping apart, and the 2 parts of the station falling apart, techies going out in shuttles to tow the 2 pieces together... you'd need to have it autodetect when 2 pieces are next to each other and have them automatically attach and 'bulkhead' together. Hm... this is sounding like a massive project, and I was trying to make it simpler...[/ping]

It's still pretty simple. Nothing here requires very much logic, actually. If you want to connect two stations, drag-drop from the command block to the block you want to attach, then click where you want to connect it to the station. It maneuvers to get them close then they get tractored together.
A system that simple would also let you have "factory" blocks that churn out other blocks. If you want to create a weapons block, instead of having to select a block type and placing it and everything, all you have to do is have the factory block extrude a new block, which gets spit out into space when it's done.

> Rejakor wrote:Anyway, feel free to ignore me, i'm just thinking out loud into the thread.

Isn't that kind of the idea?
Also, same.
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Post by the_taken » Wed Mar 31, 2010 12:25 am

I don't want to to have a very simple set of materials, that just creates a very obvious acquisition paradigm. Only ask for titanium to built hull plating, only ask for plutonium and only built nuclear reactors.
I want you to be able to take random materials that you wouldn't consider normally and put it to use. Like using play-dough as the payload component in a torpedo. Yeah, you should be using 1.21 Gigawatt of plutonium to make a nice big explosion, but you don't have any cause HQ thinks you're gonna be pwnd in the next wave. So all you can do is splatter their windshield with a kaleidescope of childhood creativity.
Ok, that's an extreme example.
...or is it?

Rejakor has a grasp of the resource scheme. I don't have specific numbers yet, but I know how resource acquisition is going to work.
Every 15 seconds a shuttle arrives at your station for every Docking Module you have attached. Unlike Trading in DF, you don't need to have haulers move stuff, we just assume the stuff goes into the various storage modules you have. Crew works the same way. Every shuttle can move X amount of crew, so for every docking port you have, the more crew you can have arrive or leave.
Which resources you get depends on what you do in the resource catalog. Every Docking Module grants you a number of points you can allocate to requesting resources. The more points you allocate to gaining Copper, the more Copper you get. And you can go take points out of copper acquisition to get methane gas instead.
How the inventory is going to work is simple. You just have room for your stuff. I'm not gonna have the game keep track of where every little nugget of gold is. A storage module adds to the maximum amount of stuff you can have, and it'll be safe to assume all the stuff will get evenly distributed. If a storage module is destroyed, you'll lose a fraction of resources proportional to the number of storage modules you had a second ago.
The exception to this are Radioactive and Anti-matter materials. Those need special storage modules to contain.
As long as the material is on the station it will contribute to the station's mass, even if it is no longer in the inventory.

Crew will be handled by a similar method. You can have X for each Barracks Module you have built. Unlike stuff, crew has to be organized into teams, even if they're teams of 1 (which is how they show up). Then you assign the kind of jobs the team can do.
They will be a hidden list of jobs that have to be done, consisting of everything from "Fire the LASER!", fight off intruders, run a factory for one cycle to setting up a new station module. At set intervals (many times per second), the game will check if it can match a team that isn't doing anything to a job. Every computation cycle, a crew team doing a job contributes a certain number of points to a job depending on what stats the job requires. The better the used stats the team has, and their efficiency, the faster they complete the job.
A crew team's location isn't going to be directly kept track of. When a station module takes damage, the teams performing jobs the module has risks taking damage.
Crew that isn't doing anything is assume to being in a Barrack Module. If one is damaged, only a portion of your idle crew teams runs the risk of being hurt. If you lose a barracks (potentially loosing crew in the process) and don't have enough room for all your crew, random extra crew members lose efficiency.
The ship is gonna have one big atmosphere status condition. You can still replace air with poison to kill everything on board, you'll just kill everything on board.

Being able to manufacture crew members would be funny. After all. that's what you do in most other games. (I'm looking at you, Tiberium Sun)

Combat ships don't work the same way as stuff and crew. A hanger module is actually a place where ships hang. When you first add a hanger, it will have empty slots that you need to fill with ships. The player can click on these slots and either select "Retrieve Ship" which assigns a ship that lost it's hanger earlier is is still out in space, or the player can click "Build New Ship", which lets you select a bunch of parts to build a new ship from, then assign a piloting job. You can then used these filled slots to manage the ships fuel and ammunition.
The Job "Pilot Fighter" lasts until cancelled, and you can't cancel the job when the fighter isn't hanging.
Fighter ships fly away from your station and engage valid enemy targets until they are out of ammo, they've taken more than scratches, or they are low on fuel. You won't need to manually what fuel or ammo to load your ships with every single time they land, just when you first build them, or when you run out.

Ammo is either in the the station's inventory, on a ship, or being delivered to your enemies via extra-express delivery.

Weapon systems and enemies need to be designed together. I already have fighters, which are the first defence against enemy boarding parties, and Commando crew members, who finish off anything that gets through. Fighters are also good at taking out mid-range bombers (as long as your own mid-range bombs aren't firing at the same time.)

Station modules automatically connect to every adjacent module, as long as those modules can trace a series of connected modules back to the Command Module.
Modules that have been cut off from the main station no longer function, with the exception of storage modules. Such modules can easily be moved (well, easier than dis- and reassembling.)
Or maybe not... I'll think about it.

The game method of just telling a turret to suddenly become upgraded is overused, IMDO. My game is going to use the "as is" method for weapons, like DF. You make a silver sword and it's silver sword until you melt it back down. You could encrust it with gems, but then it's a gem encrusted silver sword, which doesn't make it a better tool for harvesting iron ore.
On Tartaros Station, you can't tell your lab geeks to figure how your weapons teams can shoot harder, military show up already knowing how to do stuff to the best of their abilities (also, they are very busy keeping the station from exploding). If you want a better gun module, produce a superior weapon, tell it to use the best ammo (which you produce as well), and assemble and assign a better team. Like heroes.
Last edited by the_taken on Wed Mar 31, 2010 12:31 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Parthenon » Wed Mar 31, 2010 1:37 am

I don't quite get what you're saying about the types. With my suggested groups you'd ask for the Light Solid Titanium for the hull but since the risk is too high you get a lesser Light Solid instead such as Cardboard. Or you try and get some antimatter but instead you get the lesser Fuel of some coal. Thats what you want isn't it?
I was just saying that having more than seven or so types, multiple of which can apply to some materials is too many to cope with and gets stupid. Types like 'liquid' are too vague to be any use, and 'radioactive' is either exactly what you want or a lie and will piss off the player.
And you really don't want to get too much like the DS game Scribblenauts where you can get almost anything but they end up being distractions you ignore rather than actually a main factor of the game.
I definitely agree about not upgrading things, and instead replacing them. Will heroes get 'xp' and improve or is it a binary condition where they are just better?

Some of these suggestions are getting slightly silly for a flash game. Seriously, having hundreds of autonomous crew and aliens, with ship AI reacting to the onboard fight, at the same time as several other ships both human and alien flying around, and the atmosphere, gun turrets, risk, and fuck knows what else all going on at the same time is going to be too complex.
We really need some basic designs of the different screens so we can immediately know whether or not we're worrying about fighter tactics, or moving troops around the station during battle, or how big the station will be on screen, or what. And since you don't automatically engage aliens the space station won't be a factor in most of the fights and will only really come in with retaliation strikes from the aliens so the battles need to be designed so that the station isn't the main part of the combat.
You simply can't be controlling the crew on the space station at the same time as controlling the turrets and fighters, so either some needs to be automatic of they need to be separate minigames. Since people want to be fending off boarding aliens it should be a separate minigame. I see four main possibilities:

- A high level strategic view, with basically just the numbers of crew, heroes and aliens in each module. You'd be moving tens of crew at a time between modules, and the combat within a module would be done automatically, with casualties being automatically deducted from the numbers. Much too simplistic.
- A low level rts where you control just the heroes, moving around the modules and fighting off the aliens. However this ignores the vast majority of the crew and would require a lot of detail for the modules. Much too complex.
- A slightly more abstracted rts where each hero is in command of lots of crew. Each hero would be shown as a blob or a face, and you'd control where each group goes and what it defends, with the AI controlling the actual shooting. Simple enough to work but very different from the rest of the game.
- A standard tower defence where the modules create the route of the aliens. The heroes would again be in command of several crew and could be moved to different junctions and be reinforced by more crew.

For the station why not focus a lot more on the original UFO: Enemy Unknown / X-Com. You start off with one station and can create more completely separate stations. Each station is a 5x5 grid with each module taking up one or more of these squares and having to be connected to others. You need at the minimum a supply ship dock, general stores, life support and living quarters. You can have a variety of modules such as hangers, radar, turrets, manufacturing, etc, and each module can take up a number of squares on the grid, with hangers taking up more or whatever.
Then, if the aliens attack you have a tower defence with the gun turrets as towers, and fighters as movable towers, with the space station at the bottom. If more than, say, five ships reach the bottom they count as having boarded the station. If they do then they board from the hangers and supply ship dock. This allows you to arrange the layout to be good for defence or to have the largest amount of outside defences as possible. If the aliens reach and destroy all the life support modules or power plant modules then that station is lost.
Like X-Com you'd expect to lose a lot of crew and probably a station or two, but you'd create lots to make up for losses.
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Post by the_taken » Thu Apr 01, 2010 10:17 pm

I've never played X-com, so I can't copy anything from it.
Anyway, I'm just gonna make a big list of enemies so that we can come up with more, and generate weapons parts to counter them with

Rogue's Gallery
The type of enemies that show up depend on the station's threat level condition. Enemy stats:

- Hit Points, cause some ships take more punishment than others.
- Armor, cause some ships are harder to damage than others.
- Speed, cause some ships are faster than others.
- Mass, cause some ships are heavier than others. Also, some ships may collide with your station, just to mess with your orbit decay.
- Threat, meaning the minimum threat level your station requires before the enemy general will consider sending this particular type of enemy at you. Also how much Threat Level you gain by destroying it, and how much you lose by letting it get by.
- Risk, to determine how much it contributes to your station's Risk Status.
- Frequency, how often this type of unit will appear. This stat will be randomized every time you start a new game, to prevent anyone from coming up with a solid strategy.
- Damage, cause some ships hit harder than others.
- RoF, cause some ships shoot more often than others.
- Range, cause some ships can shoot farther than others.
- Accuracy, cause some ships shoot better than others.

Enemies also have behaviour patterns, which is often randomized at spawn (and possibly affected by Threat Level).

- The enemy will attempt to bypass the station, but will shoot back at fighters.
- The enemy will try to get past the station while ignored, and attack the station if attacked.
- The enemy will try to get past the station while ignored, but retreat when engaged while shooting back.
- The enemy will attack the station if possible, but will try to get past the station when damaged.
- The enemy will attack the station when ignored, will retreat when engaged.
- The enemy's only goal is the station's destruction, and will try to collide with the station after being damaged.

[*]Invader Drone - Shows up at 0 threat ( though will contribute to your Threat Level when killed). Despite it's relative toughness, it is the easiest invader to contend with as it cannot directly retaliate against attacks. It attacks by reaching your station and using a Hanger Module or Docking Module to put enemy crew members in your station. This also prevents your docking module from operating, or a single fighter from landing, and adds poison to your station's atmosphere.
[*]Meteor Drone - Shows up at 0 threat. It's basically a rocket on a rock. Attacks by crashing into your station. Few HP.
[*]Nimbus Drone - Shows up at 0 threat. Weak, medium range attack.
[*]Observer Drone - Shows up at 0 threat. Weak, short ranged attack. Also increases all other enemies' accuracy while present.
[*]Artillery Drone - Long ranged, slow firing, big attack, but no toughness. Glass cannon.
[*]Dash Drone - Extremely fast enemy. Has a weak short-ranged attack, but a high RoF.
[*]Warp Drone - Apparently slow enemy, with a weak short-ranged attack. But teleports when attacked. Teleporting takes time to charge.
[*]Asteroid Drone - Meteor Drone with high armor.
[*]Nanite Blob Drone - Ridiculously high health, splits into a number Meteor Drones when killed inversely-proportional to its frequency.
[*]Doom Drone - Asteroid Drone that explodes, damaging allot more and really affecting orbit decay.
Well that's the basic ideas I have for enemies. I figure I can easily have the game generate tier two enemies that have the best stats of two drones, and mother ships, which generate a certain drone at regular intervals. And cruisers, a doubly good drone.
Last edited by the_taken on Thu Apr 01, 2010 10:28 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Post by the_taken » Sun Apr 11, 2010 3:09 pm

Incoming Fire
A big part of the game involves shooting and being shot at by the aliens. The player can minimize incoming fire by loading up on long range weaponry, but there's still the going to be the immutable fact that some aliens will totally get past that first firing range and get into their firing range. Here's how it works.
When an enemy shoots at the station, it first picks a module it wants to shoot, then a variance is calculate based on the enemy's distance from their Range stat. Then the exact location of the shot is chosen by the RNG within the variance on both the X and Y axis of your station grid to determine which module is actually hit. If the shot lands in an empty grin, no module is hit. The enemy's Range stat determines at which point they become perfectly accurate when shooting at the station.
I've figured out that depending on the materials used, a station module can have up to 100 hitpoints, and an armor value up to 10. Enemy ships will deal anywhere from 5 to 50 damage, depending on their type and the overall threat level.
This creates a decision to either have a few elite module that are not likely to be damaged but you really can't afford to, or having a large station with many expendable modules.
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