LegacyWorlds Beta 6

Beta 5 doesn’t include any notion of time flow. Nothing is really recorded and past events only remain as a part of the memory of players. However only relying on memory isn’t sufficient if we want to build up a real history. And history is what makes a game alive. As such we are planning to introduce a “true” time flow in Beta 6 as well as an event recording system, which feeds its entries to players through the Intergalactic News Service.

However, this notion of time poses some problems. Considering real life time or server time as the LegacyWorlds time doesn’t make much sense, since the game is supposed to take place in a relatively distant future. However we can’t only rely on a fictional time indication: it is important to inform players about real-life time so that they can infer what to do and when. Therefore we intend to use a dual time system, using both the real-life, “server” time and a fictional LegacyWorlds time.

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In Beta 5 the only events which can occur in game are the direct consequences of some game actions performed either by yourself or other players. There is no surprise nor anything linked with the universe itself. Introducing alien factions controlled by the game itself is one way to improve the game dynamics. Another way is to introduce random events.

These events occur randomly in the course of the game and affect game parameters on a scale wide enough not to advantage or disadvantage too much particular players. The frequency at which random events occur will have to be precisely defined, however it will be devised so that everyone is affected by a random event every now and then in any case.

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In Beta 5 the only items which can actually be built are ships. Moreover the only “permanent” items a player can control are planets which are located at specific coordinates. With the introduction of real buildings it felt logical that a planet’s surface might not be the only location where permanent structures could be installed. How about space?

That’s where space structures come in. Space structures are structures which can be constructed by an empire or an alliance in various places in space. Three types of space structures are considered, depending on the locations at which they can be built.

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In Beta 5, alliances are only groups of players who have chosen to play together. There isn’t much which can be done at the alliance level. For instance the type of alliance government has an influence limited to the leader’s election; being a member of an alliance or another has no real effect on the player’s empire, except through decisions made by the other members and implemented manually: for example sharing knowledge or resources is only achieved through gifts or sales.

Beta 6 will add many more possibilities to the alliance system. These features would have an actual in-game effect instead of being reflected only by the actions and strategies of the alliance’s members.

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In Beta 5, some technologies might be considered as leading to the construction of buildings; however, the construction process is implicit and no actual building is present on the planet. Beta 6 will feature actual buildings, allowing for a much higher degree of control.

Several buildings with either different effects or different levels of effect on the same parameters are available. These buildings are organised in several building types, each including several building categories.

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A ship’s hull is the main component of its design. While a ship is of course to limited to a single hull, this choice has a lot of consequences, from influencing the space available inside the ship to the type of components which can be used to whether or not the ship requires a crew of officers to fly.

There are two main types of hulls. Standard, mechanical hulls are the most basic option, while it is possible later in the game to create biological ships if the proper technologies have been researched. Biological ships, while leaving slightly less internal space available, are more robust and possess natural regenerative properties; they also include a basic power generation unit.

In addition, it is possible to categorise ship hulls according to their size. Indeed ship hulls come in all sizes and shapes. The size of a ship hull determines how the ship will be used.

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As the second part of our series around design objectives, I’ll present here the limits we have to put on our imagination to design a game which we can actually write and why this limits exist.

First of all, why do we have to put limits? Some ideas we’ve come up with or some suggestions made by the players community either in the game forums or here in the blog’s comments look very cool and fun. However, accepting these ideas means they’ll have to be integrated into the game’s logic. Internally it means objects will have to be represented in the game database, that is as some row in a spreadsheet-like format with column headers representing object properties and each object having its specific values in each cell of its particular row. It means these values will have to be used to compute a particular effect which means a particular formula will have to be defined for each effect or set of effects. Some of these effects might appear transparent to the player: population grows without him having to interact with anything. However some imply management by the player. The burden we accept to place on the player has to be carefully weighted if we want to cope with our “not too time consuming game” objective.

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LegacyWorlds Beta 6 will feature different types of hangar bays which can be included in a ship’s design. These hangar bays allow to carry various smaller ships which don’t have hyperspace engines through hyperspace.

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From the experience gathered while running previous Betas we can extract a few very important goals which we intend to keep in mind while designing Beta 5. At the same time we have to cope with a set of limits that we have to put on our imagination to design a game which we can actually write. It is the first aspect which is introduced here, as background knowledge around the underlying design context. The second one will be presented in a later post.

What we had in mind when working along the LegacyWorlds line after Chris released his uni project was to keep on developing a very simple game where a player could manage his empire in a very short time. However what we achieved is flawed.

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As a follow up from our previous post about generators which can be installed in ships, this post presents the last two categories: biological generators and zero-point generators.

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