The current game is a little convoluted and broken, which means it is unplayable until I rewrite it. I’m going to focus on a minimal feature set for the next version to get the game playable and improve the quality of the features. By keeping a small feature set, I can know ahead what features I should complete and how long each feature will take. Also I’ll know when I’m finished with the project.
This time I’m not going to open the game until I’m completely finished and the game works after testing and acceptance test cases are completed. In order to improve the quality, a lot more testing is going to be done for this game and all of the games I make in the future. It will take longer, but focusing on improving the quality before players bring it up should improve the reputation of the games.
Story
The main setting and story line will change. The game will take place on an alien planet, the soldiers from different fractions crash landed and need to rebuild their fleet to get home. The other fractions aren’t going to make it easy for the others. The players will need to regroup, rebuild, and fight off the enemy to escape the planet and head back home.
Focus Points
The focus points will be territory, soldiers, research, and buildings. These will be tied together and balanced, so that the meek aren’t completely overrun by the strong. There will also be time limits and the success condition will happen over several months.
I want the game to last long enough to where new players that joined late can learn the game, group with people and appreciate the game long enough to where when the next game comes along they can just jump in and start as soon as possible. They might not win, but they’ll have the opportunity soon. I also don’t want the game to be over soon enough to where none of the players had enough time to accomplish the objectives and enjoy the game.
Territory
Research items used to escape the planet will appear at different locations. Only when the fraction has captured the research item can the item eventually be used to escape. This will mean that a grid based system will need to be used in order to coordinate where the research items and what land the fractions hold.
The Grid structure of the game will limit the amount of land the players will be able to fight over and hopefully should limit the amount of players are in the game. I believe I’m going to have a main grid that covers the planet, sort of like latitude and longitude. Then sub grid coordinates with those and so on. The containers will be big enough to hold the player and a number of buildings.
This will mean that one piece of land is actually an square acre or larger depending on the amount of buildings I finally allow. Actually, I think I’m going to do it in sq. miles and sq. kilometers.
This should allow for quick access to where players are currently and I won’t actually have to populate the entire planet with coordinates. By calculating the distance, I can figure out how long it will take for one player to attack another. At the most, since the database table could grow to be very large, or at least the coordinate table with many rows. It won’t take that much space since the most the table will have is numeric values with one of those pointing to the player which holds that piece of territory.
There will also be mining to harvest precious materials in order to pay for mecha suits, buildings, and research. The amount of mines will only be preset for the initial land of each player. Captured land will be randomly generated and will remain until the game cycle is complete.
When the land is destroyed only the buildings on that land will be destroyed or captured.
Soldiers
The mecha suits from the previous game will be used in this game as well. The mecha suits will gain attributes that will be able to be extended, so that balancing can happen quickly. Since there are only going to be five mecha types, the base attributes might be hard coded with the modifiers held in the database.
The mecha suits will be built from buildings, and require men that will also grow depending on the amount of food, research, and housing. Housing is another type of building that can be constructed.
The different suits have different capabilities that allow for different maneuvering, strengths and weaknesses. Some of the land types will not be able to bring down the flying types, no land to air missiles. The strength and weakness ratio will be dealt with the Rock-Paper-Scissors usage. This will improve the balance and prevent one player from building one type to rule all. That said, there is still one type that is all powerful, but will be extremely expensive.
The attributes will be about four or five to start out, but I can envision that future versions having more. The difficulty is that the more attributes the harder it is to balance the game. I don’t think more than 10 will ever be used, but that will decide upon later and depending on the game play.
There will also be a mechanical device that will spy, thief, and capture land/buildings. This device, called a probe, will not have any attack capabilities, but will have other purpose during the game to help find the main research items.
A transporter aircraft will be used for land based mecha suits, this will be automatic and can not be built or researched.
Research
Research will be very important and I will build a tree much like the grid idea. The Research will have dependencies, amount of time to complete, and materials. I’ll create the tree after the component is completed and think of what will go into the tree after it is complete.
The feature seems to be easy to create, but it will be difficult and time consuming thinking of all of the research items.
Buildings
There will be different types of buildings for different purposes. The list below has them all:
- Housing
Used for the amount of men will be available. Housing will be needed and when these are destroyed, then the available mecha suits can not be used beyond the amount of men available. Will also double as food suppliers, because there won’t be a food building type.
- Mecha Manufacturing / Improvements
Builds the mecha suits. I’m undecided, if one building will build one mecha suit, or if the building can be queued to build all suits for one type at at time. I’m going with the former, but the latter will allow for greater flexibility.
- Research
These types of buildings will be required for research, there will be different research buildings. There will also be one main building for improving the research speed and level.
There will not be much macro-managing with the buildings, so besides the research buildings, there won’t be many buildings to develop items. I could create buildings for developing weapons and armor, but I think that should be automatic and improved by researching.
Some of the buildings will have research and other building dependencies before they can developed. So for example, Advanced Armor Manufacture building, might require Advanced Armor Research II and Basic Armor Manufacture building. In this example, doing so will allow for the player to research Advanced Armor Research III.
In this way, the buildings will use the Research Tree module and just pull out a type to create the distinction between buildings and research fields.
New Player Protection
The game will employ “New Player Protection” to keep stronger players from attacking new players. This will be based on the strength of the player and as long as the player doesn’t attack anyone else. This should allow for new players to grow and learn the game without being harassed by other stronger players.
When the player has graduated from this status, there will be ranges for attacking. This is only in the event that the game reaches enough players that each range has enough players within it. I’m going to try to develop the ranges to where it is dynamic and allows for recalculating the ranges based on growth and the amount of players.
Game Cycles
The game cycles will continue until all of the research items are collected and a single fraction has collected all of the pieces needed. The research items will not exist all at the start of the game. I want to allow the game to continue for at least two or three months before all of the needed items are available.
There will be more than one research item available of the most basic items, which will be available at the start of the game. Other ones will become increasingly rare as the game goes on. The first couple of cycles will probably require that the research items be “dropped” near the territories of the players, so that they can be found within the five or six month hard limit, where the game will automatically recycle whether or not anyone “won.”
Collecting all of the research items is the win condition and required of the players to track the components down. This will force players to try to collect as much territory as possible.
Possible Modules
Modules are game components, which can hopefully be used on other games. If developed correctly, these modules below can be used in future and past projects. They will be developed separated and updated on all of the games, since they aren’t tied to any single game code.
The games will be developed around modular components to reuse as much code as possible. Each game will have separate components that won’t or can’t be used elsewhere, but as much code as possible will be transferred to the Quantum Game Library as possible.
There will be the code that will exist in QGL and the plugin code for the game engine that will use the QGL code. The code that isn’t dependent on a database will be committed to QGL and the code that does rely on the database will not be part of the QGL.
- Territory Grid
- New Player Protection
- Research Tree
Conclusion
Well, the game won’t be that easy to create, but it will be more simple than the previous version, which had cities and population and based income from that. I like this design document better in the sense that everything ties together in a clear fashion and the code won’t be overly difficult with AI requirements.
Actually, there won’t be any AI requirements, which automatically make the game very simple to create. I hope to have this game out in production after two months of development. After the Farm Sim is complete, Mecha Asylum will be in production.
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