Hello. I’m Jafit, also known as Irashi on the old forums. I’m here to talk to you today about suggesting gameplay mechanics for the game.
I spent a great deal of time on the old forums having a lot of back-and-forth arguments with people over gameplay ideas and proposals for Infinty: TQFE, all while having no well-defined frame of reference upon which to base any assumptions.
When you have no fixed frame of reference you are inevitably going to create your own vision of what the game will be like. You might attach your hopes and dreams to this idea, add in nostalgic elements from games you enjoyed when you were younger, and features that you like from other games that you currently play. You might become very emotionally involved and protective of this vision and hostile to others whose ideas seem to contradict yours.
I’d very much like to avoid seeing this community become what it was in the old days, i.e. a big mass of deluded fanboys bickering amongst themselves over stuff that doesn’t really matter, all while not actually doing anything to assist the developers in creating a product.
So I’d just like to try to encourage everyone to maintain perspective, stay grounded in reality, and don’t become too emotionally attached to any ideas that you have. Have an open mind about what the game will be like, because nobody really knows how its going to turn out, not even the devs.
If you have an idea that you really want to communicate, and you actually want to be credit to team, how about making some kind of basic working prototype of your idea? Such a thing is not beyond your reach.
Learn Python and make something using Blender’s game engine.
You could even make a simple 2d minigame in the browser using Javascript.
In any case the process of actually making something will force you to clearly define the system that you’re proposing in a way that will hopefully be useful to the project. Because sitting around talking about general ideas gives you a feeling of accomplishment while not actually accomplishing anything, and ultimately its a waste of time. Believe me I should know.
SORRY, I somehow misread the purpose of the thread and wrote a ton of stuff that doesn’t really belong here. Either read it or you can just skip what I wrote.
Atm all I’d like them to implement is blackouts from extreme g-forces and permanent hull damage that can only be repaired at stations. As I understand it, you can heal your ship either by diverting power or by going to a station, though going to a station to heal is kinda pointless since they can just heal the ships up by diverting power.
They could just add a form of heavy damage to actually make station healing relevant. Heavy damage tacks down on how much you can repair by diverting power, so if you crash into someone, or into the ground you get like a certain percentage heavy damage based on how heavy the hit was, so after the crash you can only have like max 80-90% (or whatever heavy damage you took) full hull and to repair it to 100% you must go to a station to repair.
This mostly since most fights turns into “fly into fight, take damage, fly a little bit away and heal then return to repeat”. There’s like no real reason to fully retreat and recuperate.
Another thing would be to make some form of 2-5 second blackout screen when your ship starts to spin ridiculously after hitting something (extreme g-forces you know), I kinda want both these systems so that people don’t want to try the “ram someone tactics and then let their friend shoot the other ship” (i.e with my system: if they ram they take heavy damage and they will get blacked out until ship is stabilized or blackout timer runs out).
Both of those things shouldn’t be too hard to implement, blackout is just a fade that is active either for a time or until the ship stops spinning, and the heavy damage is just a damage that reduces max allowed self healed hp (until you go to a station).
/edit, also possible disable warp drive inside asteroid belts, just like it disables when closing in on a planet.
//edit I kinda misread the threads purpose >_> though I’m not gonna delete the comment
“don’t get too attached to your ideas” is probably the best idea suggested so far!
I think you should be clear that this thread isn’t the place to post/discuss actual gameplay suggestions, but rather how we, as a community, handle gameplay suggestions.
So:
No.1 - Be clear and detailed in your suggestions.
No. 2 - Be prepared to alter your idea in light of feedback.
You have to take what you see in the prototype with a grain of salt. All of those features, which are at the end of the day balance features, are all just place holder and convenience things. This wont reflect the final gameplay in any way.
I know, just suggesting stuff at random since I don’t really know what they are gonna do with the gameplay anyway. I don’t really expect them to implement it.
Also misread the thread purpose somehow… I really read OP’s first post like 3 times, guess I’m tired
I don’t see someone, completely novice, learning code from this day on, to be able to create a prototype before this KS ends.
How about we let the early dev build to be released in the first place? The dev team haven’t even released everything yet (see the 30km station recently). Let’s for the moment see what the “reference frame” will be before going any further.
Also, let’s see the KS stretch goal. If the suggested gameplay involves some persistence, and the KS doesn’t reach 1M500, well…
The game isn’t going to be finished when the Kickstarer ends, you’ll have plenty of time to learn to program, and people aren’t going to hold off on posting gameplay ideas until an alpha version gets released.
A great many people, including me, learned 3d modelling on the old forums in order to contribute art assets to the game. I don’t see why people couldn’t learn to code in order to clearly define and demonstrate their gameplay proposals, and I think its more productive than just pouring walls of text out over the forums, and you might be surprised how fast a novice can reach a reasonable level of proficiency in programming.
Plus if you do learn to program it makes for a good hobby and its a very marketable skill, you could realistically expect to get some kind of junior development job out of it even without a Computer Science degree.
Really have to agree with this. It doesn’t take a lot to understand enough to be able to code simple prototypes that explain a concept well.
When people think of coding, I think they tend to think of only the most complicated of examples as a whole product, rather than starting small to build bigger, which is how most actual software development works. Look at it that way, and the prospect of learning to code is a lot less scary.
You don’t really need to be able to learn to code. Unity makes it ridiculously easy to make simple working prototypes. Somebody could easily make a template 20km x 20km arena in Unity with the basic mechanics of the flight in Battlescape which could then be used by anyone to mock up things like missile behaviour suggestions.
I’m more of a mindless explorer/shooter type of guy so I mostly want the game to be pretty, and not too complex, I probably just want to fly around wherever mostly and engage into battles/escorts/convoys/whatever is going on randomly. Stuff ED and other spaceganes are doing. Speaking of pretty: Improved docking sequences/options/weapons. More variations of mountains/moons, more detail. Birds (boids)/fish (if water is transparent)/frogs. Buggy vehicle (antenna, shoot flares when lost). Defense systems on mountains. Huge deep-space-stations. Atmosphere entry effects (so that you can see players enter atmosphere planetside). Godrays. Revolving solar system. Transparent cockpit windows, see character move head around.
Edit: Monorails noded through mountains, shielded military planet accessible only through orbital gateways, underground areas/tunnels through mountains, pipings/powerlines (stuff that you can follow). An (actual working) obsevatory on top of mountain (zooming in on spacestations/other planets even). Highways on poles noded throughout the world, interconnecting bases/factories (branching so that you can chose path), similar to wipeout (hovervehiles) but more straight. Shuttles scouting/skimming surface of planet. Capital ships roaming planetsurface (deploying fighters if attacked). Fighters roaming planetsurface (squadrons/formations, break up when under attack). Procedural hot desert cracks, ice cracks/plates (on water/poles), coustlines/beaches, give each planet a more distinct look. Deep planetary scarring (huge craters/canyons)/plateaus(rocky/color variations), an extra layer of detail/variation.
Also: Displacement mapping? Tesselation? Procedural vertical displacement (like seen in early motion blur/physics vid)? Possible to create a Halo world instead of a planet?
I think they kind of missed the boat with no support for FPS (it’s what EVERYBODY wants eventually, and I’m not sure if the engine is suited for it, not sure if a 3rd party is interested in licencing for that reason alone. I don’t understand the Planetside 2 comparisons people moan about because there’s no FPS element). If consider doing FPS in the future I was thinking about procedural interiors of spaceships/bases based on maze/dungeon generators (Example: princeofcups.com/utilities/DungeonGenerator/ - donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/index.cgi). And maybe limit FPS/walking to inside and not planetside. Exploring/conquering base/station-interiors is full circle procedural gaming. And then some adventure element thrown in (inventory/items/dailogue/story branching). Maybe intergrate some of Unreal Tournament (open source?) into the game.
Maybe Jafit (or Topper) can program a FPS module. Or if that’s out of his league a buggy.
Having INS provide code for their basic flight model for this type of testing would really be great, I don’t expect such code to be more than 100 lines, that could easily be converted and implemented in Unity.
Or maybe just providing parameters like turn rates, velocity modifiers, sensitivities, would be enough.
Personally; I’d rather the tone of this forum stays:
'Everyone’s more than welcome to suggest ideas. Please try and keep suggestions within the realms of possibility and don’t be too upset or think people don’t care what you have to say if what you suggest gets shot down. It might just be because it was a little overambitious or outside the scope of what INovae want to do.’
and not
‘We shouldn’t be open and inclusive and receptive to other people’s ideas at all! Let’s all go and make some arbitrary requirements right now so we know who to immediately ostracise from our community in advance [insert evil laugh here].’
We don’t really need to simulate wind in such prototypes, which I believe is a single force acting in the same direction for the whole planet, all we need is the translation from input to ship movement.
I worked on a Unity project that is a very crude arcade flight arena game. No 6DOF, not Newtonian, trash assets, few weapons, and primitive energy and damage systems, some rudimentary sounds…the code was written by a senior undergrad so probably not that great :P.
It’s on github if anyone is interested I will link.