Developers Corner

If you don't like sandboxes just hit the back button.

I was wondering what people thought of a game which premise is a crashed spaceship that was full of colonizing equipment and colonists that crash landed on a planet.

The game would literally start the day of the crash.  There is nothing in the entire game world besides the wreckage, the cargo inside, et cetera, and the hostile alien world which surrounds it.

Basically the game starts out every man for themselves.  The world is then yours to shape.  Assume no contact from the outside world, at all, completely open PvP, no classes, no levels, Oblivion style skill system, and twitch based combat (to an extent).

Would a game with that kind of freedom be appealing?  Or is too much freedom for a player?  Assuming you put the control of the entire game into the player community's hands do you think the colonial "society" could ever actually achieve anything?  Do you think people would ever really synergize with one another for long enough to start building a civilization?

And don't think I only care about every player working together.  I expect, and want, some conflicts to erupt among the playerbase.

This is kind of the game I've been dreaming of playing for a long time.  A game that is made or broken by the community.  You can wallow in the world you live in and hold progress back or choose to work together and start a true civilization.

Been thinking about this a lot lately.  It's what I want but I just don't see it being realistically feasible.  Or at least I don't see the civilization ever progressing very far.

Of course I'd like to play such a game. In fact, that's the same premise I'm using for the MMO I'm developing, just mine's fantasy themed (a world being destroyed, a god opened a one-direction gate to evacuate people to another world).

Seems several people in this forum are planning or developing sandbox worlds, we'll have some fierce competence in the future .

ACtually there was a game like this released a few years back. It failed miserably. I truly wish I could remember the name of it. For a clue the graphics were cell shaded and the characters were of the super deformed anime looking types. You know with the arms and legs really don't seem to be proportionate with the body as a whole.

Basically the idea was to keep the colony afloat as best as possible with day to day chores. I really can't comment much more than that as I only got to read about it. It was so buggy at launch I couldn't stay in the game long enough to do anything but create my character. If I can remember the name I'll post back. I'm sure if I see it again I'll recognize it so I'll go looking through mpogds and betawatchers list of defunct games to see if I can find it.

Such a game can (and will) eventually be possible.  You have very real concerns about exactly how the players will interact.  I think what needs to be in the design from the very beginning is a well thought out tool set that helps players manage things and work together for any sort of goal from small scale to empire sized.  Also the design has to be open enough to be fun even if nothing ever does develop. A world of tribal anarchy can and should be just as exciting as massive empires and kingdoms.  When both are possible and everything in between I expect you will constantly see cycles between the two extremes in different parts of the world constantly.  The length of the cycle of course will depend.  Perhaps some will establish kingdoms that last for ages, others may create short-lived empires. 

The key is to have the focus be on the players and their interactions.  Whatever is going on IS the content.  Of course players have their own goals and sometimes they are moving forward and other times they may feel thwarted, but hopefully things would be set up in such a way that they would perceive set backs as temporary challenges without which the game would be pointless.  It is all really in perception.

How to accomplish this?  I believe it is in creating the whole design on a consistent, intuitive, and varied natural world economy that will let players realize what can be done while at the same time making it clear to them that any goal they structure on top of this is entirely up to them to accomplish or fail to accomplish.  They have to know the world functions properly and that any flaws are of their own making, while still knowing that they can work to fix them, thus making things that much more compelling.

What sort of tech level are you thinking?

They've a ship, albeit a wreck but it will have salvagable parts, some tech may be recoverable while most may well provide little more than walls for their shelters.

I'm thinking about Homeworld now, remember the story, they forgot about their time amongst the stars, and when they found the crashed ship they managed to reverse engineer the hyperdrive. They lost pretty much everything for a long time (dark age) and yet they managed to eventually rebuild advanced tech. Or perhaps its more like Alpha Centuri (Sid Meiers) where they retain a modest tech level upon planet fall and work to build up again to stella-transit.

I'm not advising you let them get off the planet, but its still quite a tech tree.

Unsurprisingly I once again agree with Ironore, a complete 'natural-economy' would ensure the players can do whatever they like and the world will still make sense without need of goblins (Devs) to deposit resources or steal away gold. But equally true, you're going to need to plan every possible interaction the players might want to have and build that in!

Back to your original question; yeah sure, bring it on, I'll dig up some minerals to aid the reconstruction of our soon to be great colony. Just dont disagree with me on how we use MY minerals, else a plot will be heading your way...

It would be interesting to see technology slowly fade away, then see a dark ages type game play where people understand all the theories behind the world(from fertilizer, engineering, genetics(and breeding that's related) to space travel) just not the technology to use a lot of the aspects and the ability to barely touch them.

Yes lots of people are waiting for this, and are playing similar games even though the quality isn't up to snuff.

to balance it you basically need a huge world with very little fast travel.  The starter areas WILL end up a boring and stupid gankfest,  the outside areas where people who don't want to be a part of the gankfest will end up having several societies.

I guess a handful of clones of yourself can sit around all day playing the game struggling to keep a society running.... players will find rewards from supporting this colony simply by having access to healing/food/repair etc

I'm picturing Tina Turner in a tree house with a saxophonist (thats Madmax3 just incase you wondered)

Once its up and running you'll find that the players will keep it in line, its like most political ladders....

the guys at the bottom complain about the guys at the top being corrupt or not listening to the little guy, they claim that you should pull down the ladder as its not fair. But the only way to be heard is by being up the ladder, so up you climb in order to sort it all out. Of course when you actually get up there you suddenly realise that toppling the ladder will result in you landing in the mud.... not a great plan.

By employing a militia (PCs and NPCs) you can ensure that PvP is very limited within the colony, and so PCs can relax a little and set about building up the colony itself. Of course outside is a whole other issue. In time you can have your clones die off natually or otherwise, and the PCs are finally incontrol (keeping my ejector seat handy!).

For a technology level think of like Battlestar Galactica.  Imagine that a lot of the ships wreckage was still in working order.  Even whole parts of the ship still functioned (the crash wasn't that bad, the ship just can't fly anymore). 

I have another question.  When dreaming this up I thought it would be best to not have any NPCs at all.  Each person you see is a player.

Another mechanic, which I thought would be absolutely necessary, is a "join in progress" system that would allow anyone to finish the work of another person at any time.  So if a guy half builds something and then runs out of resources or whatever any person can come along and finish it.  This way you don't get a bunch of half built things laying around the gameworld.

I was also thinking that at character creation, since this is going to be harsh and have a hefty learning curve, you could pick an "RP origin" which would provide you with your initial equipment upon entering the game world.  In this sense you could choose to be a scientist, or a soldier, et cetera, and you would start out with some decent equipment right away (c'mon, you knew you were colonizing a planet before hand).  It would also start out with a bare minimum of "mandatory" skills (picking a soldier would obviously imply that you should have some firearms training, be certed to use some rifles, pistols, carbines, machine gun, grenades, et cetera).

One last thing, when I think of this game I absolutely do believe it must be skill based but I think just living in the game world is going to be hard enough.  Having to start as newb with newb skills could really, really turn people off.

So my thought was how would y'all feel about basically using something akin to GURPS which starts you off half way to max in terms of skills you can learn?  After that it would basically be like SWG in that you can surrender skills to get back points but then you have to a bit of grinding to get them back up.

I don't want skill grinding to be any large focus of this game so I figured maxing out a template would take a hardcore (30-40 hours a week) about two weeks while it would take a casual player (10-20 hours a week) about a month.

If we've all just crashed here then everyone will be here right from the beginning, and yeah they'll be skilled.

We'd have the crew, perhaps including some marines/security maybe passengers/colonist/payload specialists. You might even have an unfortunate cargo, imagine Ripleys Aliens getting out! 

You could have a colonyship with stasis chambers, and as players join we simply defrost them and behold they appear in the game world. Dont forget that we'd have some sort of organisation, the Captain would naturaly assume c