Space Games format design suggestions needed.

Game Play & Game Design
#1

I want to revamp an applet game I made in 2001-2. It was a 2D space trading and combat game(yes, another one ;D ) and now I want to do it in 2D, full screen. The game will/should have galaxies/sectors, etc. When you are in a sector, you can move around, dock at stations, land on planets, or fend off other players/bots.
You can use hyperdrives (I called them Trans Galactic Drives in the first 4 iterations of the game[C64, text/mud like, single player BBS, then applet]) to move from sector to sector/galaxy to galaxy.

The applet version was a 400*400 canvas that was the entire sector. Star gates/portals were in the upper left corner, If there was a planet, it was in the right corner, space stations lined the bottom and other players could move around the screen with mouse clicks. When you clicked a portal, you “zoomed” to it and left that sector(other players saw you move to the portal and disappear, you then had a new sector load on your screen) Combat was, click a target, press fire. Server did some calcs and you would see a beam from your ship to theirs. If you hit, you would see a little 5-6 pixles “hit” and then you would get a damage report. More of an RPG than a shooter.

It was multiplayer and ran pretty well with no more that 15-20 online at once. I had 400 + sectors to explore and trade in, blah blah blah…

Any thought on how to apporach this with the latest in java (1.4.2) and 2D stuff?

I was thinking, a full screen, scrollable background, you stay centered within the sector move with mouse click (ship turns and begins moving toward click point) Combat stil thw same, click on target to acquire, then press fire. Hit is calced by server (and character skills, shields, weapon power, etc…) Ships don’t need fightercraft movements as they will be small trade vessels on up to Cruiser size. Have a small map for radar, and a drop down map for galaxy, pick sector and click warp then ship does some effect to show TGV firing, etc…

Any other thoughts/ideas/suggestions…???

M

#2

First of all, the game idea sounds interesting.

I don’t really understand what you want to keep from the old game and what you want to change. If you use a full screen mode instead of a 400x400 canvas, you’ll probably have more space available (nowadays at least 1024x768 pixels). You could double yout icon/unit size and add more detail. Or you could make your sectors larger. You might even scale it past the screen size… If your 400x400 canvas had (let’s say) 40x40 discrete fields and your new sector has the same number of fields, nothing changes.

If you want to change something, it might be interesting to add the sector gate in the sector map’s center and distribute planets and space stations around that. Then, all players will have to meet in the center to enter/leave the sector and there’s still plenty of “space” for pirates and/or mysteries to hide in the sector corners.

Different ship sizes might be fun… especially if a large ship could carry smaller ones.

If you want to keep the emphasis on the role playing, then you should provide a way for people to communicate - some way to chat for example. This chat should IMHO overlay the screen, like a head-up-display and you could add effects like sliding in and out other dialogs to “spice up” the UI.

#3

A friend of mine corrected me, between the applet and bbs game, I had a short lived active server pages version of it up, so this is #6.
Anyway, the applet version had large and small ships, (though nothing as small as a fighter) and pirates and other races controlled by the server. I like your idea of small ships inside large ones. A transport could haul 2-3 players to distant sectors/galaxies. Sector gate in middle sounds good too, then as you said, I could fill the remaing space with whatever.

Definitly will have chat with channels: private, universal(for out of character) team/alliance, etc…

I like the idea of on screen vs a textbox for chat as well. If the sector is larger than the screen size, the ship in middle, screen scroll would add the ability for each sector to be a good, explorable size as well.

Anything else?

#4

Another suggestion request…

I am tossing around a number of ideas of hyperspace jumps (i.e TransGalactic Drive movement).

1 - Jumpgate in center, from there you can jump to a sector of choice, or one of a few sectors that gate can go to.

2 - all ships have a TGD and can go from any sector to any sector based on drive capability and fuel availability, no gate needed.

3 - Combo. Ships with TGD can do number 2, smaller startships without TGD need to use gates as in #1.

Opinions?

Thanks!

#5

Assuming no more than a couple hundred objects, with only about 10-15 visible int he render loop. What are your thoughts on a very huge single galaxy space with sectors being block of galaxy coordeinates. You can hyperspace to diffeerent areas, or fly very slow to them with non-hyperspace engines…or…smaller “sectors” and you jump between them rather frequently?

M