"Free State" game would simulate 2050 New Hampshire

[Dave Ridley]

Finally... Able to use scanner again so here are the requested storyboard images.  A few words are cut off in the bigger pictures so I have created closeups of the missing info.  Note that the bar at the bottom middle of F1.jpg is the ship loadout screen.

[Errol]

That helps. Once I get this multiplayer thing going I will see what I can do about radar. Just moved into a new place so no internet yet. Had a small break through last  week (really just spent 2 days discovering I didn't know what I was doing), and an annoying problem has been put aside. When I have something to show I will probably just email you the link, just incase it gets more traffic than expected and the alotted bandwidth for the month gets used up.

[Dave Ridley]

Sounds good!

[Dave Ridley]

Probably ship customization will be even more important than radar, so I will try and lay out the initial specs fairly soon.  I have thought them out and revisited them enough that I think I have some good numbers worked out.

[Dave Ridley]

Here is an explanation of how I envision ship hypercustomization working.

First, we'd slow down the default ship speed to zero.  But we'd give all players 10 enhancement slots on their ships. They choose what to install, and they can if they wish install powerful speed enhancers which gain back up all of the speed we're taking away from them.  And then some.  Turn rate would not be affected.

Left and right guns stay on all ships, to make sure our unusual starting feature doesn't get buried.  When players are new or they join the game without registering, they get a weak, fast "default ship." It's loaded with mostly speed increasers, probably about 7 of them, enabling it to fly at the Nov 2013 default speeds...it will be able to jet around the battlefield, giving players a quick feel for how things look. They'll also be fast enough to avoid constantly dying while looking around.  But when they land at base they can start hypercustomizing their ship.
Autofire option will be needed, i.e. allowing them to set the ship so it constantly fires this or that system.  That way people can start experimenting with AFK play, which (besides being fun) should alleviate our initial player shortage. 

Now:  Here are the systems players would be able to pick from to enhance their ships in many different ways.  These perhaps could be picked up at any friendly base and would, for now, be there in unlimited quantities. Once we have an in-game currency or credits system up and running players would buy these enhancements.

In order of chronological priority:

) Speed boosters - Each one Boosts your ship's speed by 50kph.  This includes top speed, reverse speed and "flying home disabled" speed.  Installing more thrusters means more speed, but the effect is cumulative, not compounding.  This is probably the most important enhancement to make available after we start implementing enhancement slots.  without it everyone would be flying a snail.  Only people who *want* AFK play should have to do that.  Once mounted the speed increaser automatically stays active until dismounted or lost.

So ship with no boosters would travel at a speed of what we could call  0kph.  With 1 speed booster :  50kph.   with 6 it would be 300kph...the current speed of the dec. 2013 default ship... and with 10 (the maximum) it would be 500 kph.... 50 percent faster than the dec 2013 default ship.

) Healer - Heals friendlies but not you.  Pressing the appropriate key heals every friendly unit or tower within about 1/10th of a screen width. I'm referring to a conventional laptop screen.  The weapon's "effect radius" should be easy to see,  perhaps it would be just a circle that appears around the healing ship. An unlimited number of units can be within range and thus an unlimited number can be healed with one "shot" if you time it right!  Units can't heal *themselves* under any circumstances, creating more teamwork play. Uses 3 SU each time you fire it. Default effect: Heals 1 point of damage on all friendly ships within the "circle"
) Mine tube - Drops an aerial mine that just sits there for 3 minutes or until an enemy flies through it.  At that point it explodes.  Default effect:  Does 5 health damage to whatever enemies are within about 1/20th of a screen width of the explosion's center.  Uses 5 SU every time you fire it.  The area effect is not a big deal and doesn't *have* to be implemented.  Mines could be used in combat, not just in anticipation of an eventual enemy appearance.  They would be visible to all but not on radar.
) Bomb bay - Explodes a short range EMP bomb "under" your ship when you press the relevant button.  Default effect:  Same as a mine explosion.  Does 5 health damage to whatever enemies are is within about 1/20th of a screen width of the explosion's center.  The area effect is not a big deal and doesn't *have* to be implemented.  Like the mine tube , it uses 5 SU every time you fire it.
) Missile tube - This would fire guided projectiles in any direction from your ship.  I'm thinking missiles should move at about 300....the same as the top speed as the default ship we gave players in the October 2013 era.  Or you could say 1/3 the speed of October 2013 era gunshots.  Range is about 4x as far as those gunshots.  They are guided and home in on the enemy unit which was targeted by the firing player.  I guess they should blow up when they hit *any* enemy along the way, but that is not super important. Default effect if it hits:  2 points damage.  Firing it uses up 2 SU. Probably the missile should be faster then 90 percent of the ships in the game.
) Forward gun - Behaves the same as the side guns (see below) except for the direction in which it fires. And the fact that it's optional.
) Rear gun - behaves same as side and fwd guns (see below) except for the direction in which it fires.  And the fact that it's optional.
) Armor (formerly "health booster") - Each enhancement slot you fill with one of these increases the number of hit points you can suffer...by 500%  Your ship starts with 10 hit points, so the first booster ups that to 50. The second ups it to 100...and so on.   Does not directly decrease speed, but obviously it takes up slots that could have been filled with speed increasers.  Once mounted the booster automatically stays active until dismounted or lost.
) Multiplier - Each multiplier increases by 500% the effectiveness of all guns, bombs, missile tubes, mine tubes and healers on your ship.  Each system thus does 500% more damage (or healing) each time it hits.  You can stack multipliers, though they have a cumulative effect rather than a compounded one.  So: If your carrying only side guns with no multipliers, each gun guns does 1 point of damage per hit on the enemy. Add 1 enhancement and they do 5 points.  2 enhacements means they do 10 points damage,  etc.  Alternatively, if you load 1 mine tube and 9 multipliers...each gas cloud you drop will do 225 damage instead of 5!  See what we mean by extreme customization! Once mounted, each multiplier automatically stays active until dismounted or lost.
) Supply pack - Each pack carriers 100 units of universal supplies. We call them "supply units" or SU. These service your ship's guns, healers, mine tubes, bomb bays, missile tubes and also serve as fuel.  Ships will not be able to much do anything but fly home as a ghost, if they don't have a supply pack with some SU remaining.  Different systems use different amounts of  them. 
) Fuel - This will not be a system but more of a process we create. My thought would be we implement limited fuel and range by making it so each ship uses up 1 unit of Universal Supplies every 4 seconds.    You'd then get about 7 minutes of flight from each SU pack, assuming you didn't fire any systems.  When the 7 minutes are up your ship becomes disabled/ghost.  A ship would launch as a ghost if it had no  SU packs.  Later maybe we could enhance this feature so that ships use "fuel" faster or slower depending on their speed.   SU would gradually increase while your ship is at a friendly base.  I'm thinking it should take about 1 minute to top off each pack, and all your onboard packs would reload simultaneously.
) Left gun (already implemented) - Fires straight out the ship's left side....unguided.  Uses 1 SU every time you fire it. The October 2013 version of the game features perfect left guns already.  These will be mounted and unremovable on every ship, to ensure that this unique element of our game remains prominent. Default effect: 1 point damage each time it his the enemy. It does not count toward your maximum total of 10 enhancements; it's mounted by default.
) Right  gun (already implemented)  - Fires straight out the ship's right side.  It does not count toward your maximum total of 10 enhancements; it's mounted by default. Other than that, it's the same as the left gun.

You could tweak some of the numbers and effects if it made things easier for you.

The Dec 2013 rate of fire for the side guns can probably be applied to all other weapons including the healer.  The Universal Supply limits and hungriness of certain weapons will create their own restrictions on system usage.

Adding a second mine tube, gun, missle tube, bomb bay or healer could be allowed but would not improve your ship's capabilities.  You boost those weapons by adding multipliers to them rather than duplicating them. maybe someday you could carry extra, duplicate weapons and drop them for friendly players to use.  We'll probably also increase the number of enhancement slots at some point or come up with ways players could merely double their top speed rather than having to quintuple it. 

Healers and mine tubes are listed as fairly high priority implementation items because each would quickly add much needed variety to the game play.  The top problem we're likely to have once multiplayer / metascoring is successfully implemented ... will be the initial lack of variety.  Its likely to be an even  more important problem than the initial lack of players.  Once most of the customization options are implemented, AFK play will be possible...hopefullly boosting our player base.

Later we'd implement features where players can lose some or all of their enhancements in combat. The enhancements would essentially become consumables which players would buy with credits earned in the game.  Or with credits which they purchase using bitcoin.  Nearly any player could briefly experience their dream ship but keeping it flying with all the perfect enhancements would be costly.

I don't see a need to make the ships look different yet. Eventually it would help.

Just for fun I will later post some examples of ways players will be able to customize their ships.  Once all 12 of these enhancement options become available there will be about 100 types of a ships a player can create... each significantly different from all the others. This would also make our *game* significantly different from all the others, as best I can tell.

[Dave Ridley]

Looks like i forgot to list "healers" in the illustration of the ship loadout bar.   Also I've just recorded some new sounds for you that should get us through the next year of development.   I like so much what you did with my voice that I have a feeling it may be nearly all we need.

[Dave Ridley]

The new sounds. 

[Errol]

Finally found a few days to get back at it. I'm going to have to review a lot of these posts at when I have this thing going, and start adding features.

I've got the multi-player thing working somewhat. You can play games in parallel where the score and antennas are synced, otherwise it won't make much sense to the players if there are more than one. I'll have to set up a test date with you one night when I've got the drones and bullets synced, and we can test how well the connection works. I will send you an e-mail when I get that far.

 

[Dave Ridley]

wonderful thanks errol.   i have a 5 year old nephew who asks about the game every time he sees one of my laptops;  he seems to almost completely understand it after 15 minutes of play.   The single player version does work on both of my computers.

Also:  does the game *need* to be set up for two players to play online or can we just jump straight to that .io website you were suggesting?  Guess i dont want you to have to invent the wheel twice.  and... you dont have to send me email generally, i check this every few days.

[Errol]

I will create a page on my website you can go to when it is ready. You won't need an account just yet, you can just provide a username. The server will be run from my laptop here (all data goes through the player io server first though), so the game will only be available while my laptop is running the server code (it can be transferred to the player io server once it is mature enough).

[Dave Ridley]

nice touch with the "lack of need to set up account" errol, sometimes I think you're a sponge that remembers everything I write here.

[Errol]

Something I didn't anticipate.

https://playerio.com/

Not sure how this changes yet. Maybe it doesn't. Just a different name.

http://gamesnet.yahoo.com/

[Dave Ridley]

ok thanks.  not seeing a problem at first glance either.

[Dave Ridley]

Let me ask you something errol:  Would it be easier for you to execute a bigger map than implement my "meta game" idea?    if we had a large live map that generally took one or two weeks to conquer.... this would become kind of its own seamless metagame.    Maybe it could be about 10 times as big as the current one, with 10 times as many bases to hit. 

anyway, if the big map is easier and you haven't already executed the previous "tug of war bar",   maybe the big map is what we should do instead.    your thoughts?    I got this idea from noticing that a lot of games tout "seamlessness" now, as an advantage their players want.

[Dave Ridley]

as i give this idea more thought, i'm thinking that for the first few months this "big map" (were we to implement it) would probably be long and narrow.  The narrowness would squeeze players into the same general area so that they actually do encounter each other.  and the longness would be what creates the "long length" of the game.   Each side might have 10 bases, with each base conquest pushing you 10 percent closer to complete conquest.  maybe this factor would let us just forget about team score altogether.   Your team's "score" would be how many bases you've deactivated.

Also we would not want to get into a situation where the narrow game is essentially one dimensional at the strategic level.  We might want to have bases in a fairly random pattern.  Thus in some cases , for instance, the NEU side might be pushing up the tall narrow map , and right after conquering a base they come to a situation where there are two INH enemy bases that are more or less equidistant from their friendly base.   NEU could then concentrate forces against the left base or the right base, complicating defense.