Jolt Country

This is the thread in which we design the world's greatest space trading game. It is important to understand two things about this thread:

1. Any and all ideas will be considered and discussed, so do not be shy about expressing your opinions, as long as they represent a good-faith effort to move the design along.

2. No one, under any circumstances, should expend even a second's effort, or even think about expending any effort, on actually creating the game that we design. Let me say it again as clearly as I can: Whatever design comes out of this discussion, the game must never be written. Not a single line of code. Do you people understand me?

Now, with those ground rules out of the way, I will start with a few thoughts:

In a great space game, I would like to see, at a minimum, things like:

- Lots of different material to cart around.
- A big universe.
- Preferably one without jump gates, as previously discussed.
- A complete re-thinking of the emphasis these games normally take on the flow of play.

Let me expand on that last one. Generally, in space trading games throughout history, there are two main considerations: 1. Figuring out the economy to know where to go, and 2. Getting there in one piece.

The trend I have seen is that generally getting from A to B is quite easy, where figuring out what to buy and from where is often (and inexplicably) mysterious. I mean, really. In 2007, we've had the internet, and up-to-date stock tickers delivered directly to our cellphones for years, but in the year ten thousand, they haven't even figured out how to find out what is being sold on the very next planet over? This "artificial difficulty" is compensated for by making it child's play to transverse across the galaxies with a mere flip of a switch.

I think they've got this wrong. Here's what I'd like to see:

1. A complex economy system, but one where information is easily attained, sorted, graphed, whatever. There is no reason I shouldn't be able to see the prices of everything being sold at any planet which is "friendly" with whatever race or company I'm with. Sure, if you want to make enemy systems a mystery, that's reasonable, they've probably got Norton Firewall up there. But c'mon, don't make me hunt around for who's selling synthmeat patties 20 for a buck.

2. A much increased depth and difficulty in actually getting where you're going. I don't mean throwing a bunch of bad guys out there. Even in a badguy-free environment, space travel should be dangerous, and spaceship systems should be complex. Flight Simulator is great, because getting where your going is satisfying, even without being shot at. Space travel should be no less satisfying or challenging. I do not know exactly how to do this, but this could be a whole conversation thread in itself.

I want to know where I need to go, but I want to be forced to understand my ship and its limits before deciding whether or not the trip is worth it. And I want to be happy to get where I'm going. Something about hitting "warp" and magically showing up at your destination sort of takes the awe and wonder out of the whole "outer space" theme. Really, I want it more "navally", you know?

Other than this, my other main emphasis would be on the personality of the systems you visit. This could be accomplished through graphics (making seedy systems have funky-ass space stations and weird crap everywhere, etc.) and through NPCs who would lend flavor to all of the various goings on.

That should get us started.

(Or finished, depending on whether anyone else is interested in this topic.)

Here is something I would like to see, while completely agreeing with every character that Ben wrote above:

I see the wilderness in a space trading game to be similar to how the Internet was five years ago, before everyone started tracking IP addresses everywhere. Many space trading games will have bounty hunting missions, and something like, "Dr. Blitzbo is wanted by the people of Sszarathis IV for the crime of ethnic cleansing, bounty: 20,000 credits." And this is fine.

I would like the ability to hunt these people down, destroy their ships, use a tractor beam on their persons and then throw them into my ship's brig.

I would then like the ability to either get the ransom directly, or, if I decide it has become personal (in other words, the guy was a bitch and a half to take down and I had to re-load* many times) I would like the ability to offload this fucker into the worst prison world in the system.

And I would like this ability for many other crimes like, "Grand theft auto" and "Landlord coming into your apartment and looking through your silverware drawer."

No, but seriously, I would like things to get very personal with the various Bad Guys in the universe, all of whom should be randomly generated before I start. And I want to be able to off load them to brutal worlds and get some money for it, thus making the Interesting Gaming Decision between the Full Ransom and Unleashing a Cruel Fate on a Computer Guy I did PVP With.


Clearly, Ben has more of the big ideas that he is addressing, so read my posts as just added detail.

And I would like there to not be square based jumps. "Do it how they do it in Eve On-Line or how traveling was done in Daggerfall" would be better.

*Well, reloading and death = death is its own thing for a separate message.

I've always been fond of the pricing information system in Pieter Spronck's "Space Trader" (for Palm OS but ported to Pocket PC and Windows). You can select any system on the chart and see the prices of goods there, both the base price and the net profit or loss you will make by selling your stuff there.

Unfortunately the travel aspect of it is not too robust but the trading part is very good.

I approve of hygraed's contributions to this thread!!

hygraed.... welcome to LEVEL TWO! yOu hAv3 gAinEd a lEvEl!1!1!

This has been an accurate description of Sid Meier's Pirates!

there are different economies around which, if one desires, can be made to buy low and sell high. There are random bad guys around which can be brought to justice for money.


THE
NO SPACESHIPS THO
AARDVARK

I would not include "minigames" in our game. Pirates has "minigames", doesn't it?

I would like our game to be a seamless experience to the greatest extent possible. Ideally, if we included external environments like space stations and planets that you could walk around on, you would switch between "cockpit view" and "FPS mode" without the player even knowing. You'd just look like you were getting up from your captain's chair.

Which is not to say Pirates! doesn't get a lot of what we're trying to do right. I just don't know, cuz I never played the sumbitch, and every time I'm about to try it, I shy away because of the dancing.

Is this the Atari version or the latest version? If my flash cart would ever FUCKING arrive, one of the games I want to play is the 800 version of Pirates!

Basically, I want to play all the Dani Bunten and Sid Meier games that came out for the 8-bit, when the flash cart gets here, which it hopefully one day will, but who knows when.

BTW, the reason this thread has a funny name is because while Jonsey was trying to download Bioshock from Steam, and it was taking forever, he got fed up and decided to play Evochron Alliance, and announced this decision by accidentally saying "fuck this, I'm gonna go trade space in shit..." or something like that.

I liked the transposition so much I just kept it.

And the rest, particularly the previous three hours, is history.

Here's an argument against the "having an effective view of the market":

Space trading games often posit a universe that is the moral equivalent of Tai-Pan: your ship *is* the fastest means of communication between systems. The news you carry *is* the news.

_Traveller_, in fact--sort of the granddaddy of space-trading-games, albeit a pen-and-paper one--made a fundamental premise of the _Traveller_ universe precisely "information does not travel faster than starships."

You can certainly construct good science fictional reasons this should be so; on the other hand, you can also make up something like ansibles so that it's not so, and information transfer is more or less instantaneous.

However, if the latter premise obtains, then why bother with the "space" theme? It just becomes a commodities-trading/arbitrage game. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Bruce

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Is this the Atari version or the latest version? If my flash cart would ever FUCKING arrive, one of the games I want to play is the 800 version of Pirates!

This sounds like I am really made because "Pirates!" has an exclamation mark in the title. I really don't like games that have that in the title. Thank god I can enjoy Evochron Alliance and not Evochron Alliance!

That being said, I am waiting for the first game with two exclamation marks in the title. That will be ground breaking.

bruce wrote:Space trading games often posit a universe that is the moral equivalent of Tai-Pan: your ship *is* the fastest means of communication between systems. The news you carry *is* the news.

I hadn't considered that. I approve of your contributions to this thread! That being said, there are like 30 space trading games out there that do it this way and having one that did not would be grand.

However, if the latter premise obtains, then why bother with the "space" theme?

Well, so you can eject people into space, I think. NEW FEATURE! NEW FEATURE FOR OUR NEVER TO BE MADE GAME:

- You must allow the player to remove the spacesuit of anyone on board the ship at any time and dump them into space, where they immediately explode. (Or is it implode? I think explode, because our bodies push against the atmosphere as a matter of course and there is none in space. But if that were right I wouldn't have this funny feeling that people implode when in a vacuum.)

On Death & Dying
------------------

At some point we must decide how to handle the whole "death" issue. Here are three popular choices, each with their own ups and downsides:

1. Death = no biggie, just save a lot and restore your last save. (Evochron Alliance). Upside is, you can get further into the meat of the game while you learn how to play, and you won't get frustrated by having to restart in the same crappy ship all the time. Downside is, there's a lot less tension to the gameplay and a lot less impetus to think about what you're doing if there's no ramifications for it.

2. Death = death, no way to continue. (Nethack). Upside is, it forces thoughtful play, and achievements are that much more rewarding. Downside is that unless you design the game so that there's virtually no way to die unless you make an obviously bad decision, it has the potential to really destroy anyone's enthusiasm for the game. (See previous thread about Flatspace).

3. Allow for both (Flatspace). This to me is an unsatisfying compromise, because if you choose "let me save and restore", you feel like a real tool.

I wish I felt strongly enough one way or the other to really put forth a compelling argument for any of them, but as I already mentioned, my experience with EA is making me waver on the issue. Like I say, on the one hand, I'd like for my choices to really "matter" in the larger sense, but on the other hand, I sure as hell don't want to have to make the same fifty ghetto trade runs again to make enough money to buy Not Quite As Shitty Laser for my ship.

I am starting to think that a "death hurts" philosophy is the way to go. Though it's always written into a game in some cheesy way or other (you ALWAYS eject in an escape pod, somebody ALWAYS picks you up, or you ALWAYS get fined $1000 by the cops and ALWAYS blah blah blah), I think it may be the only way to strike a satisfying balance between making your decisions count and also not overly frustrating the player.

So, I think death should hurt, and it should hurt a LOT. If there's an experience system, you should get dinged on that, as well as your cash reserves, and all that stuff. It shouldn't bust you out of the game, of course. Knowing that you might "die" provides the player motivation for not spending all his cash right up front... he may need to buy a new ship later.

Perhaps you could also purchase "insurance" for this reason... pay $x per time period to get your ship replaced (minus a few of its higher-end gadgets, perhaps) if you die, versus gambling that you're just so damn good you won't run into any trouble.

Thoughts? Feelings? Deeply held hopes and fears?

bruce wrote: However, if the latter premise obtains, then why bother with the "space" theme? It just becomes a commodities-trading/arbitrage game. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

That's why I think if you made information more accessible, then the space theme would have to be made MORE important, rather than less. Sure, you have all the information at your hands, but you also need to garner the material and the skills to take advantage of that information.

hygraed wrote:I've always been fond of the pricing information system in Pieter Spronck's "Space Trader" (for Palm OS but ported to Pocket PC and Windows). You can select any system on the chart and see the prices of goods there, both the base price and the net profit or loss you will make by selling your stuff there.

Unfortunately the travel aspect of it is not too robust but the trading part is very good.

After downloading this and playing it for ten minutes or so, I can without hesitation say:

If they just slapped a fancy, good-looking 3D real-time front end on this game, a la EA, it would instantly become the BSTGOTERN.

bruce wrote:_Traveller_, in fact--sort of the granddaddy of space-trading-games, albeit a pen-and-paper one--made a fundamental premise of the _Traveller_ universe precisely "information does not travel faster than starships."

Even if this were the case, what was going on in other systems would still only be a mystery if nobody else was going there.

I think in our never-to-exist-under-any-circumstances game, we will want a dynamic universe featuring many other ships going about their business, so that even if news only travelled as fast as a ship, you could still get at least SOME information, even if delayed by a few chrons, just based on what the ships going back and forth to those systems are saying about it. Surely by the year ten million, they will have figured out that "hey, when you come back from Grabulon IV, could you like, let us know what they're selling and for how much, so we can sort of tell the others in the neighborhood what's going on?"

And regardless of whether you know what's going on in the next system you visit, you sure as hell should be able to tell what was going on in the last system you were in. Basically, I would rephrase this item as: "There is no reason the player of the game should ever have to use a pencil and paper." This bothers me about EA (and about Flatspace, and about plenty of others...) I should be able to recall, on the screen, at least the state of the market in a system I was already in, at least at the time I was there. My trading computer should not just forget the entire universe every time I move.

This is a USER INTERFACE issue. Trading games have notoriously bad USER INTERFACES. Our game will have an EXCELLENT USER INTERFACE, which makes it all the more unfortunate that it will not, and can not, ever be created.

bruce wrote:why bother with the "space" theme?

One other issue I'd like to address is that the "space theme" is not just for gaming dynamics. It is in fact for the experience itself. Even if you could say that whatever game we make could be changed to a naval game just by changing the word "planet" to "port" and "spaceship" to... well, "not-space ship", the environment of space is important just for the feel of the game.

There is a dreamlike quality to (simulated) space travel which, for me, is an inherent quality of these games. See previous comment about "Space Trader". The game dynamics are excellent, but I am not geeked to play it as I am to play EA, because of the visceral experience of being a trader in space. There may be no "game mechanic" reason why it needs to be in space, but there is most definitely an aesthetic one.

That's important, I think. Which is why the game has to have good graphics and sound.

I addressed this issue (making information in other systems freely available to the player) with the author of EA, and here's what he had to say:

Guy Who Wrote EA wrote: Often discussed, difficult to implement without making gameplay more 'armchair' and less player involved. I'll post a quick quote from another thread where this was discussed:

With regard to knowing what's going on in other areas without actually travelling there in relation to trading/economy/inventory (which is what I think you're getting at):

This takes away the very need for travelling around in space. You have to ask yourself, why should I travel anywhere and do anything if I can just remotely check for what I want whenever I want to. It takes away all kinds of gameplay aspects and challenges.

That being said, a compromise was made in a recent update to Evochron Alliance 2.0 that allows you to remotely check local market values in the news console without the need to dock or land on a planet.

Hopefully there's not too much being presented to you that would require a lot of memorization, at least in EA. The next game will have a map log, which will let you take notes in-game on particular areas of interest and valuable trading points (including the capability to enter a text description of the point your saving along with being able to automatically plot the nav point in your computer). I hope that answers your question.

I have thoughts on this, but don't know what they are yet.

My thoughts are: I am definitely going to buy the sequel to EA because this guy seems like he is open the feedback and a decent human being.

This is what you want out of your space trading developer. Someone who lives and breathes this stuff.

Maybe a power-up (or "thing to purchase") in the middle of the game is a super-Internet Information Gatherer so, once you've explored plenty of places and made money to buy it, you can make the job easier.

I like the "notes" area of a game. Any game. I wish I could put something like that in my text adventures. (My text games are horrible for someone coming back after a few weeks or months off and remembering what their goal of the moment is.)

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:This is what you want out of your space trading developer. Someone who lives and breathes this stuff.

Yes. My only real complaint about the guy is that he actually creates the games he designs.

I cannot in good conscience condone, or respect that sort of behavior. If you're going to go through the hassle to design a game like that, why ruin it by developing it?

That's not how we ROLL.

Yeah, I don't know what his problem is, making stuff that he designs a reality.

OK, here is the other thing I was going to say: our characters might be new at trading space for shit all over the galaxy, but we players are grizzled veterans. So we might very well not find it to be fun in its own right to simply explore new worlds to see what they are buying teabags for.

A game would have to... well, should have... more interesting stuff than just a price list in each solar system. And EA could very well do that. In fact, I bet it does do that. As soon as BioShock stops infinitely resetting my PC I will start it and find out.

...


... Other things I would like in a space trading game:

1) Solar systems with 5-10 planets, including gas giants. The planets then have up to, I don't know, 30 moons.

2) No solar system has the planets all in a line (I thought I read something that said that ours was the only known system that does it that way? Can't recall)

3) I would like to see utterly preposterously shaped "moons" like Phobos and Deimos. Obviously at some girth everything turns into a sphere, but I love moons that aren't big enough for that stuff.

4) Even though there is One Interesting Factoid about every moon in our solar system, I will not hold that against a space trading game where there may be thousands of moons.


OK, that's all I can think of.

Ben, have you played "Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space"?