One of the games that got me to build Rez is Fleet Commander.
This is a kind of procedural narrative game that is partly inspired by Out Of The Park (OOTP) baseball from 2002. OOTP is a baseball sim where my keenest enjoyment was watching prospects come through the farm system to the majors. It was fun to watch them develop as players and see how the team functioned in the season.
I imagined something similar where you command a fleet of star ships that have to deal with situations going on (medical emergency, pirate raid, diplomatic incident, mysterious signal, and so on) and where you control officer assignments and development. The idea is there is a central plot that is there and then procedural missions that branch off from it.
While I have done a lot of work on Rez I’ve done relatively little on the games that inspired me to make it and I want that to change. So here is a Live Coding session where I start building Fleet Commander.
Honestly I don’t really expect anyone to watch this. It’s certainly pretty awkward and might be boring[1] unless you are curious to watch me designing the game “live” and see how that’s done with Rez.
[1] If this hadn’t been a live stream I would certainly edit out the bits where I am fixing bugs in Rez’s implementation of bags.
I might watch a bit of the livestream, but Youtube is currently broken on my Firefox for some reason.
I had an idea for a similar game where you have to manage an interstellar empire, but I had trouble imagining how to fit a narrative in it. Your officer system seems good, I may do something similar. You send agents on missions, that can get random events with skill checks, so you should choose the best one for the job.
Now that I think about it more, I’ll probably turn it into a Perry Rhodan fangame (immediate respect points from me if you know the series). I don’t think they’ll go after a free fangame and if they do, I can just take it down and rebrand it.
Yep that’s the core of it. Only in FC you assign a ship with all of its officers. Different types of situation/mission require a different mix of skills. Additionally there is the psychology of the various officers (and particularly the captain).
For example a reckless captain might be ideal in a situation that calls for bold action but less so during delicate diplomatic negotiations.
Then again there is the dynamic of how officers work together. A trusting captain might develop their officers better but be more susceptible to surprises.
The idea is that the central (scripted) plot intertwines with the procedurally generated situations. It may make the game “unwinnable” but I don’t care too much about that right now.
Be good to hear more of your ideas.
Alas I am not very au fait with German Sci-Fi series
Yeah, I’d plan to have bigger missions have multiple agent slots. You wouldn’t e.g. infiltrate and enemy empire to steal an artifact with just one really capable person.
Multiple difficulty tiers that modify the skill checks and chances for negative encounters may be good in that case.
You could also take the CoiceScript approach and make a utility to auto-test the game with different random seeds and see what percentage made it to the end.
If you knew that it’s a German sci-fi series without googling, that’s enough for me lol.
