In the case of a sandbox game, a great chunk of the time in the artificial space universe the player will spend flying from point A to point B somewhere in space. Hence why that aspect of the game is pretty crucial, since the player might get bored over time when repeating that task, regardless of whether or not there is a comprehensive autopilot function visible to the player. That’s one of the problems we’ll notice once we want to break up the “big” game atoms into smaller pieces. Breaking up that chain reveals that a great deal of repetition is present, which can’t be broken up by a waterfall design. So making flight least painful or boring as possible is important! Unless the aim of the game is to bore you to death.

The concept of space flight differs a lot from game to game. It’s also linked to the objects in space are arranged - whether you travel from one star system to another, or from one section to another inside a big star system, or even just “random” sectors in space connected through some kind of gates or whatever, that all defines the layout of your star systems or sectors, etc. . Whatever we’ll choose, it’ll fundamentally define the way the game is played. Instead of choosing one right in the beginning, I’d like to discuss that first.

I’d like to briefly describe some layouts/concepts which come into question and point out the one concept I like the most right now. Disclaimer: All those concepts revolve around star systems with no objects moving around the sun(s)/planets/etc., i.e. “unrealistic” systems.

1. The gameplay-relevant sections are star systems which are divided into sectors according to the position of planets, stations etc. (one other way to divide the star systems is into equal rectangular sectors, however that’s pretty inconvenient in my opinion and doesn’t suit my image of the game) The means of travelling between objects inside the system consist of acceleration gates or rings (or whatever they’d be called) that would convey ships from a relevant sector to another. Travelling from one star system to another is done using jump gates and/or worm holes, whose positions are independant of those of the remaining stellar objects. In case of acceleration rings, the disruption of one portion of the ring system would be possible, thus allowing pirates to disrupt these and camp at those acceleration lanes. (People who have played Freelancer are familiar with the concept of “lane hacking”)

2. The relevant sectioning is done in space sectors. Space sectors are small chunks of important space, arranged in a matter possibly independent of logic of any kind ;). Travelling inside those sectors would be no big deal as distances aren’t big. Jump gates interconnect all space sectors.

3. The concept I favor the most is kind of a compromise. I just see it as the best way to include some interesting gameplay mechanics and get some action going. The gameplay-relvant space portions are star systems, which are again divided into sectors of different size adjacent to stellar objects or inside formations etc. (asteroid fields/rings, dust/gas clouds, scrap fields, rock formations of other origin). The means of flying from one sector to another would consist either of a “in-system jump drive” or, again, acceleration gates. However, travelling from one star system to another requires the space ship to be far enough from the gravitational influence of the sun(s) and planets, meaning that one would need to get to the system’s far end (depending on its size, the “far end” can vary :D) to use the inter-star jump drive. Parallel to #1, pirates would eventually be able to stop ships by disrupting acceleration lanes or the ship’s in-system jump drive along the path.

Discuss.

Typical combat designs in space sims consist of chasing the enemy by flying around in circles, while he may or may not be able to get you on his front side to be able to shoot you. If the enemy has gotten turrets, you’re screwed, - or not - depending on the game’s design. Simply put, the ships with the highest speed, most firepower and fattest shields wins. One of the obvious reasons why combat is so dull is the very simple ship balancing. Every ship owner will come to a point at which his ship is basically worthless, due to the “if you aren’t this big, you’re too weak” design, meaning that every “more advanced” ship can defeat any ships below it, regardless of fitting or tactics - no exceptions allowed. That design can be loosened pretty easily though. I’d like to introduce a design with more variations, involving more tactics - rather than just a straight line.

(both diagrams were made by Tranberry from the FGD forums, visit his wobsite under: http://tranberry.se )

Instead of being instant cannon fodder and thus good for basically nothing at all, fast and light-weight ships, you may call them interceptors or scouts, now have the possibility to be used for, what their name actually suggests, interception of fighters and bombers. They should be quite effective in groups, especially for perturbing the enemy. Interceptors/Scouts should be the cheapest ships in the design. Excluding civilian ships, if there is the need for a separation between faction/military ships and ‘mere’ civilian ships or ships manufactured by independent companies.

The gap in-between would then be filled by fighters, which would be somewhat limited omnipotent packages, perfect for raids, escorts and patrols in small numbers and for hit-and-run tactics, in which you don’t necessarily want to lose a great bunch of your ships.

The next class is filled by heavy fighters and bombers. Heavy fighters, the more expensive variants of the fighters - also with a much greater mass - are intended for universal use. If you have the money and the nerves, that is. The fighter<>heavy fighter relationship might be a critical point in the design when it comes to balancing. Bombers will be designed for anti-capital assaults. They’re particularly slow for their size, although they will have the ability to get a fair speed boost for a limited amount of time during strikes and for evasion of heavy capital turrets and missiles, and their energy systems will be specifically designed for the carriage and launch of very heavy missiles or energy-based bomber equipment, so they won’t be abused as “very-very-fat” fightercraft.

The gap between capital ships and heavy fightercraft will be filled by gun boats (their purpose being the interception of small and medium fightercraft using turrets), corvettes, cruisers and frigates… I will have to think this class through I think.

The capital ships (destroyers, carriers, etc.) are self-explanatory.

As I was already saying in the beginning of this mess of an article, another quite soporific spice put into combat design is limiting and boring navigation and flight physics. Though by any means, do not interpret this statement as it would promote realistic space physics; please don’t. Ultra-realistic flight physics destroy the fun of combat completely. Instead, consider flight physics a way to introduce new elements to combat. Instead of putting all down to physical laws, you should also think of ways technology would’ve worked out the issues of space flight by then. After all, it’s a science-fiction game - don’t take the ’science’ thing too seriously.

Imagine a simple spaceship having two engines. This would allow the ship to accelerate in one direction and thus travel in one direction, but it’d be heavily affected by the gravitational force of the celestial bodies near or not so near it. Thrusters on the front side and on every other sides are added to allow manipulation of the direction in which the ship is heading, as well as the roll of the ship. After a while, a trick allows to get the gravitational force of the celestial bodies out of the picture, which allows much more freedom for space flight. Also, the correction of the course by the thrusters is handled automatically, even though more advanced pilots may consider manual operation for sliding/gliding. The thrusters on the front side are especially effective, in so far as it is possible to stop immediately, decelerate and then recelerate again, making room for many wicked maneuvers. Just to picture it:

You can bite your fingers off at that, vector mathematicians.

Now to a little bit of history. In the history of sefaring, due to the lack of long range weaponry suitable on sea, the first way of nautical combat was quite simple: ram the enemy! The ships were obviously constructed with that kind of combat in mind. The nose of the ship was reinforced with metal and made extra sharp. Thus, the ships weren’t too big and were quite agile. That method of combat was used by the Greek and by the Phoinikians, probably invented by the Pelasgians. Don’t quote me as a reliable source though; the origin of this tactic is unknown.

During the Punic Wars, the Romans were faced with that tactic, since the Carthaginians/Phoinikians were masters of seafaring and nautic combat. They were at disadvantage, as their ships were quite… crappy. Until they had found a solution, they were never able to secure their sea or cut off the Carthaginians from their usual trade routes (Sardinia, Sicilia, etc.). One day, they decided to turn the whole thing into land combat again and filled a whole ship with soldiers, everybody well equipped and well trained for battle. They tricked the Carthaginian ship into approaching them, at which they evaded the Phoinikians, smashed their rudders,  sailed to one side of the enemy ship and jumped over. Seamen can’t fight. And so they were doomed. And so, boarding ships was born.

The same thing would be quite interesting in space: Ships of the size of corvettes - so right in-between capital ships and bombers - with the ability to harden certain areas of their shields for a period of time. A new kind of hit-and-run tactic would be born.

The diagram has to separate branches. The red one is the very simple ‘isle’ sandbox design. After having performed a task, there is no reaction of the environment around the player, nor is there development outside the player’s microcosmos. Usually, there is a time span between the tasks in which the player is pondering about what he will do next. Projected onto a space game, the factor that defines the outcome of the reorientation phase lies in what the player’s basic occupation is, so whether he favors trading or a more martial style of playing, and how many possibilities the game holds open in that situation. This is usually shaped by the price of items and ships, the galaxy map and occasionally by racial differences. I have noticed that as for space sims, it is quite hard to keep up the “Aha”- and “Wow”-moments high in number and concise in appearance. Frankly, there are hardly any “Aha”-moments in current space games (the exception proves the rule), as most mechanics are either obvious - a prime example of that would be the rule of thumb in a simple combat ship design, in which ships with more firepower or shields are simply better than everything else - or built on top of simple, easy to see through mechanics - yes, I’m talking about you, Freelancer weapon balancing. But after all, there may be a way to analyze that and come to a solution (thinking game design atoms). That will mean a lot of handwork though.

Back to the diagram: The plain black branch is what I like to refer to as the “waterfall” sandbox design. It’s a lot more laborious to design, let alone to implement and to maintain - but it is more interesting to design, of course, and a lot more fun to play in the end. It limits the importance of the player as a parameter for the game world, so the environment (factions, economy, etc.) may take a completely different direction, hence the “waterfall”. Though the player is able to manipulate his environment; if he participates in raids of a faction against another faction in the conflict; if he’s a driving economical power (again, space stations, trading, escort/police service, blah, blah, blah); and of course if he has a huge fleet, an enormous wallet and can just gank everything and everyone in the universe.

In the diagram, the normal arrows point at events or tasks that get triggered or are opened after player interaction or rather the performing of a task. The diamond arrows on the other hand point at events or tasks opened up for the player, without the need of player interaction - they just happen or appear. An example of that would be the beginning of a conflict over a system rich on sources. No player interaction needed there. Although, the faction may now offer missions regarding this conflict (raids, defense, recon) to the player. The goal would be to make the waterfalls and occasional isles as long and as rich as possible.

Another trick beside the usual waterfall and isles, and of course, making the basic elements of the game - trading, combat, exploration, story - as fun as possible,  to keep the player at it is by adding fun activities or “pretended” fun activities. Say, space racing, gambling, etc. The key there is to add a money bonus to it.

Other than that - my typical credo - : Increased interaction between the player and his/her (AI) environment. A martial player will eventually have somebody holding a grudge against him at a certain point. The player’s standing towards one or more factions will eventually be so low, that the faction will send ruffians to attack his fleet or his stations (if he has any) as an act of retaliation or rather aggressiveness. That would also be a reason for the player to continue shaping his environment and attacking other factions or teaming up with some.

I hope I have cleared things up a bit…

PS.M64 mentioned in his Blog that one of the issues that FOSS game development has to tackle are huge, bloated “game designs” (quotation marks by me), which try to imitate commercial games to some degree. FOSS games should rather focus on casual games with smaller designs, so he says. That is true for most cases, but in the end, everything gets down to the game design, and if there is none, a bigger game can’t be played consistently nor be really fun. I want to prove that

What space sims these days lack are real dynamics that affect the short-term and long-term goals and the activities of the player. By adding the feature to choose between several races at the start, it is possible to not only define the location the player starts at and the ship he’s preferably going to fly, but also to define the style of playing and the player’s long-term goals, including his impact on the persistent, dynamic world. Other possible differences can include the reaction of the player’s environment towards him, possibly biased/defined by his race’s mores, traditions and political standings to other factions and/or activities. But before one can even get to a design as complex as that can be, one has to define the fundamental mechanics underneath.

This might start to get slightly technical, as the scripting implementation of the game logic and AI also depends on the game’s design. In the case of an implementation (which is unlikely to happen, anyway), I’d like to make sure that nothing goes wrong on that end. At the bottom of everything lie the basic AI commands for ships, no matter how they’re called or executed right now. Fly to position, follow ship, attack ship, and so on. Simply by utilizing simple commands such as these, which then again consist of lower level commands utilizing vector operations etc. (I’m not into things like that), a complete assault of a faction against another one can be staged. Furthermore, if that event depends on whether certain conditions are met, it will seem realistic and logical to the player and there’ll also be room to notify the player and to give him the opportunity to join that assault or prevent the enemy faction from gaining his faction’s space, or to economically support his home faction with resources and equipment. That would then be one of the player’s temporary objectives possibly given by the game at some point or another - preferably taking quite a time.

Projecting this from the macrocosmos of the game world to the microcosmos of the player, which he is experiencing at the moment, to the bigger game world, would mean that there would be systems which two or more factions fight over for a certain time frame. The time frame and the intensity of such a conflict would be affected by economical and military factors, for instance the amount of equipment a faction can ship to support the fleet or the number of ships a particular region can summon up, the arrangement of sectors and systems across the space, which is being fought over, and the direct or indirect interventions of the player or of other factions (pirates cutting off trade and supply lines, etc.), either on one side or another.

This would require that the owner of a system or a part of the system can be changed through scripting. Sounds easy to do, but what might come up is the issue of when a system actually belongs to a faction and when it’s effectively war-torn territory. That will be a subject of discussion. These pictures are only there for clarification of what I have in mind… more or less. The global AI relationships and its impact on the player’s decisions and goals will, too, be a hot subject of discussion.

(Yes, that’s the Llama from Vegastrike, GPL)

On the other hand, X3:TC made me think about what amazes me about spacesims the most. I’ve been addicted to space since the first Escape Velocity, then the other 2 ones, which were unbelievably fine games, defining free-roaming spacesims for me, although they were 2D top-down games. It’s an incredible experience to fly around with a fleet of “merely” 5 destroyers, wiping out pirate or alien space. I got my hands on Descent: Free Space, a really compelling combat spacesim, which had top-notch graphics back in the day. Saving earth from weird alien threats was my duty! There was also Starlancer, with which the *Lancer universe started to become colorful for me. Years later, I stumbled over Freelancer, the technical sequel, but with free-roaming elements this time, eventually bought it and had lots of fun with it, especially the entraining storyline. Later the same year, I had bought a gaming magazine, just for the heck of it, which also had some free full game with the weird name “X-Gold”, which I reckoned to be some shitty retro game nobody ever heard of, thence I didn’t really care. The same year, I read about the sequel of a well-known and immerse space game, called X2: The Threat, on the Internet. I figured this X-Gold CD must contain its predecessor and thought “Hey, why don’t I give it a spin”. So the beginning was kind of 0815, “Weird controls, mmkay, probably some mission-oriented game” and then SWOOSH I don’t know where the fuck I was and then this reptile or something talks to me and he has to lend me stuff which I have to pay him back and WHAT PROFIT AAAH WHERE AM I. - That’s the element of surprise, my friend. If I could, I’d buy a game I know is good but I don’t know what it is about, and play it, just for the element of surprise. Anyway, I kind of started with X - Beyond The Frontier, didn’t play that game too long though (sadly, I can’t find my X-Gold CD anymore the story really rocked), then tried X-Tension, then went onto X2, a very cool game with really dumb storyline missions. I had some issues with it and X3, too, but I must say that they are really good games at their core, it’s just that Egosoft had to release fast to keep up with the deadline and they had kind of neglected some parts of the game. Terran Conflict somewhat fixes this, however there are still some bugs present. The kind of bugs you can easily find a workaround thought, so it’s not a big deal. Plus all the free-roaming aspects, the new ships and sectors (<3 Terran Cutlass) and the newly added mission system - it’s just overwhelming.

Since the beginning of my obsession with spacesims of all kinds, I’ve always wanted to make a space game myself. That’s the reason I’ll be doing some thinking and breaking down of the spacesim genre here and now and in the next posts of this Blog. Thinking and writing about crap seems to always have been my strength, which is obviously stronger than the restraint of doing something serious. Starting with my thoughts on the spacesim genre and what it should focus on, I’ll try to assemble a game design document. I’ll be trying to do this periodic to some degree, if I find the time and motivation to.

Let’s start.

Simply put, a free-roaming spacesim consists of these key elements:

- Persistent universe
- Flight and Getarounds
- Economy
- Combat
- Background story

All of those points are pretty much self-explanatory, so I don’t need to give them a closer look (yet). What really bugs me is the way how they are combined into the game. I’m talking about subtle style and story impressions given to the player to build up an atmosphere, how war can affect the economy in said persistent universe, how relations between races/factions or between the player and NPCs/factions can affect the way the player, how flight time and such can slow down your gains from trading, etc.

Let’s start with the most important thing to me: The background story and how it is linked to the universe. A link between those two are considered obvious and easy to achieve by most players and thusly by most game designers, except for the ones focused on multiplayer FPS games with or without a minimal storyline that everyone ignores anyway, because it’s of low quality and of no use in the game itself. You have to kill stuff and that’s it. In a spacesim however, a link between said two is crucial and helpful in creating a chain of tasks and events for and around the player(s). A good free-roaming space simulation can keep the player(s) busy if they’re not involved in a concrete storyline of some sort, by giving possibilities to make money, spawning events, missions, showing off new elements (aha-moment; think game play atoms). If the space the player is in is in some border region and the race the space belongs to is basically some unfriendly, violent bunch, the systems/sectors may contain lots of vibrant yet aggressive coloring, lots of nebulae and debris, frequent pirate or enemy raids and lots of military activity (or none at all). The pilots the player tries to contact may be unfriendly and in a hurry, in order to avoid pirates or enemy attacks. They may be out for the player’s cargo. Et cetera. Besides having many background story elements weaved into it, there may be an explanation for all that. Even more so, the more background information there is, the more events, elements and style accents can be utilized. It’s fun to read, fun to imagine and fun to experience. Or it should be. Some people lobby for scientific accuracy in space games. I for one give out my Ceterum Censeo for deep and thought-out space games stories and universes.

Distantly related: Economy and combat. How so? Economy affects combat, combat affects economy. Moreover, both elements haven’t received any modernization in the past decade. X Beyond The Frontier added the production factor into the dry system of supply and “demand” (or, in other, less economy-oriented space sims, “*swoosh* and the ware is there”) and introduced player driven trading and station building. X3 introduced station complexes which you can connect multiple stations with. As already noted, other games, such as Freelancer or Vegastrike (and thusly probably the old Privateer games, too) have a system with fixed trade routes between big stations which supply or demand certain wares. EVE - more an RPG than a space simulation; interesting nonetheless - on the other hand has a 98% player driven economy in and outside NPC/safe space, 2% formed by blueprints, skill books and basic junk offered by NPCs. That on the side of an MMO space sim though. If you’re asking now “Why should I look at other games”, you should also ask yourself “Why should I reinvent the wheel?”.

The innovations in combat are even fewer in number. Capital ships and semi-capital ships which are thought as gunboats to take down fighter swarms. Time get some speed and dynamics into it.

To Be Continued…