[Dev Log] From Earth to Pluto

[thepaulhoey]

You are in control of a space ship taking care of the needs of the ship and its crew to ensure they make it through their journey from Earth to Pluto. It will be a command line based game, the plan is that once I get the basic running of a ship and looking after it's crew working I'll implement the fun parts that you will have to deal with. Some ideas so far are an alien aboard that mimics one of the existing crew members or a saboteur who's hell bent on tampering with equipment. Emergency situations such as "space stuff" causing equipment to overheat, hull breaches, increased radiation levels etc. Lots of things I haven't thought out in great detail yet but I think it's a fun concept which I want to play around with. Ideas for other spanners in the works are welcome.

[infamous space turtle]

Cool idea, Is it Zero G inside the ship? Water getting loose and floating around the electronics could be a fun problem.. 

[thepaulhoey]

There's no sort of gravity in it, since it's entirely a text game I'm not sure what way I could make that have an impact. It's quite abstract.

 

I've made some progress on the Crew part of the game. It's all rather crude but should work out OK, they have several needs that they need to fulfill and this will drive them to move around the ship. i.e. I'm hungry, I'll go to a room with food and that will sort that out. Ideally they'll choose a room to address multiple things(hunger, thirst & social let's say) but that's one of those, if I have the time things. I want to get the basics working first.

 

I'm still thinking about the fiction that lends itself best to the gameplay. I'd like you to have to do a decent amount of micromanaging, like they're smart enough to go eat when they need to etc. but as far as making sure the mission goes OK that's on you. Not enough food being cooked? Order a chef to the kitchen. Engine under performing? Send an engineer to the engines etc.

 

Lot's of things are still up in the air but I'm enjoying exploring the idea and seeing what's fun about it.

[infamous space turtle]

Haha damn I totally missed that. 

 

 

[Ben X]

This sounds really cool but also really complicated (i.e. too difficult for babies) to play!

[thepaulhoey]

I'm doing my best to keep it as simple as possible. Let's say everyone is hungry because you only have one chef and he's sleeping or dead, so you need someone to cook food. type 'crew' to get a crew list. Pick the ID of the person you want to reassign then type 'crew 13 setjob chef' and violla, there's your chef! Same for sending them to a room 'crew 13 setroom 2'.

[Ben X]

Sounds good! Please put in a cheat code for me just in case tho

[thepaulhoey]

I haven't had a lot of time to work on this, I refined some of the "simulations", they're very simplistic(someone eating depletes food resource, someone working in the kitchen increases it). I have time this weekend so I'm going to focus on creating a scenario where there's a saboteur on the ship and you have to identify and isolate that person then deal with them.

[thepaulhoey]

I didn't get this into a state where it's worth releasing. We're having a heatwave here and I didn't want to spend it sitting indoors programming, so I got a lot less done this weekend. I got the basic systems in and working, did some code rewriting to make it easier to implement the various systems and features I want but there wasn't time to get them implemented. As it stands there's a very basic simulation of a ship where chefs cook food and people eat and so on but that's about it.

 

I'll keep working on the project as I still like the idea, it'll just take some time to add to it enough.