PSG 7

Spaceship game

Update log
Jul.19.2006: Some SC related doodles might be found in this directory.

Jan.11.2006: Some stuff I haven't linked for some reason: Thread | Intro Story

Nov.06.2004: Updates here and there...
Oct.08.2004: Still sick. Changed a lot of text. New roughs arranged on species pages.
Oct.03.2004: Still sick. Layouted a little. New scans.
Oct.02.2004: Got sick. Colored a Supox ship a Mycon podship which looks rather... odd. I need to start formatting this page with CSS so it's readable.
Oct.01.2004: Added some life-planets, mycon, utwig and ..stuff. New creature sheet scan.
Sept.29.2004: Changed text, New Spathi pics.
Sept.28.2004: Scanned new batch (paper 3). Colored up Spathi variants.
Sept.27.2004: Compiled a few days of work this page.

Introduction
Here's a few idea notes for a topdown (2D) space/battleship game mainly based on StarControl II, a little Elite and RTS games in general. The basic idea is to just define each species, their ships and their behavior, place them in a universe, and watch 'em go at it.

I haven't really decided on what role the player has yet. The player could be 'god', jumping from role to role, or manage things like in an RTS, or just be a person that can do a multitude of things, like being a fighter pilot for the army, pirate, trader, miner, colony administrator or just being crew on some random ship.

Example of how the game might look, and the planet proportions. I'm going for a deformed scale.

My designs

About the art
What got me started on this project is the fact that I like elaborating on designs, drawing light, medium and heavy versions, etc. The SC2 designs are particulary charmy so I decided to have a go at it. I'm currently redesigning the ships more towards naval battleships, with lots of turrets and weapon mounts, rather than just one or two fixed weapon systems.
I'm working a lot with silhuettes and color (an advantage of 2D). I think it's important that the ships have an almost symbolic look. This makes it easier for the brain to read and associate them with a certain game mechanic.
Another important thing is that the player generally should be able to guess how dangerous a ship is. Examples of visual indicators that can be used are: Size of ship and size of weapon barrel. The shape of the weapon barrel is also important. A long barrel is accurate, a large caliber one does more damage. Different types of weapons have different visual styles (regardless of race), so the player can tell what they are.

Species and life
Here's all the technological species. I've grouped them, somewhat arbitrary, on separate pages, because there's a lot of images and sketches. Some sketches are scaled to proportion, others are just the 150ppi raw scan (about 200% of what I drew them).

Planets & life
Life planets

Gameplay

Strategy
The player would be playing a human admiral and leader of the alliance with a number of AIs under his command. Because some aliens are mystical or very weird, I think it would be difficult to to have make them playable. Instead they could function as allies that can be 'suggested' commands, which they will interpretate in their own special way.
Anyways, the main gameplay components are:

Game is open ended.
You can cheat the game plot / Improvised game plot.
A lot of species fighting at the same time, not just two teams.
Comprehensible 2D gameplay.
Battleships with lots of guns delivering broadsides.
Battlefleet construction.
Exploration (new species, planets, life, artifacts, etc).
Research.
Customizeable ships.

Fleet battles
The battles in SC2 was simple one-on-ones, with arcade-style action and a limited selection of ships. I'd like to move away from that and use naval battle mechanics instead, ie. battleships unleaching devastating broadsides on each other. The arcade style action could still be there for smaller fighter ships though. Each ship has a crew managing the ship funtions, the players role is simply to roughly order the ships around. It's possible to assign ships or entire fleets to commanders or generals. However, the player can jump in and control specific ship systems, like specific turrets or steering. The interface is mouse for steering/aiming and keyboard for engine control.

Ship construction
To prevent the player from exhausting the diversity of the game, larger spaceships are very cumbersome to build. If the player manages to build one, it will play a central role in the fleet. A normal army will be made out of fighters, cruisers, frigates, maybe a few destroyers and carriers. The top end for ships is giant battle platforms, but building one of those takes a lot of determination and sacrifices.
Although most fleets will be kept around the mid range of ships, each race has the potential to become really powerful if they're given enough time and resources. For some species, like the ZoqFotPik, it's extemely hard to get to the level where they can build a destroyers or even a giant battle platform, but the design should still be there, just in case they get that far.
Each ship can be equipped differently with turrets, engines and different systems. The equipment may be more compact and/or efficient depending on the price, so it's possible to equip a ship with poor pirated/noname equipment, or cram a lot of expensive stuff into a small ship. The fun part here is of course finding good combinations. The ships can also be named.

All weapon, equipment and ship 'stats' are based on formulas and not 'guesstimated'. The internal space of a ship can be calculated by using the topdown profile along with a heightmap or slices. The speed and maneuverability of a ship depends on the size and streamline of the ship and what material it's made of, and what engine that is fitted. Calculating the ship stats from variables will make it a lot easier to get appropriate values I think.

The ships and species not balanced, some species have poor ships and are likely to get extinct. There's no forced vulnerbilities, like battleships not having flakguns so you can take them out with fighters if they don't have escort. A good set of consistant rules and physics is better than arbitrary game balance restrictions and exception rules, in my opinion.

Base construction
I'm blank here. It's hard to consistantly link the planets to the gameplay, since the planets are kept in a separate paralax layer, and ships will need to translate between the two dimensions. I think in SC1 asteroids were used for resources. Would be odd not to take care of both asteroid and planet resources though. Asteroids contain mostly ice and rock, whilst planets have more dense materials, like iron. Gas giants have... well gas.

One way to solve the planet to space gameplay mechanics could be to keep all variable stuff like factories, raw materials etc in orbit where it can be attacked without having special rules for landing parties, atmospheric shieldings and all that. Instead the planets simply serve as providers, ticking units of whatever into orbit with certain intervalls.
A planet might provide a constant of 0.5 resource A and 1.2 of resource B, and so forth. By keeping the resources local, trading economics should be possible. Of course, the different species produce more crew on planets that suit them.

Research
A species can invent new technology by doing brute force research, and by finding life forms and ancient precursor artifacts. For example, a metallic lifeform might give a bonus on armour research. Seeing or capturing alien ships could help aswell. Some research brances are hidden until inspiration comes along, but there's always a chance to discover things by random.

Exploration
Finding artifacts, ruins, life and other species should be something special, so there need to be a lot of dead systems and planets. Suitable figures would be that 1/2 of all systems have uninteresting bacteriological life, 1/10 have indigenous life or something interesting. With unique art for all life and special planets it should be more exciting to explore.
All life (or sites) on a planet can't be immidiately detected. Small and/or rare lifeforms might not show up on scans, and some might not register because of some physical characteristic. Such a creature would be suitable for anti scan technology, but of course, scanning technology can improve aswell.

Story and events
Although SC2 has a very charming story, it's based on certain scripted events and thus not very dynamic. An RTS probably won't reach the same heights story-wise, but could still have events or scenarios that are triggered under certain circumstances. The AI will also need to simulate the personality of each species, in form of battle tactics, resource strategy and triggered behaviours.

Map
The game would be top-down 2D (flat projection) and the universe would be a single map. I figure since a game like Total Annihilation can have thousands of units with turrets and up to 10 players, it should be possible to actually have the entire universe simulating realtime. In ground-based RTS games units will have to worry about terrain pathfinding, which is an extremely CPU intensive process. In space there isn't much obstacles, asteroids and other ships aside. Unit collision detection could be done with some sort of quad tree or grids with pointers.

Although gravity wells offer interesting gameplay, I think it would be too CPU intensive to have all the objects (primarely planets and suns) tug on each other. However, since gravity wells are an interesting gameplay element, there could be a few black holes, and maybe gravity weapons.

The map would be about 500-1000 screens wide, and it takes a 1-4 second to fly a screen distance. It would take something along the lines of half an hour to cross the universe, and maybe loop around the edge. A solar system would suitably be about half a 'flightminute' in diameter for the inner planets, and maybe 15 seconds to clear the asteroid cloud, then another 15-30 seconds of void until the edge of another solar system. There's about 100 solar systems. Most of the map is void, because the solar systems are clustered, with most of the action within maybe 10 flightminutes.

Left: Universe starmap, 90% of the species in the center. Middle: A solar system layout. Right: Nebula paralax BG. This will scroll very slowly, gradually changing the background as the player travels between the stars. The universe could wrap/loop, or there's just an empty void if you go too far.

The map is slightly zoomable, and there's a tactics map with all the ships and fleets. The ships have a certain range in which they can detect ships and objects.

Engine requirements

Gfx

Simple 2D topdown, variable resolutions.
One color transparency mask.
Bitmap objects loaded from common gfx file formats.
Scaling and rotating, maybe some custom filtering.
Plotting for some particles at certain zoomlevels.
Background paralax layers with space particles.
Huge background nebula image.
Coordinate grid lines.
Fonts, possibly HL2 type.

Physics and mechanics

RTS AI, territory, diplomacy and fleet handling.
Not much pathfinding/terrain AI.
Angle, distance, leading vector math, Sinus tables etc.
Parent and child rotations (Ships and turrets).
Polygonal or bitmask collision detection.
Thousands of objects updated each game frame.
Huge 2D game map.
Some sort of grid, quadtree or whatever for the collisions and targeting.

Scaling and mods

Unit limit is variable with future Ghz/mem in mind.
Content loaded from folders/zips, txt and common gfx formats.
Game will automatically implement new content.
Content is independent, no indexing or linking between files.

-eof-