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cjet79  1mo ago (text post)   2718 thread views

Maker's Monday

Trying out a new weekly thread idea.

This would be a thread for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers. We can coordinate weekly standup type meetings if their is interest.

@ArjinFerman, @Turniper, and myself all had some initial interest.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

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HighSpace

Not much to report on since the monthly post is still pretty fresh, and we only had the call with cjet last Thursday, but I did set a bunch of tasks for myself, which can be seen here. The ones I assigned to myself is what I have planned for the week, which is:

  • Load new game state from json data files instead of hardcoding it in LUA
  • Spawning of enemy ships ("in pursuit" of allies)
  • (bug) CTD on start of campaign under some circumstances
  • (bug) Crash on win/lose of the game
  • Neutral Ships join player on rendezvous

I'm off to a good start as the first two issues are already done, and I suspect the mysterious quasi-random crash on start of campaign happens when an enemy and neutral ship start close enough to trigger a mission, which would mean it's just a duplicate of another issue (Cannot jump into mission without “Alpha 1” being present in group) which I didn't want to tackle just yet.

Writing

@cjet79, you expressed you interst in doing some writing. As mentioned on Discord I made some notes / basic outlines on the project wiki, any names or smaller details I put there are subject to change as I just wanted to have something written down, so feel free to rewrite them. During the call I mentioned Star Wars when you asked about the hardness of the sci-fi, but I think I want to go more with something like Star Trek (so the harder end of the soft side, I guess). If all goes well I'd like a bigger campaign, but for now let's stick with the prologue / demo scenario. From the monthly thread:

A logistics taskforce flew right into the hornets' nest, and are now being pursued by the Incomprehensible Horrors. Captain Playername receives their distress call, and as the nearest ship, rushes in to help. Reinforcements are on the way, but will need time to assemble. The logistics guys can't jump to another system due to [McGuffin, or some clever Subspace jump mechanic I'm yet to come up with], so they opted to scatter throughout the system in an attempt to buy time and minimize casualties.

The player is in command of a mid-size carrier, and has to rescue as many friendlies as he can find, before the IH's get to them. Each successful rescue gives the player a new ship at their command (in case it's one of the escorts), and/or resources like bombs/specialized ammo (when it's one of the transports), but generates more aggro (which itself has trade-offs - more aggro on you means less on the relatively defenseless friendlies). All this culminates in an assault on the IH super-capital ship, that is the source of all this trouble. This will resemble an arcadey boss-fight, where fighters will need to take apart some critical components of the enemy ship, so the friendly capital ships can approach it safely and finish it.

For the story I was planning to go with a Japanese visual novel thing, so the most obvious thing to do at the beginning would be the content of the distress call and / or a dispatch from high command that informing the player that such a call was received and that they're to head over to help, and buy as much time as possible. Some dialogue with the crew upon arrival in the system debating the strategic choices they have. One early choice I thought of introducing was:

  • Maintain radio silence (avoid detection)
  • Quietly announce your arrival to your allies through an encrypted channel (arouse minor suspicion from the enemy, get intel from allies)
  • Loudly announce your arrival to your allies as well as enemies (get intel from allies, immediately aggro enemy forces, increasing initial difficulty for yourself, but providing relief / buying time for allies).

Feel free to introduce some characters that we could make use of later, and come up with more strategic dilemmas that could arise as the rescue operation unfolds. Otherwise, let me know what you'd need from me. I figure the fun in writing is the creativity, so I don't want to impose too much.

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