Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

changes to ship design system

cliffski

Today I got totally distracted and put in 90% of a system (I’ll finish it tomorrow) where not all slots will take all modules. Most sci-fi games with ship design adopt this system, and I think it’s a good idea. Eve has (at it’s most basic) three different categories, low mid and high. I’ve decided to go with a much more basic two-stage system where you have turrets and standard modules. This means that a ship with 10 slots (like a frigate) will have maybe 3-5 turrets. You will be free to put anything in a turret slot, but weapons can *only* go in turret slots.

I also beefed up my crappy hacky editor so I can easily designate which is which.

 In gameplay terms, this will allow for greater distinction between ship hulls. Some hulls will have a greater proprtion of their modules as turrets than others. You might use these for lots of small weapons like point defense lasers or  anti-fighter weapons. The other ships will lend themselves to small numbers of big beam lasers.

All good fun :D Time for a bottle of wine and the apprentice final. I think yasmina will win. Kate is too safe and steady and ‘sir’ alan is more like yasmina in personality terms.

I wouldnt employ her though. She clearly has no business sense. yasmina.com is not even registered, despite her currently being the most famous yasmina on the net. Someone else even got her full name domain: http://yasminasiadatan.com/

7 thoughts on changes to ship design system

  2. You mean the UK version of The Apprentice is better than the US version?

    Interesting.

  4. i liked the way master of orion 2 worked in that you could research miniaturization to max then load up a ton of phased plama beams on a ship and conquer the universe.

    i always felt limited by systems like eve online it feels kinda silly that a huge ship such as a battle ship can only have 5 to 8 guns and thats it .

    a battle ship should have several primary weapon systems and then a slew of secondary weapon systems . but thats because i am weapons man . all offense and the hell with a elaborate defense systems.

    I like my battle simple let loose an awesome alpha strike watch the pretty fireworks rinse repeat.

  6. Differentiation is important. It would feel weird to have more than 3 guns on a frigate. On the other hand, having a capital ship with only 5 guns? Strange. Depending on how twinky you want to get with this, this would also help differentiate hulls. Instead of having “weapon slots” you could designate some of the slots as specifically laser or missile, so you could have the “missile boat” hull. Restrictions are a great source of creativity, so a player may come up with a setup that they like while trying to get around the “half of the weapon bays on this hull are missile only” system.

    If you are going to implement a system like this, generic slots and cross-specialization slots would be great. Generic slots letting you mount either a weapon or an accessory, to give you a little more flexibility, or cross-specialization slots to let you mount a laser in a missile bay or vice versa at a cost to effectiveness, basically penalizing you for trying to overspecialize.

  7. Different types of slots gives “hulls” a lot of “personality” but you probably need more then 2 types to do it. It’s possible and maybe better in other ways then adding slot types however.

    Eve for example has the turrets/missile ‘subslots’, ship hull bonuses, and the powergrid/cpu resources, as well as built in attributes (speed, armor etc). Even if it has only 3 slots this makes up for it and makes each hull have a lot distinguishing it from others.

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