Iteration 3 will feature a more linear game difficulty. Actually one of the main goals is for Iteration 3 to be more game like. Basically spawn points will start with a small “budget” that will increase. Different ship types cost different amounts, it is designed in a tiered way, so even if the spawn point could afford a destroyer it will go down to the lesser ship type so that it will spawn more ships in general and with more variety. EG: a destroyer costs 500, I have 1000, I will spawn a destroyer, now I have 500, but this is below the threshold of even checking to spawn a destroyer so I will spawn a frigate, etc etc.

Basically I want a wide variety of ships to be created and the difficulty to be a bit linear in the beginning then scale up to a certain point, and then remain somewhat static. I’ll throw in some randomness as well so that the spawned forces are not always predictable, also once there is a difficulty slider, the randomness will slide more towards creating more enemies. These spawn points won’t be the only source of opposition in the game, once there are story elements, triggers, special events, this will add to the overall conflict.

Back to the more game like goal of iteration 3, the player will start with less ships than in previous iterations, and won’t have enough resources to build any stations at the start, although the asteroid base can build corvettes and frigates so that the player can start building ships. The player will have a choice, start making smaller ships? Invest in a shipyard to build bigger ships? Build or go for a defense platform instead?

While doing some tests I realize that there is a serious need for a path finding algorithm. Fighter ships that launched in response to the first threat became horribly stuck before being able to reach the hangar bay to dock with the asteroid base. This isn’t the first time it happened, but the asteroid’s base size makes this a more likely occurrence than a carrier, either way I need a some sort of a path finding algorithm (A* etc).

So for Iteration 3 the plan is to convert the world from planets to asteroid bases. This is to accomplish several things: asteroid bases are cooler than planets (in my opinion), asteroid bases achivable scale versus a ship or station is closer to reality and more pleasing to the scale of planets versus ships and stations (currently a carrier is only a few times bigger than a moon, making planets bigger would make planets too close to eachother, the sun is also only about 10 times bigger than the Earth like planet). Asteroid bases are a bit more believable to starting with low amounts of tech, resources, and people under your command. Asteroid bases would also balance out the “pirate” faction which I’ll convert to a rival base faction. Asteroid base veruss another asteroid base is a lot more balanced than planet versus pirate base. Also I can come up with some really neat ideas as to how humanity ended up on these bases in the first place.

So with the planetary system a very easy and obvious, yet neat configuration came into existance, the sun, in the middle of the game world shined a neat ligth on the planets. The planets have a light and dark side. This looked pretty neat and screamed space. Planets that were closer to the sun produced more energy than those that were further. Point being that the sun had many cool aspects. But if I go into an asteroid base type environment where there is no sun this light is gone and so is one aspect that would distinguish bases from one another (the energy production yield). I want the bases to be lit up and have a dark and light side as well, so where would the light come from? For quite a while the idea in my mind is that the game will revolve around a highly advanced piece of technology that all the sides want to posses. So I thought that this object would give off light, and some sort of radiation that the bases would harness.

While spending some time in Blender creating this object, I was basically creating a circular gate, then it hit me… I’m losing a sun, but want to add some high tech object, why not add a sort of a space station that has created or somehow contains an artificial sun. Voila, I have a high tech object, I have sun light, I have the bases power source and I’ve made something that was fairly ordinary in concept (a sun) into a some thing more an artificial sun and a space object that seemingly created it. Pretty good synergy of design right here.