There you have it, the title of the Browser based space game I talked about last week. Ythmeven, a homage to my character from Star Wars Galaxies. I find it to be a fitting name, as I plan to borrow a few other features from SWG that I haven’t seen elsewhere. What you ask?
Well the Crafting system of course. In Star Wars Galaxies there wasn’t just metal, ore and so on, but hundreds of different kinds and quality of metal. It made crafting an extremely time consuming, but very rewarding profession. When you were one of ten people with the resources to craft something, out of hundreds of players, it forced the players hand if they wanted the best. In Ythmeven I hope to capture a small portion of what they obtained. The current plan is that planets will produce crafting resources (different than what you will buy and sell at ports) Weapons, and modals will be craft able, and give a different bonus depending on what resources were used. A planet will produce one type of resource, but to craft an item it may take 2 or 3 types from different planets. It will differ form SWG in that the resource the planet produces will always be the same, rather than changing monthly. I hope that this will be enough incentive to control and build up a planet, cause my current plan won’t make it easy.
Anyways on to what I have actually coded. This past week I continued work on the starports (lots to do as most of your time will be spent at them) I also have ships working (multiple ships can be owned, and changed at the port) For the most part resource gathering and selling to the port is finished. Buying is also finished. The basic Merchant port is finished, with just a few small details to work out. I also started planning out what ships the game will have, and came up with 21 pilot able ships, and 3 capitol ships (more on capitol ships later) With some very generalized stats.
This week I intend to step back from the game a bit, and work on a few of the mindless systems (messaging, online players ect) while I come to a decision on turns. I’m almost 100% sure that I will implement turns of some kind, they serve the purpose of putting players on equal footing. In 3D games you have people with no lives that can play all day and night to finish the content before anyone else. But with a turn based game, I can limit everyone to a set number of turns per day.
I’m not sure if I want to make movement cost a turn, or just trading, mining, and docking. Rather than giving the player more turns in the day to move around, I’d rather limit the number and allow movement to be free. I’m considering tying the turns you use, to your “level” so every time you buy or sell from a merchant and use a turn you gain 1 xp (or turn) in a trading skill. This trading skill would give you a bonus in the ports based on a percentage. So if you spent 500 turns on trading you would get a bonus of 50% or .5 The percentage would be based off a discount percent of the base price, so spending 1000 turns would give you 100% of the bonus, but it wouldn’t mean you’d get free goods (just cheaper than others). This way you would gain from doing an activity over and over, and make you more efficient, and thus faster. You would also spend turns on mining (asteroid for metal and ore, or nebula for gas) and docking would give you a movement point.
That is the plan for this week anyways, I’m happy with the progression, its going faster than I expected. I’m hoping to be able to start playtesting by summer.
