I aten’t dead!

Let me start this with a short apology. There has been no dev update for quite a while now. There’s mostly two reasons for that, and hiatus isn’t one of them. The game has seen development at the regular pace during this period. In fact, I had thought about releasing the first part of the new contacts feature in September, but decided against it, because I felt that the feature without the actual progress mechanics didn’t add enough to warrant a release, and because the second part would just kill savegames all over again. I also decided that I was going to skip the state vector for September, because there wasn’t that much to write about, and I could see the release window for the full feature in October getting tight. So, better to put the couple of hours these things take to write and proof read into actual development, right? Well, yeah, the idea wasn’t bad, but it turns out that I underestimated some of the workload of that second part. It would almost have worked out. But a couple of private situations impounded some of my dev time, and then I realized during testing that the game had become almost unplayable. Not due to mechanical issues, but due to balancing. So I had to analyze the situation and try a few things to fix that.

Balancing the scales

The issue is that the game, due to its pretty simplistic core mechanics, relies on a rather tight balance. If it’s too easy, the core mechanic feels like busy-work rather than tough decisions. If it’s too hard, it’s frustrating and an unlucky dicepool at the wrong time could spell game over. While the game has a bit of a roguelike mentality built into it, I don’t want it to become too much of a gambling game. Bad luck is part of the game, and its consequences should be felt, but the intention is that bad luck is just another factor that one needs to consider in decisions, and that in the end bad decisions are what kills you, not bad luck. The idea is that in every game over, one should be able to look back and say “yeah, I should not have taken that risk while in that state”, rather than “There was nothing I could have done, those dice would’ve killed me anyways”.

When the contact feature was finished, this was no longer the case. It was no longer the case because any character with an acuity less than 8 was doomed. This goes back to the early prototype, where flying the ship was really the main challenge, and the character was predefined. Other attributes could help, but they were not life-or-death important. Technically, they still aren’t, but the new contacts certainly make it a feasible choice to bolster expression for faster advancement. While getting jobs done is still the way to earn money, having a silver tongue can now speed up progress significantly and help getting a lot of benefits to make life easier, at the cost of having to be more careful while being out there and not take too many risks. But the way it was was that all the easier progress with contacts counted for nothing, because you’d get yourself stuck without remass or suffocating somewhere in a lost orbit.

Add to this that the whole orbital maneuver challenge is a bit overblown currently, because it was the majority of the content at the release of the first prototype. So, rewriting that challenge would have been a logical way to go to solve the issue. But the next checkmark on my roadmap will involve completely overhauling those anyways when I switch to more believable and planable orbital mechanics, and actual navigation will become another thing the player will need to worry about. So I was not in a mood to touch that challenge just now. Instead I experimented with other things, like different dicepools and modifiers.

The first things I tried all made the game too easy. Now decisions lost their weight, and everything became very boring. Why do you need to slot those dice in to stuff all the time if nothing interesting ever comes out of that anyways? Finally, I arrived at an actually very simple solution. I removed the penalties from low drive. It turns out those few modifiers were what was actually killing me, both mechanically as well as psychologically. First of all, at zero drive the player had a -2 penalty on acquity challenges and a -1 on everything else. That in itself is pretty harsh when you look at the probability curves of the game. If the player had a D10 acuity, and a -2 modifier on the roll… the chances of getting through this, even with a D10 dicepool, are abysmal. And the situation could arise very fast, becasue the game is designed to do exactly that: Sap your drive at any point it could, to shove you closer to taking some of that dreaded burnout.

But the dread of burnout never really comes if just running out of drive while out there spells certain doom. Once I removed those modifiers, the game started to change. Instead of avoiding to push to not end up with crippling modifiers, I found myself pushing liberally when things started to get hairy. Even a bad push, while not exactly comfortable, lost some of its despair because I could push again. As long as I had that drive left.

As a result, drive transformed from a stat to be safeguarded to a resource to be spent, and that could be fairly easily replenished between flights. It became kind of what shields are to most combat focused games: A more easily recoverable extension of the health bar. Things still get tense when drive runs low. There’s still the nervous tick that kicks in at zero drive, and of course there’s the threatening burnout, which will still apply harsh penalties and render the character more and more non-functional the higher it rises. But the vagaries of an individual trip are now much more predictable. I decided that I liked this approach, so this is how it is… for now.

One lesson to take away from this is that balance will be of extreme importance going forward. Especially when other progress mechanics like player skills and ship upgrading enter the game, it will be tough to keep up. One way I’m planning on dealing with this when the time comes are higher-level jobs that would be extremely risky for characters without the necessary skill to take on, but also to move the problem domain. Doubtlessly, for a character one year into the game, just flying the craft shouldn’t be that much of a challenge anymore. They should have other problems to deal with, though right now I only have vague ideas of what those could be. I’ll just have to trust that solutions will present themselves when the game gets to that point of development. If you have any ideas, feel free to tell me.

We’ve got contacts!

Apart from those very minor changes that have a huge impact on the gameplay, there’s of course also the major changes that have a huge impact on the gameplay. And those are business contacts, which I guess constitutes the first official NPCs of the game. Though in terms of characterisation, they’re admittedly somewhat bland at this point, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Contacts are the new way for getting jobs. This means that for the purpose of getting payed work, the character’s skills are now secondary. It’s the characters network of contacts that decides their chances of getting a well-payed job, or one that they’ll lose money on, or worst, none at all for the next couple of days.

Building that contact network, though, still does rely on a characters skills, so it’s not like you can’t influence your chances of getting good jobs. But you’ll need to invest some time and effort into it. This, then, effectively is the game’s first progress mechanic beyond “number goes up”. In fact, you’ll be having a very hard time to make the numbers go up before you build at least the foundations of that network. The more contacts you have, the better your options. Of course, contacts are somewhat limited by the location they work from, so it pays to have a variety of contacts in a variety of locations. The locations themselves also play into the mix, since not all kinds of jobs are equally available at all locations, and of course it’s easier to find some job in a large, important location like Argosy, while options on smaller, more specialized locations are a lot more limited.

Contacts also offer other benefits than just jobs. With good relations to a contact, they might give you more opportunities, or offer services for cheaper. This requires improving relations with contacts, which is a combination of doing jobs for them and interpersonal relationship, which is where characters with good expression really start getting their money’s worth. A character with a D12 in expression will need to work their but off to get contacts to really notice them, while characters with a D8 or even D6 are able to improve their relations almost casually and get at benefits others can only dream of pretty early on.

Beyond that though, contacts currently are clearly a mechanic, not characters. They have names, and a profession, and some attributes, but nothing to distinguish their personalities. Some trait system to make interactions with different contacts slightly different for different characters are something I very much want to introduce in the future, but this isn’t the time for it. I’m already two weeks late from my planned release date for this feature, and the game doesn’t really have all the necessary foundations yet to make this worthwhile. Also, you shouldn’t expect an in-depth dialog system for contacts at any point. This isn’t really that kind of game. I hope that at some point there’s enough context and flavour to roleplay around a bit for those who want to, but now is not the time. On the plus side, right now none of your contacts will ever screw you over. Which I think at some point in the future, some of them absolutely should. In my opinion no space-trucking game is truly complete without some jerk trying to cheat you out of a payday…

Factions yes, but…

This update also introduces factions as actual ingame entities rather than just mentions in flavour texts. Each contact belongs to a faction, and factions have a certain presence on the various stations that makes finding contacts of that faction harder or easier, and the player can increase faction reputation by doing jobs for a contact of that faction. Right now though, that just helps to get better contacts from that faction, and some of the more powerful benefits. There’s nothing more to them right now. Not even a menu where you can look up your current reputation and the factions history or anything, really. Even more than contacts, they are just a name right now. A necessary cog I needed to make the mechanics work, but without any soul.

I’m kind of sorry for that state, but it will remain like that for a while. First off, they aren’t all fully fleshed out yet, so I didn’t dare adding any flavor text to them. Second I don’t have a menu to display that flavor text, and right now it’s not worth the time to build it. And third, a lot of them are still missing completely. All the major intercorps are currently represented, as well as the international orbit authority and the holocratic confederation (essentially the government of the stations in high earth orbit, though calling them a government is probably giving the wrong picture). But inside the holocratic confederation, for example, there’s supposed to be this whole system of specialised circles (read: guilds) that isn’t ready yet at this point to enter the game, and then there’s also going to be some smaller factions in the form of independent companies at some point. All of that complexity and spice for the world is still a pipe dream at this point, though. I need to get the basics running first, and at least three parts are missing for that.

Entering the slow phase

Let’s have a very short look at the immediate future. I need Three more things to promote this whole thing to “mid-alpha”-stage: I need navigation (and the orbital mechanics that go along with that), I need actual character progression, and I need something to re-invest hard earned money on, which will first and foremost be an actual spacecraft with actual things to improve. Let’s face it, your spacecraft is currently just a bucket of numbers, and they’re fairly overpowered numbers at that, because you need an overpowered spacecraft right now to not limit the players options to absolute boredom.

I hoped to get these 3 things done at least in their basics until summer 2025. I’m not entirely sure I’ll still manage to hit that. The reason is that I have just suffered my first delay, and that I can see myself suffering another one with the next thing, which will be navigation, orbital mechanics, and making the passage of time a more integral part of gameplay in general. This will be the part of the project that will be the heaviest on math, and I’m not exactly great at that. So it’ll probably be February, possibly even March, until I have that stuff solidly under the belt, not January as I initially planned. And I don’t think I’ll be able to catch that time up during the other two things, since they’ll need a heavy dose of conceptualization before I even know what kind of code to write.

None of this especially bad. I’m not on any schedule except that set by my own ambition. And not beholden to anybody, as nobody seems to be playing the game and eagerly awaiting every update right now. I’m just saying this because the update frequency is also not going to be comparable with the first half of 24. These are all big, chunky things, and picking them apart into pieces that can be released each month isn’t really practical. So if there’s no frequent updates in the foreseeable future, this doesn’t mean that development on the game is slowing down. I’ll see that I can at least keep the state vector schedule, though, after having completely broken it for the last quarter. While I might not having anything new to show, I want to at least keep you up to date on what I’m doing.