Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 14, 2019 4:28 pm
Silverware wrote: ↑Sun Feb 10, 2019 4:03 pm
Pick breeding partners and attempt to prevent bad genetic matches. (although you cannot force two partners together, you can generally force them apart)
you can totally force them together, if not as romantic partners then as breeding partners.
Breeding assignment is absolutely a component of the basic game design I have in mind.
You'd be able to inspect an individual's genetic highlights, run a simple simulation of what you MIGHT be able to get from the offspring of two individuals, and assign two individuals to breed. (There's an interesting question here of whether a "breeding" assignment includes mating, and only breeding with that partner from then on, or whether it should be permitted -- or in some cases necessary, given low numbers -- to deny that whole "mating" thing and breed anyone to anyone. I feel like there's room for some interesting story and moral choice elements there.)
Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 14, 2019 4:28 pm
Flatfingers wrote: ↑Sun Feb 10, 2019 2:21 pm
Typical game might last 2-4 continuous real-time hours total (but player can save/load anytime)
Set crew lifespans so that ~50 generations pass, requiring breeding assignment choices
thats 2-5 minutes per generation, not much depth to be affordable in actually controlling the breeding choices.
Yep, fair point. Let's say a typical game runs around 8-10 hours, then, with an alternative "quick game" mode of only ~20 generations.
Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 14, 2019 4:28 pm
Flatfingers wrote: ↑Sun Feb 10, 2019 2:21 pm
Select target planet
why land?
build habitats using the skills and tools you already have available in the location you are in.
in space, with a factory complex capable of building anything you need for space habitats with a crew experienced in space operations.
theres nobody aboard who even saw a planet, much less has any idea of how to live on one (compared to living on a space habitat)
I hear you, but you're thinking practically -- colonizing a new planet is sort of baked into the "generation ship" story trope as The Goal.
I don't hate the idea of subverting that goal by allowing alternate endings, including ones that are a bit more shocking as conclusions of the
story of a generation ship. But I'm trying to keep the basic project simple to start with: pick a target planet, win the game when you land there without leaving a big crater.
Now, as for implementation frameworks:
Unity is not a horrible choice. But I did include it with the more Out There notions of Unreal/CryEngine because it's become so big (like them). From my very light experience with it a few years ago, it does require a lot of Unity-specific knowledge to make things work in it. That's not "wrong"; it just makes it harder to find people who can do it well who aren't already doing some other big project with it.
C# is a maybe; I hadn't really thought about it. Does it lock you into .NET?
As for HTML5 canvas, I have some experience there -- see my
jsfiddle that benchmarks multiple methods for drawing to a canvas. You can also check out the in-progress version of
my own 4X-style game (pick the Autoplay option), which while not an action game does some pretty deep things with canvas.
Canvas certainly is slower than calls to a graphics library in a compiled language. But it's not necessarily "slow," depending on what you're doing. A mostly static background with some moving animated images -- such as a 2D ship schematic with NPCs moving about on it -- could easily be performant enough for any normal desktop or mobile device.
My main gripe about that is the lack of pre-built routines to do basic game display stuff. So I will be looking into PIXI.js -- the idea of third-party libraries annoys me, but without spending two years designing and coding my own toolkit, some such external toolkit would be non-optional if going the HTML/CSS/JS route.
Keep those suggestions coming!