Skill Changes, Part 1

The skill system – the one in the currently released version, 0.95a – has some things about it that I like, and some things that I don’t think worked out particularly well. One feature is in both categories – “pick one of two skills at every tier”. In some cases, it works well and you have an interesting choice to make. In other cases, the skills don’t lend themselves as well to it, and it ends up feeling unnecessarily restrictive.

The other high-level feature of the system that I really like is the ability to have some top-tier skills that you need to invest into an aptitude to get, and that can be powerful and game-changing. You can’t have that in a system where you can cherry-pick any skill you want at any time.

So, the goal of these adjustments is to keep the progression and high-impact choices, and add more freedom where “pick one of two” doesn’t have a compelling reason behind it.

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Personal Contacts

One of the bigger tasks for this release cycle has been adding new content into the game. Since a lot of it is story content – think the “Red Planet” mission, but on a bigger scale with things tying together and building up – it’s not something that I can really talk about without spoiling it.

But, not all the new missions are “story” missions. A lot of them missions are just new things you can do in the game, without being unique one-offs. Consider, for example, the current missions to scan a derelict, survey a planet, or collect a bounty – these new missions are all roughly along these lines, with of course more variety thrown in.

The question is, how do we make them available to the player?
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Skills and Story Points

I’ve wanted to update the skill system for a while, but that’s part of the challenge with early-access style development – if you update something too early, you might have to update it again, when yet more things change and make that part not-quite-fit once more. With how many parts of the game the skill systems has tendrils into, it wasn’t something I wanted to do more than once.

Now, finally, the game is in a place where I can do that – I’ve got a good overview of what I actually want from the skill system, the number of unknowns is low, and most of the unknowns are probably known.

(Please note – some of the graphics and text in the screenshots to follow are placeholders.)

So, what are the goals of the skill overhaul? First and foremost, the skill system should increase the replay value of the game – that is, depending on what skills are picked, the player should be able to explore new ways to play the game.
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Colony Management

I’ve been making steady progress fleshing out the various colony-related mechanics, and though there’s still a lot to do there (in a way, everything for the next release has to do with colonies), there’s also a mostly-completed set of features to talk about.

colonized_systems

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Economy & Outposts

I’m going to break one of my unwritten rules today and talk about stuff that isn’t quite done, because the alternative is taking far too long to talk about it at all. There are a lot of inter-related systems in the works, and it’s not going to be possible to playtest properly until most of them are in place, so please keep in mind that the features I’m going to describe here may change more than usual.

Economy
If I’m counting correctly, this is the third “from the ground up” rewrite of the economy system. Well, maybe the second, since the first one wasn’t a re-write, technically. Still, the economy system has had a more turbulent path through development than just about any other part of the game.

(Let me take a moment here and clarify what I mean when I say “economy” – it’s the behind-the-scenes system that produces and moves around between markets commodities such as food, fuel, and supplies, and determines their base prices at various locations. This is different from a player-centric notion of “the game’s economy”, which focuses on how the player gets and spends credits – a perfectly fine use of the term, but not what I’m talking about here.)

eochu_bres

So, why did it go through a couple of complete re-writes? I think it’s because up until now, the primary reason for its existence – a macro-scale game that the player can participate in, which is to say building outposts and such – didn’t exist, and so the shape the economy needed to take was murky.
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