Hey there fellow players + devs,
I stumbled across Starfarer today and was absolutely blown away by the concept and feel of the game. As a long-time fan of EVNova, this game felt new, fresh and ambitious to the point that I purchased it halfway through reading the "features" page. You guys have some serious vision...I was totally sold.
Having only played it for a few hours this evening, my intuition was completely on-base. The combat in this game is amazingly simple, yet hard to master...with enough nuances to keep a player for a long, long time if given an unlimited potential for storyline and side-game.
I have a suggestion for the overall development of this project, but I'll hold it for just a moment. Here are a few things that really struck me as ambitious and captivating:
# Explore hundreds of star systems to find habitable worlds, rich resource deposits, and advanced alien technology
# Impact the inter-stellar economy with your decisions – decide the fate of entire planetary systems
# Fight to bring stability and prosperity to the sector – or watch it burn while you take advantage of the chaos
I love that you guys have the vision for this kind of thing. It would be easy to lean on your combat system and make a game that reads as purely arcade. That would be fine, but would seriously lack the longevity that you guys are proposing. Simply put, if you pull off what you're planning on pulling off, this game could be the next Minecraft.
But the real gem here is that you plan on implementing a complete editor. One thing that really bothered me about EVNova is that it was nearly impossible to mod your own ships. In a game planning development exclusively for the single player, I feel that at this point in time not having moddability is really shooting yourself in the foot. Mod communities are what continue to hold up games like Morrowind even though the game itself is over 8 years old. People like being creative, and there comes a point when developers either lack the energy to add more to a project or don't have the manpower to get content out fast enough to appease their fanbase. The fact that you've made all of your ships in a sprite format that ultimately makes it possible for people to design their own ships is the first step in what I think could be an amazing opportunity for a brilliant metagame mod community, considering your suggested plans for allowing the moddability of missions, planets, factions, universes, etc.
So here is my humble suggestion as an enthusiastic modder and non-game developer: during the continued development of your product, why not lean on crowd-sourcing from the community? If you guys focused on making a comprehensive "mod builder" alongside the development of your features, you could leverage your community to provide themselves with entertainment and you with potential content. As you develop these highly ambitious features like:
*Unique character development
*Factions
*Economy impact
*Dynamic events and trade
and all those other goodies that simply cannot be all that easy to implement, include them in this modding suite and release them to the community. Develop the capability for factions, for example, and release that out into the wild. Do the same with all the other features. Simply put, allow people to make their own worlds with their own stories, and add the features that you release to their own mods as you release them. Not only is that likely to attract a metric ton of pre-sales (and additional funding) as people get in on the ground floor and start building things, but by the time the game proper actually launches, you'll already have a ton of additional content that the community will be clamoring for.
Your universe and story that you're writing and planning on implementing are likely going to be a true gem here, but realistically having more content before you release it will allow you to polish it for a longer period of time than if people only have missions to go on until release. In a game like this, a lacklustre developer-created single-player resulting from lack of development time would be a real downer if the community didn't have an accessible, comprehensive suite of tools to make their own fun. Inevitably, if they DO have those things then the release of YOUR single-player campaign and universe can only really add. If it rocks, then people are going to love it and add to it. If it's not so well received, then it won't be a big deal because you can bet a few unknown armchair modders are going to hit it out of the park with their own development.
I hope the tone of my post has been sufficient to convey my excitement for your project, and not sound like a know-it-all haha. It's a concept that I think could really work, so let me know what you think!
Cheers,
-Warkrieg