Nov 4, 2006

Gameplay

How you play the game:
- Travel fast in darkness. Travel slow while shielding vehicles during sunlight. Some vehicles take damage when moving over a certain speed in sunlight.
- Keep vehicles safe, players only have 1 of each vehicle, and these can be destroyed
- Mine minerals from the landscape, and move minerals to central crawler that builds base and launch pads
- Build a landing site for future landings, refueling, and launches
- Possibly have 3 different designs for vehicles that can land and build the base
○ Fast scout - tires take damage when moving in the sun, can turn on sun shield but not move, can repair other vehicles
○ Medium mining barge - can not mine in sunlight, can repair tires for scouts
○ Slow construction crawler - can move without damage in the sun

- Player lands each vehicle from orbit at pseudo-random spots, can switch control between each vehicle (but only operate one at a time)
- Terrain is very pronounced, covered with craters so there are high jumps that can damage vehicles
- A countdown always shows on screen to give the player a sense of urgency


Concepts for immersion:
- 1/6 gravity on each object
- Moon dust - sharp, ruins rubber, clouds of dust hamper visibility, erupts in magnetic clouds when first hit with sun each day
- Shadows - very bright and stark, no grays in shadows - lots of total darkness
- Craters with high crater walls for obstacles
- Two main types of land - black flat Maria, high crumbly white lands
- Micro-meteorites storms can damage vehicles (sun shields might protect, should we build these in vehicle or as buildings you must park in during day time?)


Victory conditions:
- A scoreboard is kept listing the top scorers (should this be online/networked)? Scoreboard possibly always lists what place you are in compared to others on machine
- You start with a million points (or something) and lose points for every second it takes you to build the moon base. Once it's built with enough supplies, you win, and animation of a starship happens
- Destroying two of your vehicles loses the game
- Dying loses the game
- Taking damage to vehicle or person sounds alarms and flashes the screen

4 comments:

theoE said...

I think some of this is too complicated and not needed. Sunlight effects are interested but will game play too much. assume we have technology to get by it.

theoE said...

A slow construction crawler is great.It should be controlled by the player

theoE said...

How about a jet packfor short distances? I think one would work well on the moon.

Unknown said...

Great, I was hoping to get rid of the sunlight effects... they're proving way too hard to program into the game.

For the slow construction crawler, are you thinking that the player should ride it, or remotely control it?

OK, I'll put a jet pack in... but maybe have it only have a limited charge that has to be refueled at the home base, or something.