Doing the hard bits first
Before work on Darkness Falls came to a halt it became evident that there were certain problems that I should have been addressed earlier in the design. Trying to add them in was going to be an up hill struggle. When starting again from scratch with Courier I’ve decided to tackle these thorny issues first.
Procedural Planet Generation - Landing on Planets
Being able to fly down to a planet, admire the scenery and land at a space port was the dream of everyone who played Elite. The two sequels, Frontier and First Encounters, gave this ability and any modern space game should have it too. It can be a tough nut to crack though. Planets are big, really big, so we need to be able to handle things on a large scale. There also has to be land, sea, hills, space ports and little boxes made from ticky-tacky and it all needs to be generated on the fly.
Save Anywhere and Anytime
It is a pet hate of mine and even the big budget modern games do it. The save point. You want to save your game and go do something else but the computer says “No”. You can’t save here, you have to go a designated save point and do it. Arrrrgh. I know why it is done that way but it still annoys me. I want to be able to save the game when it is convenient for me, not for the game.
Social Networking
One of the most frequent emails I get about Elite - The New Kind goes along the lines of “make elite multi user”. There are of course two small problems with that, (a) I can’t touch Elite because of copyright, (b) it would take pots and pots of money to make a proper multi-user version of Elite. So I’ll wish Frontier Developments the best of luck with that one. However, some kind of social networking on a small scale may be possible with Courier. I’ll certainly take a look at it, no promises though.
Creating Assets
For a game to hold the player’s attention a reasonable amount of in game assets are required. Assets are the posh name for the space ships, space stations, buildings etc. Creating them takes time and skill. They also have to be created in special ways to make them work within the game. The temptation is to fire up a 3D modeling package, create a pretty looking ship and stick it in the game. In reality things get a bit more complicated. Besides, if we have a huge galaxy to explore, who wants to see the same few (even hundred) ships pop up?
Right now I’m working on the planets. Finding the best ways to create them, render them and allow the player to fly around them. Once I have a reasonable planet generator running I’ll make a download available to test and play with.