How I would design a game like Starbound

I want a sequel to pong.

 

Oh boy! Well, if you're actually interested, I have plenty of recommendations.
Get and go through this book! Each tutorial won't take long at all and it'll teach you the basics. In a weekend you'll've built a side scroller, asteroid clone, and tanks clone.
It has all the information for getting the programs used for making the programs. And it's in the same language as Terraria was built in!!!

Or pirate it. I'm a forum-goer, not a cop.

 

Thanks. This will be a great start. I've bookmarked it, and I'll be looking into it. I've actually been reading a bit of this, but I haven't dove into it yet. Everyone seems to say Python is somewhere good to start. Maybe I'll make a thread elsewhere specifically focused towards good resources to learn to program. Of course, from what I'm gathering, the best way to learn is just to do it.

 

I'd definitely say you have some money if you can spend 1,000 dollars on Starbound. Unless there is another way to get that forum badge that I'm not aware of.

 

I'm not rich yet, by any means. But I will in all likelihood be reasonably well off in a few years, if I hang onto my paychecks. I'm in a good job market, to put it bluntly.

As for the grand, I just have few things to spend my money on right now. Why not put it to something I love? Other people invest in cars, guns, sports, drugs, etc, or a multitude of the above. I invest in art. Its really no different, the way I see it (except the feeling of supporting something bigger than yourself could be seen as an appreciating asset, as opposed to the depreciating assets other people clamber for).

 

Oh, I don't blame you. I think investing in the future of anything is a worthy goal, it's just that I'm not in the position to spend that much. If I had the money to invest, I would.

 

These are the reasons I wanted to commit suicide the other day.

 

It's easy to spout ideas. It's making them a reality that is the real challenge

 

You could do a kickstarter and show people you're genuinely interested in the project. IMO there are aesthetic things which Starbound lacks which are really important.

Permanent Schematics. You'd need to be able to have your character find a permanent schematic and then make it so you need to find ingredients required in the schematic to be able to build stuff. This stuff you build doesn't have to be weapons. You could, for example, build mini pets which are robots in nature. If you wanted to make it fun, add an auction styled set up where players across all different servers can auction their stuff and buy it from other people. Make extremely, completely hard to find schematics which for instance let you build a Dragon robot mini pet, then allow players to be able to trade/auction these mini pets. The players who actually took the time to get the schematic/the rare ingredients would be able to give other players something they cannot make for themselves and at the same time have a source of income. I did this in World of Warcraft with Li'l Smoky and Mechanical Bombling and I generally made about 10 thousand gold every week for a good long while until people were no longer interested.

Make the currency difficult to obtain. You don't want to throw gold coins at everyone because then it'd be boring. You'd want, for instance, new players to be able to get copper coins. These coins would buy the lowest level of stuff. Then when you get to a higher tier, silver, then gold, then platinum. Terraria does this and you want to make sure that players REALLY have to work for their money. That way, when you actually get something that's worth a LOT of gold, you really feel it. It feels important. You want your players to feel rewarded for achievements because that's essentially what a video game is at its core. Metroid was so successful because they found a way to make boring missile expansions make you feel like you found the holy grail.

You want there to be specific loot pools. There was a discussion on another thread about Starbound how they just make any kind of loot appear in any kind of chest. It was really haphazard and done without attention to detail. You'll want to have very specific loot pools and instances. Like, in example, if you wanted to have a dungeon of, say, water and you wanted to be able to have a dungeon where you have to get scuba gear and swim and you want to be able to dive deep for your treasures. Make a loot pool SPECIFICALLY for this type of dungeon where you get maybe one of ten of a set (with one item being amazingly rare, 3 items being extremely rare, 4 items being uncommon and 2 items being incredibly common,) then make sure that it ONLY spawns in this type of instance. Do that a bunch of times instead of making a single loot pool for the entire world gen and making it so that nothing feels special. You'll want certain items to make a sound, too. The amazingly rare item? When you loot it, make it make a fanfare. This really is important. When an item drops off of an enemy, and you'll want at least two items to drop from every enemy uniquely, make it so there's a specific 'happy' sound. A sound which makes you feel like you've accomplished something. It can be a blip or a bleep, just make sure it's a happy blip or a bleep. Starbound does NOT discern the sounds of a good item as opposed to a cheap item (like literally dirt,) and this has detrimented people's play experience.

I'd strongly suggest different professions. Again, think of World of Warcraft. Some people can be blacksmiths, some people can be thieves which specialize in equipment which makes them faster/breaks into doors or chests. Some people can be enchanters while other people can be tailors or leather workers. Some people can even be inventors/tinkerers/engineers, which build the aforementioned mini pets (as well as gadgets.) If you're going to make a game, make it immersive -- both in what you see and what you can do. I've been playing this game called Castlevania Harmony of Despair and it's been really fun. Every character has a completely different play style except for a couple, and it makes replaying the game fun. You want to have a lot of different diversity so you have replayability, because ANY game manufacturer can tell you that replayability is the key aspect to a good game. You want people to not just play it once, beat it, be done with it. You want them to keep playing it over and over for a lot of various reasons. A video game should NEVER be a single play experience. It should be a replayability experience. This is done by making genuinely different play experiences for multiple characters, or at least character types (like professions.)

You never want something in a game to be single use, unless it's a consumable like a potion or a bomb or something. You want to be able to have reusability. Dust - an Elysian Tail was an excellent game, but the only thing which really bothered me was that you'd get a schematic and it was one use. You never want it to be one use because people like the idea of achievement. They want to say "I have completed _________" If you take away the experience of completion or achievement, or take away the sensation of having achieved that completion or achievement, you have successfully ruined the in-game experience for the player and that will make them resent the game in question.

I actually have the intention to create an MMO someday, and I am actually an IRL author (or an aspiring one anyway,) and I want to make an all out MMORPG based on my second novel. These are all things which, growing up, I have seen not just in myself but in others. World of Warcraft is so successful because of the many little aesthetic things. ANY game which takes so much of your time, but gives you so little in return, is only going to be seen as a boring game. Add as many little aesthetic details as you can, and if you can't think of any, find/hire people who are able to give you good ideas that you normally couldn't think of. One of the biggest reasons so many recent games are terrible is because there's not an idea/content team, and they usually lack a project coordinator. It isn't all just throwing programmers at your game and making it, it's like....think of like you were creating a living body. What would you do? First you get your skeleton, which is the structure of your idea. Then you add the meat, the organs, the sinew and the musculature -- this is the driving force behind your game. The very last thing you want is the skin of your game, which is the polish and the looks. It's all necessary, but take it in steps. Hope this helped.