This was previously seen in my megathread, but with new rules in place, I'll have to split it apart to better keep the forums organized. (It's much better this way anyway, although I'll have to make a separate thread in most of the suggestion sections.)For sake of ease, once I get the other threads up, I'll conveniently link them. Some of my suggestions are finely linked. Such as Procedural generation as a mechanic, and then how it could apply to weapons, in a weapons thread. All of these threads will be updated quite often, as I spend most of my work day fantasizing of things that would be awesome to have in the game. This color scheme is to provide a clear way to distinguish ideas from one another, and the bolded white text has been proven to draw your eyes to the main focal point of that idea. (I guess.)This is all temporary until I get spoilers, if ever.Without further ado, I present to you my tons of game mechanics ideas. I'll post handy update notes as I do major updates, too. It looks like the game will be intense, so I suggest they put an emphasis on mobility. Perhaps a sprint bar, or something. You'll be able to move much faster, obviously. If sprinting and you push a certain key, your character could do a dodge roll in the direction you push. This would consume a chunk of the sprint (Stamina?) bar. This allows you to get out of tight spots or dodge sudden attacks, since the combat in this game isn't "I touch you and you get hurt" but more along the lines of actual attacking involved. Jumping while sprinting allows for a longer jump, but costs Sprint/Stamina, too. (Regular jumping will NOT consume this bar.) It's been being said for a while, but I hope they decide to implement a multi-tabbed inventory. Having Equips on one tab, consumables on another, Blocks on another, and Misc on another would greatly help organizing things. I see no flaw for having multi-tabbed inventory, but I realize it's not like the Devs can snap their fingers and make things happen. I hope they do add SOME kind of scaling, if playing with multiple players. An increase rate of enemy spawns for one. Or perhaps, if you're in the general area, (1-3 screens away) as another player, the enemy stats are increased every so slightly. I'd play exclusively with one of my girlfriends, so I want a fresh challenge even though I have 2 extra hands. I want to be able to dress up my crew of NPCs, so I could feel like they're an actual crew, instead of a random assortment of NPCs. it would be lovely for Roleplaying. Even taking it one step further and allowing us to rename NPCs, as well. I don't have an idea how this system can be integrated, but I imagine it would help a lot for RPers. If money/currency is going to be a large part of the game, I suggest a pseudo-fluctuating economy. On any given day, X items become twice as valuable as normal while Y items become half as valuable. Or on a server, a false supply/demand set up. If the player uses this NPC, and buys 1000 Apples, the demand becomes high while the supply becomes low, thusly, the prices of apples goes up across the server. I think this should be settable on server creation, and managable by server commands, just in case somebody tries to grief by pumping illegitimate items into the economy. More along this line, I'm all for having money sinks in the game. From silly things like Stylist/Barber NPCs to change your hairstyle, to shops that sell high class decorations. "Useless" things that would be fun to spend money on, but not necessarily something that'd make a huge impact on gameplay. Customizing your ship/vehicles would be a prime example of an effective money sink. You should know by now, but if we're going to bother having multiplayer, we're going to need to have advanced server support. If we have the above idea for a more in-depth economy, we'll need some commands to deal with it. We should have anti-grief measures built right into the game, too. The ability to set player owned regions (That region able to be as big as a planet, if the multiplayer supports members on a server being able to travel to different planets within the server) would be extremely handy, too. /kick, /ban, /teleport would be just a few very basic commands. We shouldn't have to download outside server mods just to manage a decent server. Unless that outside server program is made by your team as well. Perhaps a dedicated server where one can see the relative positions of players, and use commands directly from within it While above are basic commands, how about anti-griefing tools and utility commands. The ability to set areas, regions, (or even whole WORLDS) as ownership to a specific person or group. Imagine it: Terraria had PVP on one map. Guild Wars 2 has World PVP encompassing tons of areas. Starbound could have GALAXY wide PVP. One team can start at planet A, and have to conquer planets all the way to, and including, the enemy start planet. (Think Control/Capture points in TF2. You can't skip one, you have to go linearly.) I really hope most information is stored serverside. It'd be awesome for things like roleplaying servers, where creators can custom-tailor their quests and such, so all who join can go through the custom content. With such a flourishing game in terms of content, it becomes necessary to have a more stable server system. Serverside information will eliminate the need for "Create a new character to experience this map" and etc. Ideally, server owners could customize what items a new player on their server would have, as well. Proficiencies and Perks. The game reminds me of if Terraria and Fallout had an adorable little kid, that was raised by Borderlands. Terraria was more of a sandbox game, while this one looks admittedly more like an Adventure/Sandbox. I'd like it, personally, if using one type of weapon repeatedly would eventually gain you progress in a weapon-type specific proficiency. For example: If the only thing you ever used was a sword, eventually you would hit proficiency one. From this, we get two possibilities. One: It could do nothing, but measure your preferred weapon types. Or, perhaps reaching certain proficiency levels could unlock benefits. Minor, but still benefits. Perhaps killing 200 enemies with a melee weapon, is what it would take to reach level 1. Reaching it could give a very subtle 3% melee weapon swing speed. (Or instead of just melee weapons, each type of melee weapon could have their own proficiency.) Perks would be slightly different. Perhaps perks would only exist as special augmenting items. Perhaps you can choose 3 perks on start (Or more, depending on how many perks there'd be.) You could change them at any time from an NPC, so long as you're willing to spend the money to do it. Here could be a few examples of perks. As you can see, some of them can boost a stat, others can boost your abilities, some give something good for taking something away. Having to pay to change perks can also act as a money sink, too. (If enough people like this idea, I'll flesh it out with more perks) Strongarm: Years of practice have fine tuned your throwing arm. All thrown objects will travel 10% faster and 10% farther. Heavy Hitter: Your melee weapons swing 10% slower, but do 15% more damage. Ready for Winter: You have less starting energy but more starting HP. So, we have Asteroids for structured PVP, right? Well, what if we made an Asteroid Belt destination, where PVP and Minigames of sorts can be held. Below are some gamemodes that could be featured. (However, I propose that in fairness, and to better accomodate a wider array of minigames, your outside inventory cannot be used while in this destination. Also, whatever you gain in this asteroid belt cannot be taken off of it, sans special prizes.) For example, we could incorporate a highly thought out survival mode. Each monster can be given a "Value." Say slimes are 1 points. Let's say the first wave of Survival is 50 points worth of monsters. The game would then choose any type of monster (That we could categorize into lists for limiting) as long as the total value of those monsters ended up to 50. Wave 2 could then be 55 points. Every 5th wave could have a miniboss thrown in, every 10th, a full fledged boss. After every boss/10th wave, the arena could change. The "Arenas" would just be planets that are temporary and created upon playing Survival, deleted afterwards. I don't know how valuable pixels are, but for Survival, killing a creature could give all participating players a number of pixels that they could use to buy/upgrade their weapons/armor/items. If a slime gives you 50 pixels, it'd give 2 players 25 pixels, and 5 players 10 pixels each. Thus would be an archaic, but effective, way to balance it for multiple players. Now, for PVP modes, let's have a TF2 knockoff PVP mode. I'm not going to beat around the bush and say it's a "Class based" PVP mode where "Each class has their own unique ability, weapons, and playstyle." I'm going to come right out and tell you what 75% of this community wants. They want a TF2 game mode. Each class has their own loadout, perhaps serverside support can track players' stats and be able to give them unlocks mimicking TF2, too. We could have regular Team Deathmatch, Regular free for all. But then we could have our "Class based" TDM, and "Class based" FFA. How about some minigames? How about Sumo-wrestling style matches? 2 (Or more) people on platforms above an arena, with harmless weapons. (Other than the fact that these weapons have much stronger knockback than normal.) Last man standing wins. Winner is he who wins X rounds. Dodgeball? I love dodgeball. Let's throw 1-hit killing projectiles at the other team. But give us a special ability/item that allows us to "catch" said ball if we time it right. (It can be masked as a shield that can only be raised for half a second at a time, with a 2 or so second cooldown on usage.) There's vehicles, right? Then we'd be crazy not to have races. Just give us the support for waypoints, and we'll make some races. Not sure if vehicles can over lap each other or not, which would obviously play a very important role in determining how this would work. Why should a fire slime take the same damage from a flamethrower as it does from a water rifle? Terraria had a major drawback (Wasn't TOO severe though.) Every type of weapon had quite the definitive top-tier weapon. Why would someone choose an adamantite sword over a Hallowed sword? With Damage types and resistance, even if you had the God-Water-Sword-of-Aquatic-Prowess-and-Epicness, it wouldn't do crap to a Shark, which is water elemented. This forces you to kill it another way. The downsides to this system are things can get quite difficult unless you have multiple types of weapons available. (Which can be an upside if you like a challenge.) The standard calculation would be...(For all intents and purposes, let's use fire and water) Water is strong against fire. So using a water weapon against a fire creature is +25% damage. Fire on Water, is -25%. Now, for Lightning and Rock/Earth (Since, unless wet, or with metal particles, they won't conduct electricity) theoretically electricity/Lightning elemented attacks shouldn't affect Rock/Earth at all. That's a bit too much, so for polar opposites like that, we could make it -50% damage, or even -25%. Keeping it simple. Now, for a list of elements/damage types. Elemental, first off. Fire, Water, Cold, Electricity, Air, Earth, Poison, Metal, (Let me know if I missed any.) These types can also be used on monsters/enemies, to give them a typing. This may, or may not, be suitable for the game. Then we have Physical: Blunt, Piercing, Slashing, and Ranged. These can't be applied to enemies, only the damage they do. Say, a turtle enemy would be more vulnerable to blunt damage from a hammer, than piercing damage from a rapier. Then, we have Holy, Dark, and Immaterial. These can be applied, if implemented, to monsters too. (I somewhat doubt we'd see any enemies that can be appropriately typed to these "elements" so to speak. Holy would assume angels or other beings of divinity, Dark would be demons and such. Immaterial would be ghosts, holograms, or the like.) Another advantage to having damage types, is having items that can boost the damage of a certain damage type, in order to make even better "Builds" so to speak. Like the emblems of Terraria. (This will be discussed, eventually, in my Gear/Item thread.) Status Effects: While having procedural generation in weapons, I'm almost sure we'll have status effects too. Upon procedural generation, a weapon might be able to inflict a status ailment. I'll list some status effects which I think can be in the game. I envision monsters able to inflict most of these statuses. However, I'd love it if you could inflict these statuses to others if you used poisons. Craftable using whatever ingredients, you could poison your weapons/bullets. Blind: Assuming accuracy is in the game, blind will lower it. Your projectiles will sway off course a little bit. Inept: Somewhat like a blind for melee weapons. Your melee attacks, even if in appropriate range, have a chance to miss. (Can probably just be combined with blind) Exhausted: Bit of a play on words. Your "Energy" (Assuming it recharges over time) won't recharge naturally. Can still be recharged with energy-restoring potions. Burning: Damage over time, extinguished by water. Poison: Damage over time (Slower than fire) Weakness: Do less damage with melee attacks Rigor Mortis: Cannot block OR Decreased block effectiveness. Cursed: Decreased healing effectiveness (25% less?) Slow: Slows movement speed. Well, we have debuffs, so let's get some buffs going too. I think they could be applied by certain items/weapons on a certain chance, as well as via buff syringes/potions or the equivalent. Eagle-Eye: Basically increases accuracy. Swiftness: Increases move speed Fury: Increases attack speed Might: Increases attack damage Bastion: Increased block effectiveness (or "White HP?") Regen: Steadily regenerating HP Energized: Increased energy regen Ward: Increased resistance to status ailments Faith: Increased Healing effectiveness I'll update these as I think of more. Items/Weapons might be able to inflict debuffs/buffs naturally. For example, that armor piece you just found in a chest could actually grant HP regen at a low chance if your HP falls below X% Or that penetrating rifle can cause rigor mortis at a 10% chance, or with a crit.
Spriiiiint. I like it. And the fluctuating economy would be amazing. As well as a few pvp ideas. I also like the ideas of perks, and would suggest that, as another money sink, you could change these perks using a little cash.
Well I must say, that is quite a compilation you got there. I agree with every point stated and would especially emphasize the progression system (perk-style, or whatever), and the minigames you suggested. Dodge-ball, races, etc... would really be awesome to see, there could be universal tournaments. I don't really have much to say as I believe everything has been stated correctly, so... good luck with these, and I really hope the devs will pay attention
I only like a few of them, the others are useless. The ones I don't like are: Galaxy PVP All your asteroids ideas, but survival would be pretty cool on a planet. Perks/Proffs Races are pretty needed though, it would suck to only be humans.
So my ideas are useless but you provide no actual feedback? /irony Like why having a large, PVP battle that takes place over many planets is useless. Or why having fun minigames that eventually people are going to create anyway useless. And why character progression is going to be useless. (Though perks are basically confirmed not to be in the game, but you can have gear that acts as perks, basically. It's already been stated that it'll be more gear-based progression anyway.) I recommend you read the thread better next time. If you read it closely, you'd know that I was NOT talking about Races as in species. But racing as in vehicles.
I really enjoy the idea of having a sprint/dodge option, as mentioned in an earlier thread, being able to not only block attacks with shields but dodge attacks with a timed left/right + down (for a roll) or left/right + up (for a tumble) would exponentially increase PC survival, it would also allow Devs to be more risky with creating harder mobs and enemies. Ok, so maybe, when you input the commands above, or something similar, your character will perform that action, within the second that you perform the action, you have a fraction of it that will make attacks simply miss you. If the fight becomes too hairy, then double tapping left or right (A or D on WASD) will allow the PC to sprint for an allotted amount of time, or until the energy bar depletes. so inputs can be as shown. Double tap D or A and holding it initiates sprint - begins sprint, double speed for 5 seconds or so, and can be modified by tech Double tap D or A + S is roll/ slide/ duck slide - not as far dodge distance, but take less energy to do, dodge time .25 seconds Double tap D or A + W is back spring/ back tumble/ cartwheel - further dodge distance, but takes more energy to do, dodge time .25 seconds I actually wouldn't mind seeing it. Though a different system than what Terraria and Minecraft have for inventory management will need some work. Maybe they could implement a simple weight system? Ya, we might get to see this one, but it'd definitely be nice. They should be adding scaling. Hopefully they won't be so upfront about it though. Small changes like damage increase or something. Something to make teamwork a must. I do not want a 2D Bethesda game. As someone who is a fan of customization, I'm actually not believing I'm saying this but... I don't know if I want the NPCs to be customizable. Since this is a heavily story based game, as Tiy and them put it, there's going to be emphasis on character development, at least so I hope. So you can probably see where I'm coming from when I say I don't want characters to be interchangeable on a whim. In fact I think it'd be better to leave them as they are, they can develop and become actual beings in a story being driven by you, not just dress up dolls. If they do not plan on giving NPCs a whole lot of character, then ya sure, let them be mannequins to dress up. Otherwise, give them their own styles and personality. I totally agree with the economy, even more so if this game ends up being primarily user driven. Though I'd only care to see it if the game ends up getting huge support and we end up giving them the means to create nation and international servers that can hold many many people at once. The money sinks is also a great idea, because it can drive away the "rupee syndrome", where money just becomes a big number at the top left of your screen, that just gets bigger. I do hope that if it's to become as big as minecraft that they'lll add server support, and such. I ALSO agree with the Galaxy wide PVP thing, and was stated and liked before in an earlier thread. The title could use some work, but I really hope something like that gets implemented if, again, the game gets ALOT of support and the team actually makes the large servers that can host multiple networks. If this could be implemented, I think it would work REALLY well with my idea in an earlier thread. http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/deteriorating-skills.2394/ Feats, Perks, and skills could all develop and degrade based on how much use it's put through, ushering in a countless assortment of abilities and modifiers that a PC can get for applying them. As much as I'd really LOVE to see this, I do not think none of it will be put into the game. Mainly because it was already stated that Tiy was NOT going to put in a "character stat sheet". All abilities and skills will be granted through acquisition of tech, and equipment. Give competitive players more reasons to keep supporting and playing the game. I really like it. I can see games like Minecraft's spleef be implemented into this on a 2D scale. I support this 100% If Final Fantasy has ever taught me anything in games, there is ALWAYS a weakness to every combat situation that can be exploited, either by you or by your enemy against you. I'd love to see that same tactical emergence reach Starbound, 100% acceptance of this idea.
I'll be updating this on Friday with several more mini-games ideas, some new mechanics, and will add on to Damage types. Also, thanks to Dasaki for the in-depth feedback. It's always good to see.
As far as damage types, I can agree with your elements. I also agree with weapons. I do not, however, support the whole Holy, and Dark pseudo elements, purely because I don't really like it when games try to make good and evil clearly defined. Immaterial would apply well to phasing enemies, and I have seen spectral/gaseous enemies used in sci-fi quite well. However, this would be more a physical (metaphysical?) attribute. Additionally, I must ask: what would 'basic' attacks classify? Would unaligned weapons strike for [no attribute]-type damage? And what about energy weapons? Would they hit for electricity and/or fire damage, or also for [no attribute]-type damage? Minigames are inevitable- if Starbound allows for premade games, it could be nice, but might be tough to apply in-game. Not that I care much about PvP- I'm more into co-op (though with my buds and their shenanigans, that can be tough). Economy is a must, money sinks are something I like. BTW, I agree with Dasaki on the whole 'weight' deal. Also, I would like to see a more fluid inventory system.
For most of these I ideas, I would not care if they implement them or not. I am less keen on the perks idea and at best this would be done by using gear that would give these specific perks. Though I do think that strengths and weaknesses should be implemented and I agree with the arguments you made for it.
Well, maybe instead of it being named holy, it could be called... light, i suppose. But then you would be combating dark with a flashlight. Hmm. Well, i wouldn't mind fighting off some dark monsters like that.
I think I can agree to this as a whole. The idea with the scaling could probably help the PVE quite a bit since it tends to get quite dull in other games when you add more players. Obviously you could also just scale up the mobs Hitpoints+attacks etc. since it can be annoying/break immersion if you have a constant flow of weak enemies just because you are several players in the same place, it would probably be best to scale everything. Regarding the economy suggestion, I think it's a great idea, the more you can influence the better. The very best would in my opinion be if the economy could be 100% player driven, though I can see the problems with this on smaller servers. Like you said, If there's anything that we actually Need then it's Advanced servers. Regarding the server issue, I also hope that the game won't save the characters locally on the computer like Terraria. I think that the Characters should be saved on the servers to prevent cheating/griefing and to give the server admins more power. This is basically what you wrote I just wanted to say it again. As for perks I think utility buffs are best, like lets say "15% increased ammo" for example or "10% less selfdamage", I somehow feel that these perks gives you an edge but they don't give you flat out more power which results in newbies being less weak in comparison, also I think these kind of buffs promotes more "skill based" play compared to just having the best gear and best perks. Just a side note regarding the "damage types" part. I would be very puzzled if there weren't different damage types. Though I don't think there's any point in naming different types, they will most likely spring out of the weapons/mobs during making of them. Either way, time to sleep now
After a re-read of this post, I've found a notable "element" that's missing. Ice/cold. Which could also add a secondary mechanic of freezing certain liquids in game. =3
