I’ve been continuing to work on Beyond the Chiron Gate, and I think it’s starting to come together. There’s still a lot of work to do, but I’m reaching the point where the system is working how I want it and most of the remaining work is adding content.
Traits
The biggest under-the-hood change I’ve made is to add a unified system of traits which stores most information about game entities. Planets, anomalies, star systems, crew members, and the ship all now have traits, and are primarily defined by what traits they have. Different types of thing have different sets of traits, but the trait system for all of them works the same way.
Planets, anomalies, and events
I’ve reworked planets and stars to use the new trait system. Anomalies are now entities with their own sets of traits, rather than every anomaly of the same type being identical. Right now there aren’t very many possible anomaly traits so anomalies are kind of same-y, but eventually this system will lead to a lot more variety.
Events now trigger based on traits, and there’s no longer a one-to-one correspondence between a planet’s features or anomalies and which events it can trigger. In the previous version, a planet might have the “Dust Storms” anomaly, which would trigger the “Dust Storm” event when you landed on the planet. Now, the same planet might have the “Dust” and “Strong Winds” traits, which means that one of the possible events it can trigger is “Dust Storms”, but it can also trigger events based on just “Dust” or just “Strong Winds” or any combination of other traits it has. Triggering events based on trait combinations will lead to a lot more flexibility.
Crew members
Rather than each crew member having a score in each skill, I’ve moved to a class-and-level system where each crew member has a level and one speciality, plus one or more other traits. I thought that the skill score system was more flexible and realistic, but actually I think it would lead to players aiming for blandly well-balanced crews. Having to choose which character classes to take (you have four crew slots and there are six character classes) leads to starker and (I think) more interesting choices.
I’ve added a Medic specialisation and renamed Linguist to Xenologist, so the six specialisations are:
- Pilot
- Engineer
- Medic
- Planetary Scientist
- Biologist
- Xenologist
Currently, only the Pilot, Engineer and Planetary Scientist do anything. As I add more content I’ll add uses for the Biologist and Xenologist, and I’m still thinking about the injury system and what exactly the Medic will do.
I quite like the breakdown of three “science” specialisations and three “practical” ones (for want of a better term, since the science skills also have practical uses). Regarding the science skills, my intention is that Planetary Science will have a lot of uses but generally not give much reward, whereas Xenology will only occasionally be useful but when it is will lead to interesting events and large rewards, and Biology will be somewhere in-between.
Crew members now gain XP, and level up when they reach certain thresholds. Leveling up increases the chance of success when they attempt a task using their specialisation. Crew members also have traits in addition to their specialisation, although I haven’t added very many traits yet.
Finally, crew members are now randomly generated at the start of the game (with random names) rather than being the same each time.
Chiron Base and ship upgrades
I’ve added the ability to return to Chiron Base between star systems, and a very basic system for upgrading the ship while you’re there. There are currently two ship upgrades, one of which allows you to harvest fuel from some gas giants and one of which lets you repair armour at some asteroids. Later on I’ll be able to add more ship upgrades to the system.
Random destinations
When you depart from Chiron Base, you’ll now go to a random star system; you can’t choose your destination, and you can’t return to systems you’ve visited before. I’m making this change for two reasons. Firstly, I want the game to be about exploring new space rather than visiting the same planets any time you get new ship upgrades or higher stats. Secondly, it’s for performance reasons: Twine isn’t very efficient when storing lots of data, and I was finding performance started to suffer if the game remembered more than about 10 systems. This way, there’s no limit to how long a game can go on for.
That’s all for now. I don’t have any release date for Chiron Gate besides “when it’s done”, but I’m continuing to steadily work on it.