Welcome to the forums Donnysobonny.

Have to admit that I am a single player myself so I don't have any experience with these online games, but the first thing I would say and you may have done this already is check out your competition as their are a number of these game already.

Second and as you say you will need some sort of unique selling point and having a big galaxy is all very fine but what really counts is what you have in it for the player to find achieve ect, so big universe equals lots of content.

Don't think there would be any problems with going 2D on the graphics.

Hey PINBACK,

Thanks for the feedback.

Do you mind me asking, have you tried these types of games and didn't like them, or are you just not into online gaming? It would be great to know what keeps you in your single-player games, maybe there's something there that the online space mmo genre haven't offered to you yet?

Yeah, regarding your suggestion to try out games, that's pretty much the reason I am here today writing this. I've been playing these types of games since I can remember, playing these types of games for as long as I have I feel I am obliged to say that there is something missing.

See, I'm maybe a dreamer, but at the end of the day I like to remember that we are all a very small part of something so big that we cannot even begin to understand it. When we want to feel this way, where do we look? To the stars in the only forms we possibly can right now: TV shows, films, games and our own imagination.

What I love most about these types of things is seeing how someone sees the universe in their own mind. Take battlestar gallactica (the series) for example. The whole story is an incredible view on how the creator sees how life would be if we were to amass to the stars. No boundaries, no limits, just pure - anything goes - space.

I maybe focused a little too much on the infinite/persistent model that I have already created, but the above is what I want to bring to the scifi online gaming community. A game that allows you to write the stories, that allows you to travel beyond boundaries. The infinite/persistent model simply helps to create the effect of vastness. It is most certainly not what I would consider to be a major selling point.

For the past few days now i've been drafting up some of the more solid ideas that i've had over the years about what I would personally love to see in this game. My focus is heavily on players controlling how the game works, with equal amounts of focus on balance: making sure that everyone can play the game (new and old) without worrying about the big guys ruining their fun. I'm pretty darn confident that what I've got so far are the foundations for something which could appeal to many in terms of the depth of the game and it's accessibility. My only fear, as stated initially, I really don't want to make a game that only I or a select few will enjoy. As much as I know you cannot satisfy everyone, I'd like to hit as many soft spots as possible.

Regarding the 2d idea. I actually initially did do the first protos entirely in 2d. I am a massive fan of how SPAZ looks and plays. However, I really struggled to get the sort of scale that's needed in a game like this. For example, if you've played the little movement demo I posted in my previous post, the ship you're flying is pretty realistic in terms of size, speed and manouverability for what I would imagine the smallest of ships play like. The biggest of ships (planned to be called Battleships, surprise surprise!) would be almost a thousand times bigger than the ships you're playing. Literally to the point that if you were piloting a Battleship, and you zoom all the way out, you wont be able to see the small ships at all, and to them you will be this giant noisey thing taking up half of their screen when they are zoomed in.

Scale like that is really hard to do in 2d. Although, if enough people were to suggest that the game should be in 2d, I would certainly consider it.

Keep the suggestions coming guys. Thanks again for the suggestions PINBACK.

No land line is what is keeping from trying out any of the on line games although I may get some thing sorted in order to have a go at Star Citizen when it come out but as I said before I do prefer  single player games.

A few suggestions, which I also often hear from friends:

- Deep character customization. Your character isn't the metal hull you're flying, but give players the experience of their character being really important. Top-down view might limit the ingame rendering of it, but I myself have been a fervent EVE player for 5 years by now, but slowly getting burnt out. Why? The game is starting to lack deep social interactions more and more and is turning into a big mess of backstabbing.

- If the universe is gonna be so enormously big, give players the chance to play the game in a singleplayer-esque way just by moving to a very remote corner of the universe where no one is nearby. In that way, you cater to not only the MMO crowd, but can also make people who generally play COOP and singleplayer games enjoy the game a lot.

Hey robske,

Apologies for the lateness of this reply, I've been crazily busy the past few days.

Some really interesting suggestions from yourself. I've also been an Eve player (very on-and-off) for roughly the same amount of time as yourself. I 100% agree personally with your concerns regarding immersion and feel that Eve really does lack it. I usually play the game for a while and end up feeling that i'm literally playing as a lifeless ship, rather than as a pilot of it.

In response to your first suggestion, I can talk about two things. Firstly, there's an IDEA (something which hasn't even entered a concepting stage) and an approved concept (something which is very likely to be in the initial launch). So, the idea:

I've talked very little about the features of the game so far, for obvious reasons, however one thing that will be pretty key about the game is the ability for players (or more so "Colonies", this game's version of corporations) to capture planets and then build epic space stations on their captured planets. By "space stations", I am not referring to one giant object like you see in Eve. Players will initially place down a control point on a planet before they can claim it as their own. Once the control point has been successfully built, they can then start building structures joining onto the control point and other structures. (structures are buildings which each have a unique purpose, such as building a specific type of weaponry; setting up a trade post; refining things you don't need etc). Structures will be build in a grid-like fashion, where you must build a factory to join onto another structure. Visually, it will look as if every structure is connected by walk-ways. This is the opposite in comparison to games like the X series where factories are independant from each other, and require you to dock at them individually.

What the above COULD potentially allow for (again we're talking about the IDEA here) is the ability to walk around the station and access the individual structures that way (this would be optional so that players that don't need this level of immersion could simply use the station menu to access all of the structures from one location). Players would dock using the docking bay (a structure built by the station manager in order to allow players to dock on the station) and could then walk around on it.

So why is this an idea and not an approved concept?

Well, I am not interested in making a bad, or even an average game here. I am only willing to invest my free time into making something that I feel the community has been missing out on for a long time, something awesome. Every concept that i've approved to be a part of the game has gone through countless hours of me putting myself into a quite space where I can do nothing but think about the concept from every possibly angle and make sure that it comes into the game at a very high quality.

For example, if the station walking idea were to be a concept in the game, the transition between space and the station would need to be seamless. No loading screens, no camera jumping from one position to another. It would need to be that your camera zooms in so that you can see the ship inside the docking bay, it then moves your ship into a sort of "parking space" in the bay, and your character steps out while your camera zooms into a third person view, during this time you could access the station menu at any time instead of having to actually play immersively. There would also need to be glass windows on some of the structures so that you could see exactly what is going on outside of the station.

This is the only sort of quality that I want to put into this game.

There would be a secondary option to have the station walking as top-down too. However, I would be massively against using something like an effect where it makes the roof of the station transparent so you can see yourself walking around in it, because that doesn't really help to provide the feeling that you are inside the station. Potentially it could be made that the camera zooms right in to be underneath the roof, but then the scale of the stations would need to be huge which means walking around them would then be tedious.

So, the way I see it for something like this, when also considering that the problem we're talking about (the immersion issue with Eve) dont seem to be a major issue with the majority of it's players, this to me feels much more like a post release concept. No doubt you are cringing right now at the words "post release", because what tends to happen when something is pushed to post release, it can often be ignored entirely. I don't plan to ignore this idea however.

So, to sum up, personally I would love to see this concept approved for the initial release, however it would be a real ball-buster to get right. With that being said, if enough people show interest for the idea, I will be happy to work my absolute ass off to make sure that this feature appears in the initial launch.

I mentioned an approved concept.

One of the more end-game/awesome things about this game is going to be scale. You've watched battlestar gallactica. No doubt you've sat there with your nerd-chubby every time one of their epic space stand-offs happen. No? Just me?

This game will have a system which allows for battles on this sort of a scale. I can't really talk about all of it right now, but I can tell you about the Battleships!

Battleships will be the second biggest ship in the game, and biggest ship that you can use in solicited space (solicited space will be sort-of similar to hi-sec, but again, players control everything). If you've played the movement demo, that ship is what would be classed as a fighter. Fast, manouverable, limited firepower but can dodge almost anything.

Battleships will be almost 1000 times bigger than a fighter ship. The most awesome thing about battleships is they are effectively mobile space stations. Players can dock on them, use the turrets, repair their ships, replenish fuel and ammo etc etc. The battleship can hold FIFTY fighter ships. Yeah... so you imagine teaming up with your colony to raid another colony's planet. Getting a battleship kitted up, 50 fighters all docked up inside. You land on the planet and launch 50 fighter ships?

This level of immersion where you have ships that play a much deeper role than simply being your weapon is really important to me. So this is a concept that has already gone through some minor testing and will most certainly be featured.

Okay, so, moving onto your second suggestion.

To an excent, single player possibilities do exist in the current concepting, however possibly not quite in the depth that you're suggesting. I'll go over what I mean and you can let me know if you think this would satisfy the want for some sort of single player gameplay.

So, I've touched on colonies and solicited space. To give you a bit more of an idea of how these will work, solicited space is space that has been deemed "safe" enough to colonise. Unsolicited space is space that has been deemed too dangerous.

In solicited space, there are laws which you are asked to abide by (you can refuse to do so, which will send you down the route of playing the game as a pirate), I wont go over the full law system, but one thing that could potentially offer some single-player type gameplay is this:

Colonies are all individually ranked. Your colony rank represents the maximum number of planets that you can control. When a colony successfully captures a planet, their rank goes up by one, basically meaning that they can capture another planet. Ranks will also effect the maximum technology you can build at stations and also the maximum technology that you personally can actually use (the colony rank overrides your personal skill levels).

This allows for very controlled gameplay. In solicited space, if a colony wants to try and attack another colony's planet, they must declare war against that colony and select which planet they are trying to capture. The key thing here is, colonies can only declare war against another colony which is within 1 rank away from them.

Using this method, what I expect to see alot of is the low ranked colonies, possibly even players who have set up a colony which is just them and no other players, playing the game pretty casually without having to worry about the higher ranked colonies. So yeah, it's not quite single player as in: you're in completely your own little bubble where no one else can touch you, but it does allow something kinda close.

Unless I were to dramatically change the focus from entirely player based and make it a little more NPC based (I would feel very uneasy about taking this route personally), I'm not sure whether there would be a way to incorporate an entirely single-player aspect into the game. With that being said, do you think the sort of semi-single-player aspect discussed above might be enough?

Thanks again for the suggestions. Let me know your thoughts.