What kind of experience does the design team have in maintenance that you are able to use in designing a repair system? How important is the repair system when designing a ship? How in-depth will ship engineer gameplay be?asked by The_Vigilant_One
TL;DRCalix Reneau has no maintenance background but draws on backer and military input and games for reference, aims for many small varied repair actions where finding the fault is the challenge, and hopes to release a prototype soon.
The first half is easy, I have none. But thanks to our backers and world spanning team I have loads of reference and people that I ask about how repair works in the real world. I'm the one that's doing the design for field repairs.
What are some of the things that you're using as a reference?
In terms of actual gameplay loop, there is actually some good ground tread already, and we have some military folks to bring it back into reality. The loops that I'm looking at are more built around having small discrete actions, but having a wide variety of those. Any given problem will be dynamic and different to solve, and players will have a lot to react to. It won't be a big deal actually accomplishing a repair, but the difficulty lies in looking for what needs repairing and how to do it. I'm takng cues from Car Mechanic Simulator 2014, which came out at the perfect time for inspiration, as well as trauma centre. So these are really simple interactions, but layered such that they're interesting and complex. I've also been taking cues from Penumbra, the direct interaction with the world and with the objects that you're plugging back into your war-torn vessel. So that's how repair is going, we've actually got a pretty cool prototype of that going at the moment, and hopefully we can sneak that one out pretty soon.