aegix drakan said:
As a game programmer familiar with Unity, the workload and sheer amount of talent needed to make what I'd want to see is waaaay too much for just little-old me. I'd need a full team of talented people.
Also, space games tend to not get really well funded or noticed by the powers that be, as sci-fi is generally seen as a weak market outside of the smash hits. :s
Yeah, I can understand that. Especially when you get into a lot of the artistic side of things, and trying to flesh out a proper setting and such in every aspect, and pulling off the right presentation. Still, I'm kind of blindly optimistic, largely because of how easy I've been finding it working with the Unreal 4 engine.
As for the market aspect, I think you're probably more right about that then I'd care to admit. Heck, somehow this game has still been flying under the radar, even though it's a nearly flawless spiritual successor to Descent (afaik, some of the development team consists of people who worked on the original Descent series)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/
(Although admittedly, it's almost too true to the Descent-styled design that it gets a little repetitive from a more modern perspective)
Seth Carter said:
Yeah, I'm not sure why they went with the idea of procedurally generating planets that take literal real time days to walk around (someone did it on youtube).
The idea was that retro-sci stuff, Star trek, Lost in Space, planet of the week then off you go idea.
Which is kind of funny if you think about it, since a lot of what made that kind of thing fun and interesting in science fiction shows was the detail that the show's creators put into it. Which is kind of the opposite of how NMS was trying to tackle it, I think.
Seth Carter said:
You could still have procedurally generated content, but just have a contained mission to find supplies or a crew member falling ill and needs a cure, or a distress call from a crashed ship needing repairs or a colony under attack by sentinels, etc. Not just the plop down and find enough Thamium flowers for the 30th time.
Aye, those are some excellent examples of how procedural content can and should be done. Situations that call for engagement from the player without trying to lead the player around on a leash or weight them down with mundane tasks.
I think the same sort of thing applies to generating places for players to explore. It can still be procedural, but to make sure it's properly engaging it's going to require at least a little bit of a personal touch to make sure it's actually something the player's going to enjoy exploring.
7 Days to Die handled this pretty well by striking a balance between a generated world and a wide range of hand-designed prefabs/POI's. It also worked even better because of how well they designed their looting and crafting systems, making the experience of exploring a zombie-infested town all that much more satisfying.
