Star Control Founders: February 2018

50 planet classes is awesome, I think Star Trek only has 20 or so.

I like the look and feel of Luke's speeder in the lander game;-)

If you are wanting to speed up the overall process of running around the planet you could give the lander speed boost (but “you can't hold the button down”) with a cool down. If it is an issue, being able to “zip” to the next goal will reduce the player feeling that is it becoming monotonous, and that it is taking too long to “clear the planet” (for the many who will inevitably feel compelled to do so).

You can already. Shift key. There’s a boost meter in the video.

Oh, cool.  The lander game looks like a big improvement over the original SC.

Now you just need to add your Easter Egg signature with that Ice Pirates world were you have to fight the Frogboy driving a Road Warrior car!

Lander exploration is fun. I wounder if there will be hazards/bonuses that are linked to sunlit/dark surface. Will we be able to destroy environment to some extent - like level a mountain?  Please, make sure that we have some interesting planets like in ME2 (or ME3 - forgot which part) - if you read their description - there are some nice treats. One can do the same with SCO planets even w/o description - like big scars on the surface from long forgotten battles or some @ghosts@ that spook you and do nothing besides that and etc.

50 types of planets is great - the bigger is in-game variety - the better. + Will monsters get scared of our headlights and run away? Or will they sleep|hibernate  when it is getting dark or the other way around.

Overall - I like what I see. The only thing that worries me is a lander model. I cannot specify what I do not like exactly but  it might be just me.

Regards. I have not posted here for months

Do any planets have oceans?

I'm liking the look of the game, and especially the video you just posted up driving around mars. I do have some concerns about the amount of time you had to spend driving around Mars. Once you multiply that by all the planets in the game you might want to explore, I think people will get extremely sick of driving around planets. In SC2 you wouldn't spend more than 30-40 seconds on any given planet.

My suggestion would be cut the number of resources you need to drive over per planet to about a third of what we saw in the video (but triple what you get from each one so the total amount you get remains constant).

Anyway, that's just my 2c.

Good feedback.

I have been going around reducing the number on planets for that reason.  Totally agree.

How do you intend to display ocean and earth-like worlds in game?  Really interested in those and the gem worlds (ruby, sapphire, etc)

Do not reduce the number of planets!

In terms of exploration - one might act in several ways or in combination: make planets with less rigid terrains, make smaller planets, cut the number of minerals with increasing their value but do not reduce the number of planets! Diversity AND numbers is the key for the future mods/universe.

I think that exploring for minerals/resources is ok if it lasts around 1,5 minutes save for @special@ planets that have exotic resources, rare life forms, artifacts and etc.

He said the number ON planets, not the number OF planets.  They're thinking of lowering the amount of resource nodes on planets.

Oh, missed that. That is the problem with reading stuff when rushing to the airport

Water, pools of toxic liquids, thick forests, mountains, canyons, etc can all be used to reduce the explorable areas of planets.

One thing I didn't like about the lander video was "Luke's Speeder" going up and over the tops of mountains.  It "seems wrong" AND it would be a lot cooler if the mountains were like "half-pipe" ramps that skateboarders use.

Aside from proselytizing about games being built by a team of people, as opposed to just two "creators", there wasn't much meat in this update. But I can't help but wonder why landing zone is restricted to one spot. Why can't I land over *here*? It doesn't make much sense to me, but I suppose we're still trying to cram the "landing mini-game" into the mix, and that helps it fit, I'm sure. 

Other than that, planetary landing looks like some of the most fun you can have in a space game at this time. I can't wait to get my hands on it!

Again, I agree. I understand that it provides a mechanism for requiring the player to upgrade their lander to get more available landing spots, but it seems like an arbitrary mechanism with no reason EXCEPT giving you something to need to upgrade, to me.

Obviously I can;t actually judge until I see the finished product, so may well be talking out of my ass, but I would prefer if it was that I could only land on flat spots (but any flat spot) and upgrades would allow me to land on progressively trickier spots like mountain tops, mesa's, oceans etc.

But like I said, it's probably too early to judge.

Heck yeah, Brian. Superficially creating restrictions, just to give reason for an upgrade to exist doesn't seem like the way to go at all. 

Why not go the SCII way? Have your landing be sporadic and only relatively close to your intended landing spot - until you get an upgrade that makes your lander more precisely touch down.

I always thought Gears of War's reload mechanic was ridiculous. In practice it was okay - but on paper, creating a timed reload mechanic that makes your gun jam every time you miss doesn't seem like an upgrade over regular games where your gun just reloads correctly every time. Is that more fun than just reloading?

Games that have timed responses in conversations irk me in the same way. Most games, you can choose your response on your own time, after thoroughly reading available options - but some games force on you the need to choose within x seconds, just to create a mechanic where you have to pick an answer quickly, and for what? Is choosing a response quickly more fun? Seems arbitrary.

You can create a MILLION mechanics, to warrant needlessly obtuse upgrades. Create a mechanic where when offloading minerals, you have to click on the valuable ones as they pass by on a conveyor belt in order to get full value. Create a mechanic where instead of using X amount of fuel to jump to the next system, you have to guide your ship through rings just to use the normal amount of fuel, if you miss, you burn double. Are those really more fun than offloading minerals or just jumping to the next system, normally?

Or, you can create a mechanic where, instead of landing on a planet where you want, you can be stuck landing only in one location, and taking damage on the way down if you don't guide your lander through rin-........ oh...... wait..............

I like how you need to aim your lander as it descends (it is buffeted by weather?) and if you miss your target you take damage.  We should keep that whether or not that target is anywhere on the planet or just a few landing spots.

On the lander sequence, one thing I didn't see in the video was if there was any fuel costs associated with performing a landing. Now if the devs turn around and say 'landing costs fuel' then my argument can get thrown out the window.

In SCII fuel cost was the limiting factor to reduce the number of landing sequences you would attempt on a planet. Does anyone remember early game finding super rich planets with crazy level hazards? You could only go for resources by targeting right on top of each resource and doing 3 or 4 landings - which cost you fuel each time. That made you do a quick cost/benefit analysis to figure out if it really was worth going for one more.

Iff landing doesn't cost fuel in SCO then there needs to be a way to add difficulty to planets. We've only seen 'easy' planets in videos, the restrictions make a lot more sense on harder planets to force interactions.

Inferno, the crew is also a limited resource and in SC2 you would lose crew on hazard worlds trying to land many times like that.

True but even after you upgraded and your lander was tough, the fuel cost still became the limiting factor. Plus I got pretty good at landing right on top of that resource  

Oh man, that glimpse of your ship in orbit as seen from the surface… too cool.

Building on the topic of fuel consumption, I just had a funny thought: would be interesting if the lander actually had its own fuel reserve taken from your ship's fuel, and you could only pilot it around for so long before having to return to orbit. In SC2, you can't just pilot your ship around space forever because you have a finite fuel supply, so why should the lander be able to cruise around a planet indefinitely as if they have a neverending fuel supply?

As we all know, the planets aren't big anyway and don't take much time to cover, so maybe some kind of imposed resource limit could help add a degree of realism and/or strategy to your landings; you could only cruise around on the surface for so long so you should plan your landings to get what you want, or be cautious to conserve fuel to get what you need. Maybe there could even be hydrocarbon-based resource pickups on the surface that can just extend your fuel supply too; think Rad Racer where you'd get a time extension if you could reach the goal in time.

Go ahead and tell me I'm crazy but I think it would add urgency to the gameplay. Obviously there could be lander upgrades to make them more fuel efficient or maybe even have an endless energy source so they can run forever without needing to refuel, just as they are in SC2. After all, the SCO ship is Human tech while the SC2 ship was Precursor tech; maybe their landers were so advanced they didn't need fuel? Fanwank explanation for why they could run forever.

Re landers

Some great feedback here and we have considered it and accepted it as a better direction.

Here's how it's going to work from now on:

At the start of the game, you only have 1 landing zone and it's fixed.  This allows us to guide the player through playing the early part of the game.

However, early on, you will be able to buy an upgrade that lets you land anywhere but you will also learn that some planets are difficult to land where you want.  

What we are trying to do prevent is the case where completists feel like they have to bounce up and down on planets over and over.  If you watch let's plays, you can see people feeling compelled to launch land land over and over again to get every last mineral and many of them felt like they had to.

Cheers!

A limited cargo hold on the mothership would telegraph to players that they are not supposed to be worrying about getting every last mineral from every planet.  If the mothership can't hold anywhere near what you can collect in-between visits to locations where they can be off-loaded/sold, then the players will quickly realize that the "most efficient" way of collecting minerals is to focus on "cargo hold density" rather than "get everything".  By "cargo hold density" I mean making your cargo hold carry the most, in monetary value, that it can since you will quickly fill it with "cheap minerals" that aren't worth "wasting cargo space" to hold when you know that you will find more valuable minerals on other worlds before you wind up at a place where you can sell them.

The low value minerals are still relevant as either resources needed to build certain things, or required for certain quests, or just to leave behind as something you might pick up if you are ever in the area again (all the "good stuff" having been removed the first time you had been in that area).

Seconded. One thing I'd do often in SC2 was purge cheap minerals to make room for valuable ones. I'd still like to see some degree of space management like this in SCO, not just completionist obsessive landing until a planet is stripmined of every cheap resource. I think most people won't want to do that anyway.