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LAGRANGE POINT FIVE, a new orikae joint
Orikaeshigitae
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Registered User, ClubPA regular
L-POINT FIVE, for short
Humanity has taken its first fleeting steps towards the stars, establishing Clarke Station, an outpost balanced between the Earth and the Moon as a jumping-off point for expeditions to the Moon, Asteroid Belt, Mars, and beyond. You are a fresh arrival aboard Clarke Station and must work your way up to captaining your own frigate and commanding a crew. Your fortune awaits you in the rare metals of the asteroid belt and glory beckons you on the path to Mars…
Lagrange Point Five is a Fallout-like sci-fi isometric RPG using responsive app design and dynamic narrative systems.
Okay, but what does that mean?
L.5 is designed so that you can play it on any supported device you own, with persistent saves between them. (We'll see if this is too complicated to set up!) There's also no "main plot" - the initial character generation and setup are handled with the assumption that you're on the station to make a buck and crew a ship, but other than that you're on your own. I've already designed endings for some of the edge cases, like the "kill everyone" playthrough, which ends with an Action NES-style cutscene that shows..
Kill everyone?
Oh, yes. You can kill anyone in this game. There's plenty of scripting, but we're designing the quests and gameplay from the start so that it doesn't rely on any specific NPC - or if it does, then you just can't do those things anymore. Worried about a quest log staying open after you killed the person you need to hand it to? Hand it in to their wife or son. If they'll talk to you. If they won't, maybe you shoulda thought of that before you killed them.
What about the dynamic narrative?
I've been really interested in the work of Aaron Reed, including what he calls "quantum authorship". What that means is instead of defining an exact event in response to some trigger, we define a range of events that might happen based on some other criteria. This means instead of saying "okay, X then Y," we say "if X happens, then that means that Y,Z,Q, or T might happen, because if X happens then the player is interested in C". It sounds complicated but I find it enormously freeing.
The system I'm building relies on dramatic tension. It tries to choose dramatically appropriate events based on what has already happened. I'm designing the system to avoid the pitfalls of games like Facade, keeping the emergent gameplay of CK2 while also having the consistency of Fallout.
That's a lot of work.
Yep.
Tell me more about Clarke Station.
It's the mid-21st century, and humanity has managed to set up shop on the Moon and in various stations in Earth orbit. Lagrange Point Five is one of the closest areas of gravitational equilibrium , so various venture capitalists and private spaceflight corporations have set up Clarke Station as a waypoint to the stars. There's a short three-month window to shoot for Mars every two years, so competition is fierce. Fortunes are made and lost here.
I love it! Tell me more!
Well, in a way, that's what this thread is for. I wanted to make a thread here before I set up my own website or even went to TIGSource. Mostly because y'all my bros and ladies, and also because I want to know what you think about the setting so far. I'll be posting excerpts and playable builds as they happen.
What are you using for this?
Unity3D, C#, and a whole shitload of plugins. Currently I'm testing whether 3D or 2.5D is easier to create and work with.
How can I contact you about this game?
PM me here or email me at karl "initials for no problem" @ mediumdifficulty.com.
Thanks for reading! I'm looking forward to seeing what you think of the idea so far.
Humanity has taken its first fleeting steps towards the stars, establishing Clarke Station, an outpost balanced between the Earth and the Moon as a jumping-off point for expeditions to the Moon, Asteroid Belt, Mars, and beyond. You are a fresh arrival aboard Clarke Station and must work your way up to captaining your own frigate and commanding a crew. Your fortune awaits you in the rare metals of the asteroid belt and glory beckons you on the path to Mars…
Lagrange Point Five is a Fallout-like sci-fi isometric RPG using responsive app design and dynamic narrative systems.
Okay, but what does that mean?
L.5 is designed so that you can play it on any supported device you own, with persistent saves between them. (We'll see if this is too complicated to set up!) There's also no "main plot" - the initial character generation and setup are handled with the assumption that you're on the station to make a buck and crew a ship, but other than that you're on your own. I've already designed endings for some of the edge cases, like the "kill everyone" playthrough, which ends with an Action NES-style cutscene that shows..
you, as a blood-drenched silhouette waiting for the repair/rescue crews to arrive.
Kill everyone?
Oh, yes. You can kill anyone in this game. There's plenty of scripting, but we're designing the quests and gameplay from the start so that it doesn't rely on any specific NPC - or if it does, then you just can't do those things anymore. Worried about a quest log staying open after you killed the person you need to hand it to? Hand it in to their wife or son. If they'll talk to you. If they won't, maybe you shoulda thought of that before you killed them.
What about the dynamic narrative?
I've been really interested in the work of Aaron Reed, including what he calls "quantum authorship". What that means is instead of defining an exact event in response to some trigger, we define a range of events that might happen based on some other criteria. This means instead of saying "okay, X then Y," we say "if X happens, then that means that Y,Z,Q, or T might happen, because if X happens then the player is interested in C". It sounds complicated but I find it enormously freeing.
The system I'm building relies on dramatic tension. It tries to choose dramatically appropriate events based on what has already happened. I'm designing the system to avoid the pitfalls of games like Facade, keeping the emergent gameplay of CK2 while also having the consistency of Fallout.
That's a lot of work.
Yep.
Tell me more about Clarke Station.
It's the mid-21st century, and humanity has managed to set up shop on the Moon and in various stations in Earth orbit. Lagrange Point Five is one of the closest areas of gravitational equilibrium , so various venture capitalists and private spaceflight corporations have set up Clarke Station as a waypoint to the stars. There's a short three-month window to shoot for Mars every two years, so competition is fierce. Fortunes are made and lost here.
I love it! Tell me more!
Well, in a way, that's what this thread is for. I wanted to make a thread here before I set up my own website or even went to TIGSource. Mostly because y'all my bros and ladies, and also because I want to know what you think about the setting so far. I'll be posting excerpts and playable builds as they happen.
What are you using for this?
Unity3D, C#, and a whole shitload of plugins. Currently I'm testing whether 3D or 2.5D is easier to create and work with.
How can I contact you about this game?
PM me here or email me at karl "initials for no problem" @ mediumdifficulty.com.
Thanks for reading! I'm looking forward to seeing what you think of the idea so far.
Orikaeshigitae on
+36
Posts
In my (admittedly limited) experience, working 2D in unity isn't terribly difficult. I guess it might be annoying to mediate between the default 2D plane (XY) and what I assume you'll want to use for an isometric game (XZ), but whatevs.
this sounds rad as fuck
3D will somehow be easier to work with, i suspect.
Yeah, the dynamic narrative stuff sounds really cool.
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
hey satan...: thinkgeek amazon My post |
so what would people like to see, aside from a working game (pending)
what sorts of worries or ambivalences does this thread leave you with
for one, is it real time or turn based
how does it end?
playtesting's gonna answer this one. i think that turn-based is probably pretty annoying on mobile devices, but then i have a few things in mind for that. for the most part, though, my influences are games like Darklands, King of Dragon Pass, The Last Express, and Blade Runner - games where how you act and what you do are more important than how well you can fight. I'm tempted to not have combat in there at all.
i kinda messed up a bit by making this thread so early, but i'm also kinda hurtin' for sources of support in recent weeks, so i wanted to get it in front of people's faces to see if there was something deeply wrong with the idea.
however you want it to, maaaaan
drunk and alone in a martian outpost it is
the 'main path' for this one is working your way up the ranks - learning to work various subsystems, learning to game the politics of the station, and earning a rep by working on missions. you'll be taking trips outside the station, but right now those are text interludes, like events in Crusader Kings 2 or the other games i detailed above. There'll also be the option to take your mined minerals to competing stations for some Freelancer/Elite action, but again, it'll probably be in text.
Then again, FTL is a big influence, so I might whip up a simple and low-level recreation of that to test out.
some alternate paths are sabotaging the station altogether, making enough dough to buy out the representatives of the other corporations for a period of time, being the first person to mars, and going to space jail.
But this sounds awesome. Are you looking to make it hard scifi? Or do some of the fallout "man, science is weird" stuff?
If it's the former, here's an incredibly useful tutorial on getting a proper 2D look in Unity: http://www.third-helix.com/2012/02/making-2d-games-with-unity/
If it's the latter, do yooouuuu... maybe... need help? I'm an animation student, and I've got nothing better to do!
Satans..... hints.....
YOU ARE NOW CAPTAIN JANEWAY. You are on the bridge of the Voyager.
>where do i poop
Satans..... hints.....
Like I said above, I'm not quite sure yet, but it'll probably be 3D. Once I get past the "grey box moving and talking to other grey boxes" stage, I'll hit you up!
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
i've done a bit of paper prototyping, and the narrative mechanics are building off of previous projects i did in grad school. ideally i'll be able to afford commissioning artists to help me with the art, because otherwise this will be in development until the end of time.
right now i'm getting a 3D prototype together and putting the GUI together with 2D toolkit. that'll enable me to try out the core systems and get quite a ways before I have to worry about animations, models, textures, etc.
those will all be a problem, but gotta get the stuff working first.
Also this looks like it could be p rad