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Automaton

Posted January 11, 2023 by Xhin



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Basic Stuff

  • Text-based. Modified version of fishing game software, which should cover a lot of the pathing/timing aspects.

    A reasonably full space sim, with some caveats:

  • Text-based, despite mapping stuff in 3D.

  • No combat

  • The player and NPCs are Automatons.

    Other general stuff:

  • Would like to set this on an absolutely gigantic scale because I can -- like have filaments and a void (with the latter being the place to finish the game).

  • Have a singular seed, so players can share info and stuff.

  • A kind of roguelike aesthetic -- dying respawns you somewhere along the filament unless you have something networked to you.

    • January 11, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Player Settting

  • You're an Automaton with a Digestive Matrix, so mostly machine but with the digestive capabilities to consume a wide variety of organic matter instead of refining/ replacing fuel cells. This also helps explain your text-based displays. Things like viewing light in 3d space are less useful than itemized scans and readouts.

  • You have a Ship, which you can build in various ways in a text-based format. You're linked to it, which means that it is for all intents and purposes you when in it outside of digestive matrix needs.

  • You can also get various vehicles/submersibles which work similarly when deployed. These can also be extended/built.

    World Setting

    The world is meant to be fairly realistic -- there's a filament that stretches around a Void with some kind of alien barrier around the whole thing. Takes place in our actual universe but not anywhere near our local filament -- the lore here is a breakaway group of Automatons that spread way further than normal and then got stuck when the parent universe collapsed.

    All scales should similarly be realistic -- like the number of galaxies in filaments, the number of stars in galaxies, the objects in solar systems, etc. It'll be a really cool piece of work, without the rendering engine to bog it down.

  • Planets should be tidally locked and a bit... different due to heavy alien presence. Could fit into the lore, like the Automatons were following traces of this civilization back to their origin for whatever reason.

  • But there should be gas giants, moons, various satellites, asteroids, etc in realistic scales.

    • January 11, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Gameplay Basis

  • A kind of survival / metroidvania style -- collect resources, upgrade your ship, collect more resources. A lot of this is in your warp drives, which let you navigate the absurdly huge scales. There's also farming systems (on your ship) that produce resources in real time.

  • A gigantic amount of complex management -- energy production needs cooling, warping needs energy, etc. All accessible through text as needed to simplify the displays here.

  • A large amount of components, which allows endless customization possibilities and very intricate tooling.

  • Pretty much anything can be automated through Automation Chains and Conditionals. This is kinda the Automaton Aesthetic, so.

  • Resources are varied and location-based in various appreciable ways. Some stuff is only available in Oort clouds, near the supermassive black hole in galaxies, at the spaces between galaxies, etc. Upscaling depends on warp drive upgrades, and then ties into the resources available for more upgrades.

  • Resources have varied refinement processes and component stats, all of which are procgen. The game should be needlessly complex and also extremely random, to give a lot of that refined shatterloop feel. The text basis should however heavily simplify the game so development is manageable.

    • January 11, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Fractal Components

    To improve things on my end, Fixtures could be organizable into components in fractal ways, going down to some fixed nano size. This would then allow you to modify stuff at your leisure, and the engine would integrate things together.

  • You could also research anything at any level, giving you just an absolutely gigantic catalogue to look through at your leisure, which is important since trips to other celestial bodies may take an appreciable amount of real time.

  • Scaling should probably be an unlock to preserve the metroidvania feel

    • January 11, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Technology

    So since technology / tech management is the central premise of this game I'd like to explore it a bit.

    Vehicles, Modules, Fixtures, Components

    The technology in this game is organized into these four scales:

  • Vehicles -- allow you to move through various mediums. They're composed of modules, and should also contain at least one Hangar module that stores smaller vehicle types.

  • Modules -- Vehicles are built in a modular way. Modules are a homogeneous size and can be stacked onto each other in a 3D way, taking up some amount of volume accordingly. Modules themselves are a way of storing and organizing Fixtures.

  • Fixtures -- individual units that do various things, such as Reactors that provide energy or Containments that store raw resources. Fixtures have to meet the height/width/length minimums of Modules and also will take up a certain amount of Volume -- beyond that the nanobots will arrange it into something useful sou1 you can fit the volume easier.

  • Components -- Fixtures contain a variety of Components that make them work and tie into the technology / lore. Components are organized in a fractal structure going down to some ridiculously small depth. Components can be hot-swapped with ones that have been Crafted, Bought or otherwise obtained.

    • January 12, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Vehicle Types

  • Starship -- moves through space via sublight drives and warp drives. Not really equipped for anything else.

  • Asterdroid -- Can mine asteroids and collect their dropped resources.

    Players begin with a Starship that has minimal modules and an Asterdroid. The Starship also has a Hangar where the Asterdroid can be stored.

  • Spaceplane -- Can navigate gravity-rich or atmosphere-rich environments, so in other words can make planetary or lunar landings, though there are definitely prebaked limits starting out.

  • Hovercraft -- can navigate terrain and skim over water.

  • Submersible -- can navigate watery environments like oceans.

  • Ornithopter -- can navigate gas giant gas clouds.

    All the vehicles above can store smaller vehicles (if any exist) and can have whatever modules fitted to them make sense.

    • January 12, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Fixture Types

  • Drills -- has to have some exposed point of contact -- can't be surrounded by 6 modules. Drills can mine through materials like asteroids to free resources.

  • Scoops -- same deal here, they need an exposed face and they can then pull in free resources to store in whatever they're Piped to.

  • Hopper -- takes stuff from one Pipe and distributes it to other Pipes according to some player-set series of conditions. Hoppers can have various functionalities baked into them according to the Hopper.

  • Reactor -- Generates energy via nuclear fusion, which requires that it be Piped Hydrogen. It also creates Helium as an output, which needs to itself be Piped or the Reactor will overload. Reactors also output Power which can be Piped to various things with Volt Pipes.

  • Coolant -- Coolant fixtures keep Reactor heat from destroying everything, so depending on the Reactor properties you'll need more or less of these.

  • Photon Drives -- sublight drives that turn Power into movement at sublight speeds. These are useful for smaller movements like between moonless or navigating around a planet but they can't reach big enough speeds to make interplanetary travel feasible.

  • Warp drives -- Drives that allow superluminous speeds that allow you to get around a solar system with ease. Not particularly useful for interstellar travel, would take years or something. The max speed is something like ~10 light hours in 20 minutes, so alpha centauri would take ~12 real world days and cost a gigantic amount of fuel. Technically possible but not practical.

  • Gravity Drives -- uses gravity wells of large celestial bodies to make much much farther jumps. So for interstellar transport you'd want to get reasonably close to a Star, with the more massive the star the further you could go. Black holes are particularly useful, and the supermassive ones in the center of galaxies allow intergalactic transportation.

  • Containment -- Contains various resources, which can be Piped in or out.

  • Hydroponics -- allows you to farm various things. This is largely organic matter, however some plants are capable of microfusion to create novel elements from their substrate as well.

  • Digestive Matrix -- You as an entity run on the energy released by organic matter. You have to funnel some into these modules from time to time or you'll quantum decohere and basically die. They aren't particularly picky thankfully.

    • January 12, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Warp Drive Technology

    Warp Drives have multiple handcrafted components that work something like this:

  • Particle Coils will separate base charged particles and accelerate them at high speeds towards one another, forming small charged black holes known as Nanosingularities.

  • The Singularity Chamber will keep them fed with matter to offset hawking radiation

  • Containment fields around the Chamber will use magnetic effects to move and rotate these singularities to create pockets of distorted spacetime known as Warp Nodes.

  • These can then be threaded into the spacetime ahead of the Starship like a Zipper, allowing instantaneous flight across vast distances. I'm not sure what component does this.

    Gravity Drives

    Gravity Drives work similarly, however they get threaded into existing Gravity wells generated by massive celestial objects. So they're basically Warp cells with additional components (and some modifications on nanosingularity size) and can thus be crafted from them.

    • January 25, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Mapping

    The game uses a large-scale mapping system, however it's rendered in text so i don't necessarily have to build out 3d space. Additionally planets are interacted with in a similar way, so similar rules apply.

    Solar Travel

    Inside a solar system, pois are laid out on a 2d grid because they're on the elliptic plane. Pois can be:

  • Planets

  • The sun

  • Comets

  • Asteroid belts

  • Oort Clouds

    Pois can contain additional smaller pois, like individual asteroids / clusters or moons of planets, as well as things like space stations.

    Pois occupy a polar coordinates system with the sun at the center -- belts and clouds (and the sun) are better explained by specific ranges from the center and this follows for planets as well, as it dictates their type. Nonetheless movement is in 2d space so you should have access to that as well.

    While you should be able to move from anywhere to anywhere, you shouldn't be able to directly if another poi is Occluding you -- pois are bigger than the object in question and are basically gravity wells, like the sun which has a big one. So you'd need to pass to the poi in between first.

    All of this should be visible to some extent, though in a more rudimentary ascii format. This would help you plot things over the long term.

    Planetary Navigation

    Planetary pois also have a polar coordinates system, and from outer to inner contain:

  • Moons

  • Space stations

  • Rings (depending on planet size)

  • The actual planet.

    Large moons can also resemble planets, containing their own moons and/or rings. This scales down in a fractal way until you reach the cutoff for satellite isolation.

    It is however possible with this system to have gigantic planets that go down many layers. It all depends on the properties of that particular star system and also the galaxy properties to some extent.

    Ring/Belt/Cloud Navigation

    These all fall on a polar coordinates system and contain objects such as moonlets, Comets or asteroids and lots of dust/water. They contain objects that are splayed out within the range or possibly even some kind of 3d space, and a "medium" of varying intensity which has dust or water in it.

    For the sake of my sanity, there are probably just:

  • Moonlets -- follow Planet/moon rules without having rings or moons of their own

  • Asteroids -- non-navigable but can be harvested in a discrete way.

  • Medium -- can be harvested as well, with varying intensities/composition at different ranges and/or angles.

    • January 25, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Star System Navigation

    To reach other star systems you have to metroidvania your way into some kind of Gravdrive -- this uses the gravity well of stars to reach other stars and can do something similar with SMBH's to reach other galaxies.

    Your effective range is based on three factors:

  • The star's solar mass (the bigger it is, the further you can travel)

  • The closer you are to its center of mass (though this is going to require lots and lots of cooling).

  • The max range of your grav drive -- you get limited early on but near the end of the game you should be able to go anywhere with a big enough gravity well.

    Thus, Star navigation and Star System navigation are the same thing -- you're balancing your pull into the star (with fuel/engines to prevent that) and cooling, all the while gaining access to more stars around you.

    Probably the sanest way to navigate the galaxy looks something like this:

  • A zoomable 2D ascii map that renders a spiral-like structure with more stars within the spiral than outside of it, and more near the center as well. The various parameters here (spin, arms, elliptical nature if I can swing it) are dictated by the galaxy's properties, as well as the size of the SMBH, which should be at least large enough to get to a few other galaxies.

  • As you get closer to the sun, your effective range goes up (depending also on the solar mass).

  • You're able to warp to any star in range, or see/filter by any properties depending on how good your scanners are. Looking for large solar masses is probably paramount.

    Galaxy Navigation

    Galaxy navigation works similarly to the sun, except replace it by a supermassive black hole in a galaxy's center. Galaxies are concentrated into "clusters" connected together by "filaments" around the surface of a 3D sphere known as The Supervoid. Galaxies can appear outside of clusters and filaments, though it's pretty rare and you'd probably have to spend a while searching for them. They also have unique properties, like very large SMBHs so you can get back out, and other interesting stuff. They're optional though.

    • January 25, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Game Components

    This game has basically five main components, the first two of which can basically be built individually and then glued together with the overlays stacking on top:

  • The starmap engine -- renders filaments, galaxy clusters, galaxies, stars, pois, and celestial bodies with a fractal-like technology and also calculates distances between them and gets the seeds of everything as needed.

  • Fractal spaceships -- An engine that creates starships, which are rooms with fixtures that then have fractal components inside of them that can be upgraded/fixed/etc. This is the basis of the space monkey game.

  • Resource overlay -- uses the seeds of the starmap engine to distribute resources, and then uses the fractal spaceship components to collect and process them. Also contains the crafting engine that lets you upgrade spaceship components in various ways, as well as unlocks/etc.

  • Travel overlay -- uses the distances calculated in the starmap engine to plot routes between points of interest, using the technology available in the fractal spaceships module, as well as a real-time engine.

  • Scanner overlay -- A means of seeing information about points of interest via both the starmap engine and the resource overlay.

    • January 25, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Gameplay loops

    Gameplay will look like the following:

  • Moving around areas in space.

  • Deploying vehicles matryoshka doll style depending on the terrain/etc requirements.

  • Collecting resources, which are procgen and based on where you are the type of the thing you're in, the sublocation, etc.

  • Processing resources into useful forms.

  • Using those forms to craft or upgrade components/fixtures/etc in a fractal way.

  • Those fixtures then allow you to travel further/faster, collect other resources, etc.

    Civilization submechanics

  • Various civilized areas will allow you to buy and sell resources and buy and sell components.

  • There might be a trading mechanic in whatever way makes sense (it's kinda common to space games and is easy to set up with this engine)

  • Various low-level quests that give you money and/or resources and/or components. Not sure how these are structured, they might be tiered based on the area or some faction or something, though that's honestly probably overcomplicating the game.

    Death Mechanics

    Death can happen in two ways:

  • Having hull integrity reach 0% -- probably only relevant if you get too close to a sun if I don't want to overcomplicate the game.

  • Running out of fuel and not being in close proximity to a space station (with money to afford refueling) or some other means of obtaining it.

    Either way, when you die, the roguelike aspect kicks in and you start somewhere else in the supervoid at random. You keep your ship and everything in it, but all post-starting fixtures become damaged and have to be repaired or replaced. So the risk of death is more going to a totally different area and having to take time to repair your ship. You'll then have to metroidvania yourself back into a comfortable position, or just repair your existing fixtures.

    • January 27, 2023
    Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

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