suggestions for gameplay

Do you need help playing, have ideas for the game or just want to talk about what's going on in the game? This is the place.

Post Reply
thekabal
Posts: 100
Joined: Sat Apr 19, 2014 22:32 UTC

Re: suggestions for gameplay

Post by thekabal » Sun Jun 15, 2014 22:59 UTC

coolmates wrote:1.. how about a system of tasks for players based on their rank? it would gradually ease newbies into the game, and take them through all the requirements for successful building and trading etc.. completion of a task would bring rewards or choice of reward.
One of the forks of BNT (Starkick Traders) had a similar concept (quests). The branch faded a while back, but that was one of the ambitious differences they took on.

I suspect we are a ways off from trying to incorporate a quest system. We have two extremely ambitious changes queued up already - switching to PDO (instead of ADODB), and splitting players out of the ships table. The first is mostly behind the scenes, not very user-visible, but completely necessary for the game to grow further. The player/ship split is going to be noticeable for players, because once it is done, it will open the door for persistent accounts across resets, and other cool stuff.

I mention these to clarify why we wouldn't suggest tackling it yourself and submitting a patch. Most of the game code is going to change so dramatically in the next little while that testing a patch and switching it along with the other changes would be more work than help. Maybe in the future.
coolmates wrote:2.. how about a live help option? the player would click on an icon and a live chat window/tab would launch for the player to communicate with game admin/support if online, or email a ticket if outside live support time. this can be achieved through any available open source option. alternatively.. a chatroom might be offered, or a main chatroom and individual team and/or planet chatrooms.
In our other branch, Advanced, we did have the beginnings of a chat room. We plan to do it properly and add it to both branches. What features (rooms, private, etc) remains to be seen once we start implementing it. Watch future releases for this feature!

User avatar
TheMightyDude
Site Admin
Posts: 311
Joined: Thu Apr 17, 2014 09:15 UTC

Re: suggestions for gameplay

Post by TheMightyDude » Mon Jun 16, 2014 00:32 UTC

coolmates wrote:1.. how about a system of tasks for players based on their rank? it would gradually ease newbies into the game, and take them through all the requirements for successful building and trading etc.. completion of a task would bring rewards or choice of reward.
Well I have plans for us to add loads of new features to the game like a XP Levelling System that will unlock stuff as the player progresses through the game, along with class roles like "Combat", "Gathering" and "Crafting", Research and Development tree for the crafting role and similar ones for the Combat and Gathering roles.

Player Quests based on their level and role as well as global quests.

I have thought about adding a starting area separated from other players allowing the new players to learn how to play the game without the new player being killed and giving up on the game.

Ship Upgrades are possibly going to change to require a player to be a certain level for a device upgrade, like for example to upgrade a ship device to say level 10 Shields the player would need to be at least Level 10 to upgrade to that device, so no more sending loads of credits to new players to boost them.

I have also been thinking about changing how the load outs of the ship look and work, nothing has been decided yet due to this will impact how the whole game works.
The Combat System is due for an upgrade due to it is terrible and I think a more interactive combat system using a top down turn based combat grid may work well.

There are loads of other features that can be added, but like thekabal has said we are in the middle of moving over to a new PDO database wrapper and then to separating the ship database table, once that has completed we can then decide on what to add next, this was why some features was halted due to all the changes that would be happening.
coolmates wrote:2.. how about a live help option? the player would click on an icon and a live chat window/tab would launch for the player to communicate with game admin/support if online, or email a ticket if outside live support time. this can be achieved through any available open source option. alternatively.. a chatroom might be offered, or a main chatroom and individual team and/or planet chatrooms.
Hmm, well I was working on a Ticket System a while back which wasn't to be a live chat feature, see things become difficult when the game is a browser based game, so we (as in admins) would only get information when its sent and when we ask the server for that information, granted we could use jQuery to keep requesting for information every X seconds (i.e. every 5 seconds etc) and force the admin to be logged into the game all day, sadly this wouldn't happen, admins are also busy people and may not be able to stay logged into a page all day.

Which leads me to my external Admin Application I started writing a while back to run on Windows basically for me to administer the live games on here so it was to do all admin stuff as well as handle the chat system and ticket system, sadly real life stuff took over and it was put on hold.
TheMightyDude::Blacknova Development.
Development Blog YouTube Dev Channel Twitter Twitch

Post Reply