Divert Engine Power to the SID Chip!

[luckykaa]

A game I've been intrigued by recently is PSI-5 trading company. I have these retro-gaming whims.

The basic premise is that you're captain of the trading ship. You need to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, while avoiding or destroying raiders. You have 5 crew operating scanners, weapons, navigation, engineering and repairs, and the game involved telling them what to do. It's also really hard, but that's one of those retro gaming things. The game involves micromanaging 5 different stations and keeping track of who's saying what during intense situations.

Essentially it's like Artemis Bridge Simulator except you don't need friends.

The captaining simulation is a very underdeveloped game concept. Real Time Strategy is a lot of fun, but everything in that area seems to be battlefield. I just have a hankering for a game that involves sending disposable redshirts on suicide away missions, investigating anomalies, and fighting invading Glorkons. No idea how the game itself would work, but I think there's potential in there. Something semi-scripted with a set of missions, where your level of success determines how good your next ship is. I wanna be Captain Kirk! Or maybe Picard.

Comments

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

Could this be your next Android app?

[luckykaa.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd like to make it cross platform - tablet/PC which actually makes life difficult.

It would be a screen based game, so heavy on the UI. That's the main part that will be difficult to abstract. I guess I could use Qt and see how well that works but I'm a little wary of it.

Game engine can be ported, even if Android will need a bit of fudging for its native Java API to talk to C++. It's possible but JNI is never fun.

The other problem is that my game design is pretty much what I've written above.

[chess]

Star Trek Online actually does all of the above (you amass a selection of Duty Officers that you send on missions, as well as there being a variety of main and repeatable bridge crew missions and ship combat with diverting power to various things and your bridge officers providing various skills) reasonably well - and is free to play.

(It has a couple of slightly irritating F2P 'features', like lockboxes that drop in an attempt to entice you into buying keys, and server-wide announcements when someone gets something particularly rare out of one, but it's pretty easy to tune out and doesn't affect the main game much - you can do almost everything for free, if you're not worried about competing with other players.)

[luckykaa.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a lot of fun. Will check it out.

Am a little wary of f2p though... Mainly because of the feel that you're competing with people who can spend more money.

[chess]

Yeah - I can enjoy F2P MMOs because I am cheerfully rubbish at computer games and therefore assume that everyone else in the game will be better than me anyway, but if you do compare yourself to other players then buy-to-win stuff can get a bit galling.

Most of STO is essentially a single-player game or on battlefields so massive that you can just wander around while other people get on with the serious fighting, so I just didn't notice other players that much at all, though.