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Skorj

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  1. Obviously you show the most significant digits if you need to truncate a display. Time, distance, mass, whatever. Not really a question IMO
  2. This makes planning fun Jool missions impractical. Swinging past Tylo with a minimal burn, to capture at Lathe (or even aerobrake at Lathe) is one of the wonderful moments of mastery of the game mechanics in KSP1, but takes a lot of maneuver node tweaking when still far from Jool. Heck, on the other end of the scale, when going to Gilly the first time being able to easily plan a maneuver at Eve Pe to check the dV needed to capture at Gilly is important for a new player to build the confidence to go interplanetary!
  3. I think quite a few people have been specific about a desire for resource constraints done better than KSP1s random mission system. Science mode isn't challenging on the build side because there are no constraints beyond bugs and low performance. KSP1 science mode was the same way: fine for a gentle introduction to astrophysics, but barely an actual game. For my part, I want to see funds sharply constrain launches from Kerbin, but be only a minor concern for launches from anywhere else, where the constraint is replaced by a limited ability to gather resources locally, which in turn is replaced as a constraint in the endgame where you need resources from Even and Tylo to build and fuel the insterstellar ship. Resource constraints that themselves give a sense of progression as you eliminate each constraint in turn through developing skill at the game. Pretty much the standard game design of logistics/factory games, because it works well and is very satisfying. That's the improvement I'd like to see: apply proven game design concepts from adjacent genres to replace career mode.
  4. Couldn't agree more. What I expect for colonies, when it comes to ship building, is just a VAB in orbit or a VAB on any surface you like, with still no resource cost to launch rockets, making the game still more sandboxy. Sure, there may be some additional colony mechanics unrelated to launching rockets, and maybe those will be interesting, but that would take KSP2 ever farther from the challenging orbital mechanics game that I want so badly. Sure would like to see colony-based resource gathering needed to build rockets off-Kerbin, and a reason to engage with that rather than just building a 300T-payload-to-orbit booster once, and using it mindlessly for every launch.
  5. I don't understand how colonies can have any sort of interesting gameplay without resource gathering. Already the game suffers from lack of resource constraints (much like KSP1 science mode). Without resource gathering and resource constraints, how are colonies and interstellar travel going to be anything beyond a bag of parts for sandbox play? I really hope I'm misunderstanding what that "resource gathering" point is, since it looks like there won't be an actual game until Exploration, just a sandbox and some missions.
  6. You just give some sort of mission goal or reward for completing objectives before a certain in-game date. This comes up a lot in industry sim games. Either you have some external stressor -- your base gets raided every so often or something like that to create a cost for just waiting -- or you make hitting a milestone before a deadline the stated goal of the game. Hmmm, "hitting a milestone before a deadline", I'm sure it will be fine.
  7. As far as implementation in a game where the surface is a height map, so overhangs or caves are hard to do, caves are best done using "portals". This works quite well for caves, but can be screwy for tunnels. Gameplay wise, it would make sense for cave entrances to be targets for missions. Land near the cave, then explore inside with a rover. It's a good reason to use a rover instead of just landing where you want to be.
  8. Depends what you mean. Juno: New Origins is KSP without the Kerbals. It's not a great game, lacking the depth of KSP1, maybe OK to pick up on a Steam sale but doesn't really add anything. Rocket Science tried, but it seems they spent a lot of effort on the visuals and didn't land the gameplay, too expensive for what it is IMO. If they ever get the base-building pert of the game done, it would offer something new. Spaceflight simulator is a fun little 2D rocket sim game, works better as a mobile game. I really wish I knew of others! There doesn't seem to be a rocket sim game with gameplay beyond "build a rocket and land it in different places", and KSP1 does that the best I think.
  9. Personally, I've just never liked sandbox games. I want a goal, and a challenge to reach that goal, and the kind of challenge that engages my engineer brain. If resources are unlimited, then there's no optimization needed, no engineering engagement, no challenge, and no fun. Self-imposed challenges can be fun after the first playthrough, but that first playthough needs to be good. I played KSP1 science mode up though Mun landing, and have never touched it (science mode) since. Without the constraint of funds there was a few fun hours of learning the basics, to be sure, but then I was done. Obviously, my opinion is thus that the game is pointless without some constraint at the beginning that forces optimization. I'm assuming here that launching everything from Kerbin is intended to be just the early game, and so funds (or some functionally equivalent resource) is ideal for that early game. Funds are great there because they make sense as a reward for any kind of mission whatsoever, and so don't restrict the game design or require much design effort for something that's early game only. Whatever progression makes sense to get the player past the early game, the funds reward structure can be made to incentivize that. Once past the early game, when you're launching from somewhere else, it's also easy using funds to make it impractical to keep launching everything from Kerbin, but have funds be a total non-concern for any other launch location. For example, you have the funds to get a first colony started in a low delta-V location like Minmus or Gilly, but you need that colony to make further progress, at which point colony resource extraction is the new interesting constraint. Indeed, I don't think it's at all controversial to say "funds were badly done in KSP1". Players thought they needed to grind tourist missions and similar, which many people found boring, because of the game's total failure to communicate just how much money you got by ignoring the mission system and exploring new places. IMO, almost anything different than KSP1 funds would be better. But I would add small twist to what you said here: funds should become irrelevant only because you start building colonies and extracting resources directly. That is, making funds irrelevant should be the in-game reason you need to engage with the colony system and not just launch everything from Kerbin. Just as for the late game some exotic resource only found on hard-to-reach places should force engagement with the game's full logistics system, whatever that turns out to be. The point where you also can't just launch everything from early colony locations due to new constraints.
  10. Come on now, every software development manager I've ever worked for knew with unbreakable faith that 9 women could have a baby in 1 month! But to your point, that's why I think control mapping is a great project: it's a safe and easy change for new hires and junior programmers to do, people who we wouldn't want trying to fix the remaining game-braking bugs (and no doubt breaking 6 other things in the attempt) until they know the codebase better. Or even as something somewhat relaxing to do to recover from crunch, as the case may be.
  11. I assume they aren't changing anything in the next 2 weeks. But then a whole new patch cycle starts. I've said this about several EA games: make your players happy with the state of input and menus, as a priority. It's great bang-for-the-buck for removing "friction," improving accessibility, and generally making a game more pleasant to play, because it's very quick to fix compared to anything to do with the internals of a game. It also requires little understanding of the overall codebase, and many improvements can be done piecemeal, which makes it great for ramp-up projects for new hires, small work to do between big projects, and so on (or for small indie teams, buy this stuff from the store). Adding/improving controller support, best practices for keybindings, menu usability, color pickers for anyplace color is used in the UI, these are all small projects which can be done in isolation from other changes, and produce player-visible results right away.
  12. This sounds like an easy win (not that they'd want to add anything last minute, of course). Flight controls aren't just useful for atmospheric flight, they're really handy for docking too, any sort of fine maneuvering really. And it's just control mapping, so about an isolated a change as you can have in real software.
  13. Not sure where you were getting that idea from my posts. The launch cost for a basic rocket should be the same amount of funds, metals (or whatever material) and fuel regardless of where you launch it from. In the early game, metals and fuels would be unlimited, but funds would be tight. So you need all three for consistency but only funds matter. Mid-game, you're maybe launching from Duna. The funds cost of the rocket is now trivial because you have lots of funds, not because the cost changed. The metals and fuel costs now matter a lot, because you need to somehow get them on Duna, not because the amounts changed. I hope that's clear. So the focus of gameplay naturally changes from "I need cheap launches from KSP" to "I need ISRU". And later still you need lots of metal and fuel, so the gameplay evolves to "I need a colony that makes these resources at a scale where I no longer care about them." In the late game, none of the resources for basic rockets are scarce at all, you've finished that part of the game. Now it's all about whatever resource powers near-future tech, with exploration to find it and perhaps unique challenges in extracting it. And for the end game you need that, not just as simple ISRU, but as an automation/colony challenge to make vast amounts of it for the interstellar ship. OK, I'm utterly baffled by where the "grinding" comment came from. I assume you've ever played Factorio or some game in the genre it created, so you know it not about grinding. You simply can't progress the game that way, you have to embrace the new mechanics. And as you do the resource you worry about shifts over time. Yes, I totally a agree that "X or Y" can be more fun than "X or 10X", but that's much more dev work. Forgive me if I suggest that's not a useful direction, all things considered. (As a point of reference "451 games" (a kind of immersive sim) are all about "X or Y" to pass every challenge, and while I find them immensely fun they're so expensive to develop that only a few have ever been made.) That being said, Factorio is a whole lot of fun and it barely has any "X or Y" elements at all (coal liquefaction, and belts-or-bots are the only ones that comes to mind, and the game was a success before those). There's an amazing amount of player agency and choices to make in how you solve the problem, rather than which problem do you solve. You also talk about player choices that skip some steps, and while that can be fun for expert play, a lot of that doesn't have to be designed in. Expert players will find all sorts of skips you never designed in. But I don't think you should make content that, on a first playthrough, many players will skip (other than easter-egg type stuff), because again that's an expensive approach. Limited dev resources are usually better spent making content that all players will see. Of course, KSP does have replay value, so it wouldn't be a waste, but to me any sort of (designed-in) "alternate path" stuff should be added after the game is finished. It makes good DLC/expansion content, after all. But there is some "X or Y" in this approach and even a bit of "skip" choices, in that at each transition point between "how do I produce enough Resource A" and "how do I produce enough Resource B", there are interesting choices to make. E.g., as you start making a colony on Minmus, do you try to bootstrap that with lots of launched from Kerbin, or lean into colony ISRU and have it mostly build itself, or as an expert player decide "you know, I bet a colony on Gilly is a better long-term bet, and almost as easy" and skip Minmus altogether, There's no real problem with rocket parts and fuel being unlimited on Kerbin, any more than inexhaustible ore patches are necessarily a problem with automation games. You don't need to limit them on Kerbin, you just need something that makes launching resources from Kerbin at scale impractical. For the mid-game, when you're e.g. trying to build a colony on Duna, I would go with simply he funds cost. Lets assume you need really substantial amounts of metals (or whatever the construction resource is) to build and expand the colony. While the funds cost launching individual rockets might be a non-issue at this point in the game, the cost to launch 1000 is a different matter (or as Pthigrivi suggests, time could be the bottleneck.) As soon as you add automation to a game, the challenge becomes about scale, because the gameplay is about producing unlimited resources. Just because you have some unlimited source on Kerbin doesn't trivialize the game, but is rather the start of the chain. For building on Duna, you could try to launch everything from Kerbin, but as long as that doesn't scale well that's fine. As long as launching from e.g. a Minmus colony is a much easier approach, it's fine. Assuming here that a Minums colony would become much more efficient toolchain for launches to Duna than KSC launches, which wouldn't be very hard to design in.
  14. Perhaps a bit of an aside, but I see people worrying about the possibility of a failure state. This is a game. Failure states are expected. Without a failure state, you have some sort of interactive visual novel, or idle game, not a game in the usual sense. A failure state is a feature, not a bug. And unless you're deliberately playing some sort of hardcore or ironman challenge, you can just load an earlier save if there's a big problem.
  15. When you say ... my thought is: that's what the gameplay is in a game with resource management. At some stage in the game you need X to progress. And not just a store of X, it's an ongoing supply of X far beyond anything you've seen in the game before. So, in order to advance the game, you solve the problem of producing X in sufficient quantities that it's no longer the bottleneck. And at that point you've moved to the next stage of the game. The bottleneck resource defines the problem to solve, that problem being: get all you need. If you can avoid them. the whole mechanic is pointless; you overcome them. I mean, this is the basis of every craft-and-explore game, many colony sims, a whole collection of genres. Sure, you could go a different direction, but it's hard to have an in-character need for colonies if you don't. Obviously in sandbox mode you're building things just to build them, and that's great, but in some replacement for career mode you need colonies to be good at something, and it sure seems to fit that that something is resource production. Yes, in theory you could have multiple paths past a given stage in the game involving a choice of different resources, but that's just a lot more dev work to get to the same place. One of those resources will be the most efficient path, and most people will do that and ignore the rest: that's just how most people play games these days. I mean, if the dev team was way ahead of schedule and looking even more stuff to add to an already complete game, go for it. But that's not the world we live in. I can answer that. First, you don't need to "develop" funds or explain what they are or how they work. Good game design leverages "prior player knowledge" about the world. As for your suggestion: it doesn't reward you for launching rockets! Unless I misunderstand, this sound like a resource you get more of only as game time passes, which sound likes an idle game. It sure doesn't sound like a resource you get more of by reaching orbit, then reaching the Mun, then landing on the Mun and returning. All of the tutorial-like steps the early game needs to be about. With funds, it's trivial to tie rewards to these goals without breaking immersion. If I have a tank of something that slowly filled that limited my ability to do the fun part of the game, I would immediately assume my goal was to make that fill up faster, to get an unlimited supply of it. I'd be looking for a way to build more mines, because in the language of games you just told me that was my goal. I just don't see how that would make sense to accomplish by getting my first Kerbal out of the atmosphere, or demonstrating my mastery of orbital rendezvous and docking, or any of the key early game "learn to rocket" goals.
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