we NEED level design

[regex]

On 7/2/2016 at 6:40 PM, Megadeath said:

@regex You know what opens up untold vistas of exploration and goal setting? An understanding of coding, or even personal development of the unity engine.

I could say the same thing to OP, or you, in regards to "more direction", and pretty much did.  A few of the specific gripes herein are quite easily handled by ModuleManager at this very moment and other mods will quite easily provide a more "progression"-based approach.  Why not go install some mods instead of trying to be a jerk railroading a sandbox experience?

Career is the way it is because it is designed to be approachable from many different playstyles.  That means it isn't very good at imposing meaningful restrictions for any one playstyle, which results in disagreements such as these.

[Pthigrivi]

^True, but I don't necessarily think locking players into a more linear progression is what's missing. In fact allowing that open-world sense of exploration is really critical to what could make this game special. In some ways things are linear now, in that contracts for deeper exploration don't come up until you've built enough reputation. One of the biggest issues there is the opacity of the reputation system. Because players don't necessarily know how much reputation they need to get a Duna contract to pop up they are unable to plan and strategize. There's nowhere to look and see "Oh okay I have x reputation now. To get that Duna contract I want I will need y reputation, and I can get that by doing z Minmus mission. Because these dots aren't visually connectable the entire system seems arbitrary, even if it isn't. The same goes for the World First contracts. Because you and I have played a while we know that if you go here or there you just automatically get rewarded, but those rewards are also hidden in Mission Control so people don't recognize them as the reliable revenue source that they are. 

I know they're planning some changes to the way explore contracts work for 1.2. Hopefully we get a little closer there. Its tricky because you want to give a bit more structure to those big headline contracts, giving players a greater sense of control over where they are able to go while still withholding advances for Jool missions on the first day and rewarding players for return missions and daisy-chains and all that.

Edited July 6, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Pthigrivi]

This is a good post so I thought we could chat about it:

6 hours ago, KSK said:

There's been a lot of effort put into simplifying the game mechanics because complex game mechanics were deemed not to be fun. The problem is that now the game mechanics are too simple to allow for many interesting decisions, trade-offs or choices.

I don't think its necessarily about how simple the rules are. The rules to Go are incredibly simple for example. Its about how cleverly they are organized and employed. Above I argue it's not about the linearity. I think on that general scale we're in the ballpark. I will totally agree however that the rules at the moment are vague, which is largely the problem.
 

6 hours ago, KSK said:

- It's not an exploration game (which would play really well with the underlying concept of a peaceful species going to space for the sheer fun of it) because you know pretty much all there is to know about the Kerbol system right from the start.

This is tough. Part of it is we know all there is to know about the Kerbol system because there isn't really a whole lot to it at the moment. If landing in one spot poses no advantage to landing in another there is not significant difference between a blurry red ball and an un-blurry red ball. In other words discovery does nothing if there is nothing there to discover. Really the only way to fix this (and I totally agree they should) is to populate the planets with surface features and integrate finding and exploring those features into the mechanics of the game.
 

6 hours ago, KSK said:

- It's not any kind of story driven game - and I don't mean a tightly scripted set of missions and cutscenes because that would a) be too limiting and b) most likely be way beyond Squad's budget to do well. I'm thinking more of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri which has story elements and distinct characters woven through it whilst still remaining a pretty open ended strategy game. The kerbals on the other hand are just the same old green, googly eyed rocket fodder that they've always been. We know nothing about them, we're given no reason to care about them, either collectively or individually, there's no worldbuilding at all to speak of. We don't even know why the kerbals have a space program, which is a fairly major flaw in a game called Kerbal Space Program.

This is also a bit tricky because you still want to allow players to create and project their own stories into the type of play they enjoy. I think you're also right that either going highly scripted or going Bethesda brute force is not going to work for a number of reasons. Honestly something that would help a lot would just be giving kerbals randomly assigned hair and beards and glasses and things so at least you could start to see them as individuals and begin projecting relationships onto them. The experience system too could be more visually satisfying, with each kerbal earning badges and stripes for the different missions they've accomplished.

 More deeply though I think is that basic problem of defining some kind of structure on which players could hang their own stories without getting so proscriptive that players are just going through someone else's predetermined motions. Reputation could accomplish that. If you could just see what exactly your reputation was buying and had a clear sense of how each planet is unlocked (after x rep) you'd have the opportunity to follow some basic rules and still define your own story.
 

6 hours ago, KSK said:

- It's definitely not a tycoon or resource management game. Not when the answer to most of your problems can be boiled down to 'grind more satellite missions (or whatever your personal flavour of cheese may be)' or 'visit another Mun / Minmus biome'.

This to me is simply the end result of the above factors remaining unsolved. Grind, ultimately, is repetition. If the planets are blank worlds with nothing to find then going to another biome is no different than going to the first. If you're not invested personally in kerbals than they too are blank, googly-eyed cargo. Because your second and third trips to the Mun are no different from the first bothering to gather readings from those places also ends up being repetitive and boring (and the fact that all you have to do is click on them doesn't help). If the activity of going to new places and collecting science was fun in its own right no one would be too worried about how long it took to finish the tech tree. 

That, and some balance things with the cost of buildings and stuff for sure.

Edited July 6, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[tater]

6 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

This is tough. Part of it is we know all there is to know about the Kerbol system because there isn't really a whole lot to it at the moment. If landing in one spot poses no advantage to landing in another there is not significant difference between a blurry red ball and an un-blurry red ball. In other words discovery does nothing if there is nothing there to discover. Really the only way to fix this (and I totally agree they should) is to populate the planets with surface features and integrate finding and exploring those features into the mechanics of the game.
 

Populating the worlds with more to see would help a lot, but it's not enough. It merely makes the grind more interesting visually.

To be an exploration game, you need to actually explore, period. It needs to have unknowns, and as a "science" game, ideally some of the unknowns would be determined via science, and might even have some utility on future flights. This requires random worlds---people get hung up on this, but they could be from a vetted library of worlds, plus some rescaling, and perhaps even classes of worlds that might allow the base world to have variant atmospheres that make sense, etc. What should be known from the ground is known---orbital parameters, and an image that matches a telescope image from the ground (or in orbit should that "part" be added). Perhaps atmospheric science instruments unlock something like the mod that shows a realistic flight path through an atmosphere, facilitating planned landing locations better. I have gone on at length about this in other threads, to me this would be ideal, with the "career" mechanics otherwise not changing all that much.

 

6 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

This is also a bit tricky because you still want to allow players to create and project their own stories into the type of play they enjoy. I think you're also right that either going highly scripted or going Bethesda brute force is not going to work for a number of reasons. Honestly something that would help a lot would just be giving kerbals randomly assigned hair and beards and glasses and things so at least you could start to see them as individuals and begin projecting relationships onto them. The experience system too could be more visually satisfying, with each kerbal earning badges and stripes for the different missions they've accomplished.

 More deeply though I think is that basic problem of defining some kind of structure on which players could hang their own stories without getting so proscriptive that players are just going through someone else's predetermined motions. Reputation could accomplish that. If you could just see what exactly your reputation was buying and had a clear sense of how each planet is unlocked (after x rep) you'd have the opportunity to follow some basic rules and still define your own story.
 

Thee are a couple ways to look at it. One was the sort of role-playing sense I got from his post---kerbals as characters you care about... somehow. Little else would change, except for them having more personality so that you care about them... I tend to not lose any, but except for a couple that had my kid's names within them, I have little attachment to them  

The fact that the whole thing comes and goes in a couple years does;t help, there is no sense of time progression.

6 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

This to me is simply the end result of the above factors remaining unsolved. Grind, ultimately, is repetition. If the planets are blank worlds with nothing to find then going to another biome is no different than going to the first. If you're not invested personally in kerbals than they too are blank, googly-eyed cargo. Because your second and third trips to the Mun are no different from the first bothering to gather readings from those places also ends up being repetitive and boring (and the fact that all you have to do is click on them doesn't help). If the activity of going to new places and collecting science was fun in its own right no one would be too worried about how long it took to finish the tech tree. 

That, and some balance things with the cost of buildings and stuff for sure.

It's not a management game because there is zero management enabled, or required. Management requires people (kerbals) to manage. That means tasking them to do things, and having them do them. No AI kerbals, no management game, IMHO. That is a necessary condition. 

[KSK]

10 hours ago, tater said:

I'd instead say that your post (quoted above) is perhaps the best summary of Career Mode that I've read. I could not possibly agree with every line of this more than I do.

I'll not break your post up to comment, people need to read it again so it sinks in as written .Your bullet points are telling, and point to what should be done, IMO. I've addressed your first one many times, with my dream of "fog of war" and a true exploration game. 

Your second and third points, the story driven hits at something I had not really considered much, but would be a great game I think people would like to play. Something, anything, that gives the characters life so that you care about them. I'm at a loss as to how, but man that would be cool. Management? Yeah, it fails at multiple levels.

I suppose the reason I harp about a randomized, explore option is that I see "explore" as the easiest to actually accomplish. A better program management game pretty much requires some sort of AI kerbals, plus a robust economic model so that it feels like it makes sense.

 

Wow - thank you! And thanks to everyone else who picked up my post and ran with it. A couple of thoughts in response:

I agree that exploration is fundamental. At a very basic level a randomised (or variable but curated) Kerbol system would ensure that no two games are quite the same and give players something different to go out and see every time. Even if nothing else changed that would be huge. Include fog-of-war elements, make science key to clearing some of that fog and provide something meaningful to find once the fog is clear (more on that below) and I think we'd have the foundation of a truly great game (as opposed to an already great sandbox). Doing it well would require quite a bit of effort but it would be worth it in my opinion.

Combine that with expanded resource management elements and suddenly the game comes to life. I think all of the following have been extensively debated before and that opinions on all of them are divided, with both camps coming out with solid arguments. With that said, I would do the following:

• Include time.
• Include life support. Doesn't have to be excessively complex and could even just be a single 'life support' resource.
• Make the ISRU system a little more detailed. This doesn't (and shouldn't) be as complex as Squad's original system but it should include at least two, probably three mineable or extractable resources.

Time is fundamental. If things take time to accomplish then suddenly contract time limits become a meaningful constraint that players have to plan around and work towards. Combine time with life support and suddenly logistics become a real issue. Time  also introduces a much needed shot of granularity into the base-upgrade side of the game. Put simply, when things take time, making them take less time becomes an obvious reason for upgrading your facilities. Want to build rockets faster - upgrade your VAB. Want to decrease crew training times - upgrade your astronaut centre or use more experienced astronauts!

Better yet, logistics and time management challenges scale quite well with mission ambition and therefore player skill. A trip to the Mun might just be a case of making sure you've packed enough life support for the journey and isn't too challenging for novice players. A crewed trip to Jool becomes a serious undertaking to challenge even veteran players.

You'll need a lot of life support - how are you going to manage that? A brute force enormous spacecraft with enough capacity to get your crew there and back? A smaller ship combined with uncrewed tanker missions to resupply for the journey home. A smaller ship combined with ISRU equipment (more on that shortly). Whatever option you choose you'll need to make sure that you can build it in time for the next transfer window, make sure that you've unlocked all the right technologies before starting construction and make sure that you've upgraded your facilities in time to cope with launching whatever size of ship you have in mind.

Choices and trade-offs. Choices and trade-offs.

Finally - expanded ISRU. This is the meaningful stuff to find by exploration. At the moment we have Ore which is found nearly everywhere. Expand the system slightly to include two or three resources that aren't necessarily found on the same world and exploration becomes important for mission planning as well as something to do for its own sake. Probably easiest to illustrate by example:

I have a contract to take x number of kerbals to Duna and bring them home. I'm thinking that ISRU is going to be a part of my mission plan. First thing I'd better do is scout out Duna and Ike and see what's out there to use. Do I have time to do this before launching the mission proper? Better read the fine print on that contract!

 Maybe I'll be lucky and find everything I need on Duna itself. Maybe I'll only find two resources on Duna and need to go to Ike to get the third. Maybe I'll only find 2/3 resources in total, enough to restock my life-support, monoprop and oxidant for the journey home but I'm missing that one vital resource needed to make fuel. I'd better design my Duna ship accordingly, or perhaps I'll just switch to an alternative mission plan.

Combine the above sort of scenarios with a randomised or semi-randomised Kerbol system and those sort of trade-offs, choices, resource management and planning become a fresh set of challenges every time you start a new game!

More on story elements later - I need to go to work.

 

 

 

 

[Wjolcz]

19 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Honestly something that would help a lot would just be giving kerbals randomly assigned hair and beards and glasses and things so at least you could start to see them as individuals and begin projecting relationships onto them. The experience system too could be more visually satisfying, with each kerbal earning badges and stripes for the different missions they've accomplished.

I don't think simply giving kerbals mustaches would make me care more about them. Maybe their Stupidity/Courage stats could change based on how many flights/Gs they pulled in vessels built by us, or sth like that. Anyway, I think their stats should actually be meaningful.

19 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

More deeply though I think is that basic problem of defining some kind of structure on which players could hang their own stories without getting so proscriptive that players are just going through someone else's predetermined motions. Reputation could accomplish that. If you could just see what exactly your reputation was buying and had a clear sense of how each planet is unlocked (after x rep) you'd have the opportunity to follow some basic rules and still define your own story.

I agree. The reputation could be a great thing to base the whole career on. Couple that with the freedom of objective selection and the career would get so much better.

19 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

his to me is simply the end result of the above factors remaining unsolved. Grind, ultimately, is repetition. If the planets are blank worlds with nothing to find then going to another biome is no different than going to the first. If you're not invested personally in kerbals than they too are blank, googly-eyed cargo. Because your second and third trips to the Mun are no different from the first bothering to gather readings from those places also ends up being repetitive and boring (and the fact that all you have to do is click on them doesn't help). If the activity of going to new places and collecting science was fun in its own right no one would be too worried about how long it took to finish the tech tree. 

Making grind more fun won't affect the fact that it's still grind, except it being more fun the first time you perform it. Then, it becomes a grind again. That's not going to fix the problem. What could fix this is a system based on programs where you decide what to do next and focus on it. That would give a sense of progression while keeping the sandboxy feel of the game. You would do what you do in sandbox, but would be rewarded and progress by doing so.

Edited July 6, 2016 by Veeltch

[KSK]

OK, story elements. The big advantage I see with this is that, done right, they should enhance almost any version of Career mode whether that be the current stock implementation or any of the alternatives discussed on these forums.

'Story elements' is also quite a vague term. At one extreme it could involve setting out a bigger picture for your space program. Who are the kerbals? Why are they going to space? How did the Space Program get started? It could involve bringing in the various corporations as competitors, as a source of characters for the story or anything other than the faceless names they are at the moment. It would probably involve a reason for your space program and some kind of victory condition when you fulfil your grand mission - whatever that happens to be,

Whilst, I personally would quite like that approach (and have taken a stab at writing that level of backstory myself), I can also see Kuzzter's very reasonable point that it may not sit very well with an open-ended or sandbox style game. It would also involve a metric boat-load of work (not least providing a much more rich and detailed Kerbin to play in) and probably a rewriting of the game from the ground up. So a 'big picture' approach seems like a non-starter.

So instead of a big picture approach, can we go for a little picture instead? Even if we don't really know much about the background to our kerbals, can we at least give them personalities and progression and in the process, create a richer space program with characters that players care about and get attached to? On a similar note, can we do a bit of smoke-and-mirrors to give the impression that the rest of Kerbin has at least heard about the Space Program, even if gameplay limitations mean that we're not really interacting with the rest of Kerbin.

I think we can do both. Possibly. It would still involve a lot of work but nowhere near the crazy amounts needed to create a bigger picture.

First and foremost we need to give our kerbals their own histories. The Final Frontier mod did this after a fashion, so it should be possible. I might not care too much about Randname Kerbal if she's just another name on the roster but I would get far more involved with Tater von Kerman, first kerbal to venture into Kerbin's upper atmosphere, crewmember aboard Outbound 3, the first kerballed spacecraft to orbit Minmus and then, as commander of Duna 1,  the first kerbal to walk on Duna.

One way of doing this would be to populate a biography page for each kerbal on the roster as they complete flights or are involved in milestone achievements. More subtly, I would like to see a system in which the kerbalopedia or the flavour text for the tech tree used was based on the achievements of your kerbonauts, and included little quotes from them.

For example, the very first node on the tech tree could include something like this:

"The Space Program was founded on enthusiasm, dreams and no shortage of wild ideas. The hard realities of building any kind of working spacecraft forced us to shelve most of those ideas - but we didn't forget about them..."

- Jebediah Kerman:  KIS - a history of kerballed spaceflight.

Now, if there was some way of tracking how the player met various goals (self imposed or contractual) and, more importantly, which kerbals were involved, then the flavour text for later nodes on the tech tree could be dynamically generated. For example, Player A's first mission to the Mun involved Bob Kerman in a single seat capsule. Player A then researches technology Y which opens up the possibility of clustered engines (this could be something as simple as the tricoupler). The flavour text for tech node Y becomes something like:

"Bob's pioneering flight around the Mun was an enormous step forward that did wonders for our reputation (and bank balance). Landing on the Mun was a much bigger job that needed a much bigger rocket. Since we didn't have any larger engines to hand, we decided to try clustering lots of smaller ones together."

Gene Kerman:  The Early Years - a personal diary.

Alternatively, if the player opts to research 2.5m tanks and engines instead, then the flavour text for the applicable tech node might look like this:

"Good Kerbals. We all watched Bob Kerman's broadcast from Munar orbit with awe -  but I say we can do better. The pre-production version of our new Skipper engine has just finished it's qualifying tests. All we need now is a larger rocket to put it on..."

Ademone Kerman - Rockomax board meeting minutes.

Finally, I would like to take a leaf out of Civ II's book and have the kerbal equivalent of the governmental palace. Lets have a Museum Screen with artifacts and possibly pictures to commemorate player milestones. If you'll forgive the self-indulgence, I picture it being something like this:
 

Spoiler

 

By the time the car pulled up at the Space Centre, Kerbol was setting behind the Vehicle Assembly Building, casting long shadows over the stands and smaller buildings. Geneney unlocked the museum doors and waved the three kerbonauts inside. He flicked the lights on and stood quietly to one side, letting them take in the refurbished exhibits in their own time.

Jeb’s eyes flicked over the first exhibit with it’s familar Kerbal and Moho capsules on their stands. Behind them, sets of photographs gleamed in new frames: Bill’s original snaps of Kerbin taken from Kerbal 1, Geneney, Wernher and Lucan riding out to the launchpad and the waiting Kerbal 2, photographs of half built capsules and ascending Moho boosters. He smiled faintly at the large ‘First Steps to the Unknown’ signboard suspended overhead before turning his attention to the second exhibit: ‘Working Together in Space.’

There, the Eve 1 capsule sat side by side with their borrowed Rockomax docking adaptor, still mounted on its mysteriously acquired dolly and facing an engineering mockup of the Eve docking ring on its stand. Photographs of the Eve 1 and Next Step spacecraft joined nose-to-nose in orbit adorned the wall behind them, together with pictures of their crews floating together inside. Spacesuits and other pieces of equipment stood mounted in tall, glass fronted cabinets.

Despite himself, Jeb’s chest swelled with pride at the third exhibit: ‘To the Mün and Back’. Above the first of three large display boards, a plainly printed banner simply read: ‘We, voyagers from the planet Kerbin…’ Below it, pictures of the Munar far side taken from the Muna 2 probe sat side by side with pictures of Kerbin framed in Pioneer 1’s rendezvous window, and the first pictures of Kerbin rising over the Mün. Next to them, Pioneer 2 floated high above the Great Tranquil Sea and Barrie stood atop Pioneer 3’s service module, circling the Mün with Seanan’s signpost clutched across her chest. 

The second display board labelled: ‘First set foot upon the Mün…’ showed pictures of himself and Jondun working on the Munar surface arranged around a huge blown-up photograph of the two of them shaking hands in front of the flag of all Kerbin. Then Jeb turned to the third board and a shiver ran down his back. Labelled: ’We came in peace for Kerm and Kerbal’ , it didn’t have any pictures of space or spacecraft. Instead it was full of kerbals.

 Kerbals packed into village halls. Winding queues of kerbals waiting patiently outside cinemas. A great ocean of green figures surrounding the Capital building and its seven huge screens. The Council of Twelve Pillars themselves, seated in front of one of the screens, watching two space-suited figures walking against a backdrop of grey. And one blurry, pixellated photograph of a group of uniformed kerbals sitting beneath a pair of flags.

“We got that one in the post.”  Jeb jumped, head snapping round to see a sombre Geneney standing beside him. “Sent anonymously but with a letter inside. Those are Wakiran, Kolan and even Firesvarn soldiers, Jeb. All sitting together waiting for you to come around the Mün after MOI.” Geneney swallowed hard. “We came in peace for Kerm and Kerbal. I don’t where you pulled that from but it was nothing but the plain truth that day.”

 

 

[tater]

6 hours ago, KSK said:

Wow - thank you! And thanks to everyone else who picked up my post and ran with it. A couple of thoughts in response:

It's rare to see such a concise and useful statement of a problem.

6 hours ago, KSK said:

I agree that exploration is fundamental. At a very basic level a randomised (or variable but curated) Kerbol system would ensure that no two games are quite the same and give players something different to go out and see every time. Even if nothing else changed that would be huge. Include fog-of-war elements, make science key to clearing some of that fog and provide something meaningful to find once the fog is clear (more on that below) and I think we'd have the foundation of a truly great game (as opposed to an already great sandbox). Doing it well would require quite a bit of effort but it would be worth it in my opinion.

Yes, it would be non-trivial, but I think that this really would have been the best possible way to go with a "kerbal" career system since it focusses on the one huge difference between KSP and so many other games, it's entirely peaceful nature, and the fact that anyone playing it is actually learning something, even in a watered-down kerbal way, about the way rockets work in the real world. 

It's the hardest to do given the current system in place (meaning it's a fundamental change, not tweaking the existing system), but if KSP was a blank slate career wise, I think exploration is actually the easiest road to a really good career system to please a wide array of players as it is not artificially constraining the player through limits, it constrains the player via physics. Ie: you have a new set of design choices because this career iteration, you might actually need to contemplate a staged lander for the Mun since in this new career, the Mun is 5X more massive than the stock Mun. 

Exploration would also be predicated upon meaningful science, I think. Camera probes (or astronauts) improve map zoom level. Atmospheric science unlocks (by world) the ability to predict reentries more accurately. Medical science (say space station science) can improve LS tech, etc.

6 hours ago, KSK said:

Combine that with expanded resource management elements and suddenly the game comes to life. I think all of the following have been extensively debated before and that opinions on all of them are divided, with both camps coming out with solid arguments. With that said, I would do the following:

• Include time.
• Include life support. Doesn't have to be excessively complex and could even just be a single 'life support' resource.
• Make the ISRU system a little more detailed. This doesn't (and shouldn't) be as complex as Squad's original system but it should include at least two, probably three mineable or extractable resources.

Time is fundamental. If things take time to accomplish then suddenly contract time limits become a meaningful constraint that players have to plan around and work towards. Combine time with life support and suddenly logistics become a real issue. Time  also introduces a much needed shot of granularity into the base-upgrade side of the game. Put simply, when things take time, making them take less time becomes an obvious reason for upgrading your facilities. Want to build rockets faster - upgrade your VAB. Want to decrease crew training times - upgrade your astronaut centre or use more experienced astronauts!

Better yet, logistics and time management challenges scale quite well with mission ambition and therefore player skill. A trip to the Mun might just be a case of making sure you've packed enough life support for the journey and isn't too challenging for novice players. A crewed trip to Jool becomes a serious undertaking to challenge even veteran players.

This addresses one of the critical gameplay issues with stock KSP career---it gets easier as you progress, not harder, or even flat. LS mean that you not only might go farther away in later career, you need to drag more mass along with you. I think that the logistics of later career games really begs for some AI, though. Design a craft to be assembled in orbit, then have the ability for the 10 launches it takes to get ready to happen without the player having to do it all by hand (you could choose to, obviously).

 

6 hours ago, KSK said:

You'll need a lot of life support - how are you going to manage that? A brute force enormous spacecraft with enough capacity to get your crew there and back? A smaller ship combined with uncrewed tanker missions to resupply for the journey home. A smaller ship combined with ISRU equipment (more on that shortly). Whatever option you choose you'll need to make sure that you can build it in time for the next transfer window, make sure that you've unlocked all the right technologies before starting construction and make sure that you've upgraded your facilities in time to cope with launching whatever size of ship you have in mind.

I think LS plus time really requires the ability to manage a program, meaning scheduled resupply missions, etc. Perhaps they have a failure chance as well---eliminate most of those "rescue" contracts, and allow your own scheduled flights to have some (small) chance of needing rescue, instead.

 

6 hours ago, KSK said:

Choices and trade-offs. Choices and trade-offs.

This is it in a nutshell. Choices and trade offs. That's really the point of a career mode. To create novel problems for the player to solve. Not random side-quest problems (fire an SRB on a suborbital trajectory over the Mun---for reasons), but rational trade-offs. The real Apollo program debate over Earth Orbit Rendezvous vs Direct Ascent, vs Lunar Orbit rendezvous being a real life example. That's the level I think we are all talking about in terms of meaningful design choices.

There was a thread that said that most players don't leave Kerbin SoI. Assume that is true. It's really sad that the Mun isn't big enough to require real choices for Mun missions, particularly when we also have Minmus as an easy option. In a simple rescale (say 6.4X which I play) with LS added (simple, like USILS), you end up with an early career choice of going to Minmus, which takes a lot of LS (it's like a 45 day trip there), but landing/return is trivial, or the Mun, which takes no additional LS (USILS gives you 15 days with nothing added), but the lander needs to be larger, possibly staged. It's a fun trade off.

 

6 hours ago, KSK said:

Finally - expanded ISRU. This is the meaningful stuff to find by exploration. At the moment we have Ore which is found nearly everywhere. Expand the system slightly to include two or three resources that aren't necessarily found on the same world and exploration becomes important for mission planning as well as something to do for its own sake. Probably easiest to illustrate by example:

I have a contract to take x number of kerbals to Duna and bring them home. I'm thinking that ISRU is going to be a part of my mission plan. First thing I'd better do is scout out Duna and Ike and see what's out there to use. Do I have time to do this before launching the mission proper? Better read the fine print on that contract!

 Maybe I'll be lucky and find everything I need on Duna itself. Maybe I'll only find two resources on Duna and need to go to Ike to get the third. Maybe I'll only find 2/3 resources in total, enough to restock my life-support, monoprop and oxidant for the journey home but I'm missing that one vital resource needed to make fuel. I'd better design my Duna ship accordingly, or perhaps I'll just switch to an alternative mission plan.

ISRU is a late game thing, but yeah, it opens things up for that phase.

ISRU changes are certainly easy to mess with compared to fog of war.

6 hours ago, KSK said:

Combine the above sort of scenarios with a randomised or semi-randomised Kerbol system and those sort of trade-offs, choices, resource management and planning become a fresh set of challenges every time you start a new game!

More on story elements later - I need to go to work.

Sorry for contributing in taking this thread entirely off the rails of a campaign editor.

[Pthigrivi]

16 hours ago, Veeltch said:

I don't think simply giving kerbals mustaches would make me care more about them. Maybe their Stupidity/Courage stats could change based on how many flights/Gs they pulled in vessels built by us, or sth like that. Anyway, I think their stats should actually be meaningful.

Yeah I mean, of course, this is just a silly little addition for RP. That said its also relatively easy to implement. It could be a dozen or so models that would just be randomly mapped onto the existing Kerbal frames. Beyond that you'd need to go Tater's route and actually make them behaviorally different, which means scripting some pretty complex AI. Im not a programmer but this sounds really super hard to do effectively, and Im not sure KSP really needs to become the Sims. Stats could totally do something though, maybe have some effect on how fast they gain experience and how long they could self-sustain if a habitation mechanic were implemented. More significant would just be polishing up the UI that lets you know where kerbals have been and what they've accomplished. 

16 hours ago, Veeltch said:

Making grind more fun won't affect the fact that it's still grind, except it being more fun the first time you perform it. Then, it becomes a grind again. That's not going to fix the problem. What could fix this is a system based on programs where you decide what to do next and focus on it. That would give a sense of progression while keeping the sandboxy feel of the game. You would do what you do in sandbox, but would be rewarded and progress by doing so.

It does if there are actual dynamics involved and not just repetitively doing the same thing again and again. If taking readings from the Mun meant actually doing something different there each time you went and those tasks were themselves challenging you wouldn't get that dragging feeling. 

Still, from a balance standpoint, even with surface features and fun experiments I tend to think a skilled player really shouldn't have to go to the same body more than a few times in order to progress. A decent player should really be able to send an orbital probe to the Mun, land a probe, send 3 or less crewed missions and have plenty of science to unlock the parts to build interplanetary probes. I don't know how this meshes with your playstyle but this is super doable right now. My whole thing here has been that we should be focused on improving the quality of the experience rather than extending the breadth of repetitive tasks. 

Edited July 7, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Wjolcz]

30 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Stats could totally do something though, maybe have some effect on how fast they gain experience and how long they could self-sustain if a habitation mechanic were implemented

I actually really like this idea. If LS ever becomes a thing this should totally be a part of it.

Kerbals could, for example, use a certain amount of electricity when on-board of a vessel, but each 5-star crew member would use a fraction of EC a newbie astronaut would need to stay alive, or something like that. I'm just brainstorming this, but I would really like it to become a thing some day. Crew stats could become a great thing if we ever get stock LS.

30 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

It does if there are actual dynamics involved and not just repetitively doing the same thing again and again. If taking readings from the Mun meant actually doing something different there each time you went and those tasks were themselves challenging you wouldn't get that dragging feeling. 

Well, yeah. The problem is that collecting rocks and scribbling down the results of a temperature is not that fun. I really don't see a way to make fireworks out of scientific instruments (I actually do, but that involves exploding them; not the point though). I feel like this should be left for a career mechanics refinement. A proper overhaul of basic systems needs to be done first.

Playing golf on the Mun, though... I'm still waiting for @nightingale to implement that into Kerbal Sports. Scoring birdies on another planetary body is totally what astronauts and scientists do, right?

Edited July 7, 2016 by Veeltch

[nightingale]

35 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

Playing golf on the Mun, though... I'm still waiting for @nightingale to implement that into Kerbal Sports. Scoring birdies on another planetary body is totally what astronauts and scientists do, right?

Heh, golf is the reason I called the mod Kerbal Sports and not Kerbal Fishing.  No real ETA on that though...  maybe April 1, 2017?

[Mr. Scruffy]

About things to do when landed on a distant body:

I dont think science-mini-games are a good idea. In essence, i think, what that would do is encourage save-scumming (after all, you are not going all the way there, just to end up failing in some mini-game, are you?) and/or more clicking, which will feel tedious as well, after a couple of times. Also, such mini-games would need to stay within the theme - least we were to play some sort of tetris or the like in order to perform a temperature scan - and i find it hard to imagine minigames for all the instruments that would not be either trivial (reading a thermometer), tedious or overwhelming (how is a gravoli detector operated?).

I think one way to encourage ground-activity would be to have terrain-properties ´below´ the ´biomes´ (and maybe have less of the later to compensate): Altitude and slopiness, for example. This way, you´d have a reason to travel a bit, within the limits of what you can realistically reach with one landing in a reasonable amount of time. Like when you land in a small crater, you might want to go/drive to its rim, to take seperate measurements on its slopes and at different altitudes.

Or simply being incentivized, somehow, to take several readings within the same ´biome´ with a certain moderate (as in a couple of km max) distances from each other, just to acertain the charactistic nature of the values for the ´biome´ in question (´sample-size´).

 

[micr0wave]

The purpose of a sandbox is to have fun.

When you need the game to give you a purpose to do stuff, sandbox games aren't your piece of cake.

[Mr. Scruffy]

4 minutes ago, micr0wave said:

The purpose of a sandbox is to have fun.

When you need the game to give you a purpose to do stuff, sandbox games aren't your piece of cake.

´Sandbox´ is the name of just one of three modes of the game, as it is now, and doesnt even feature science at all. So this post is entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

[evileye.x]

On 06.07.2016 at 7:35 AM, Pthigrivi said:

Honestly something that would help a lot would just be giving kerbals randomly assigned hair and beards and glasses and things so at least you could start to see them as individuals and begin projecting relationships onto them.

But... but... http://kerbal.curseforge.com/projects/diverse-kerbal-heads-1-0

On 06.07.2016 at 2:08 PM, Veeltch said:

I don't think simply giving kerbals mustaches would make me care more about them.

My Jeb has mustaches.... Had until he was blown up on ascent in some kind of Silbervogel

Spoiler

http://imgur.com/dwExnYN

 

Edited July 7, 2016 by evileye.x

[Pthigrivi]

Re: Mr Scruffy, Yeah I'm also not crazy about mini games. I'm talking about in-engine  dynamics, like these.

Edited July 7, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[tater]

2 hours ago, micr0wave said:

The purpose of a sandbox is to have fun.

When you need the game to give you a purpose to do stuff, sandbox games aren't your piece of cake.

So the only way to play the sandbox game, Minecraft, is in "creative" mode, with an ultra-flat world? If you need the game to give you mountains, clearly you lack the creativity to build your own mountains, right?

Even KSP Sandbox could use the ability to turn on all the science/career stuff piecemeal, frankly---which getting back to the thread could be done with a 'Career mode editor" (I'm using that term instead of "level design"). Sandbox with science points turned on. The paradigm of the current Career mode throwing contracts at you is not the only possible career mode, as we have been discussing, and in fact that model is a large part of the problem with career mode. Many of us would prefer a career model where we pick/design the missions---almost all of them (sat launches would be services done for a 3d party, so if they need polar, you can hardly tell a customer they want GEO, instead).

[Mr. Scruffy]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Re: Mr Scruffy, Yeah I'm also not crazy about mini games. I'm talking about in-engine  dynamics, like these.

Uhh, i totally missed that thread - really good stuff, there, imho!

[Pthigrivi]

Thanks Scruff! I mean a few of those things wouldn't be too hard to do but for sure making scanning and impactor experiments stock and adding surface features is a huge ask, I have no illusions about that. Im sure its very unlikely things will happen that way, but I hope some spirit of those ideas might be explored in the future. Like right now the prospecting system is a little hinky but it does at least behave like science, providing basic tools to gain knowledge that helps you better exploit the world around you. The scanner has to be put in a special orbit, and the narrow band scanner helps guide landings to richer deposits. There are basic rules that help you understand how each tool is useful. I just think it would be great if that kind of logic were brought to the other experiments as well. Part of my attitude through all this is Im pretty hopeful that Squad will keep chiseling away and refining and adding cool things for years to come, but I don't think at any point they're likely to totally scrap what they already have. To me its a question of what's the biggest bang for the buck, and what little suggestions get us incrementally from where we are to someplace even better. Thats why I generally suggest things like making UI changes so you can more sensibly access explore contracts, rather than asking for a whole new contracting system. Before we give kerbals real autonomy maybe we could at least give them some individuality? Maybe we can get real integrated IVA's where you can crawl from one module to another? Maybe fleshing out the skill tree with some cool tasks for engineers and pilots like automatically balancing COM and landing site prediction and holding angle to horizon? Once you have those kinds of things locked in there are at least waypoints established for future AI to navigate. Maybe instead of asking for dozens of planets maybe we could just get GP2? As tater pointed out most people aren't making it past Kerbin, so there's probably something important to solve there first. Not being an experienced programmer its hard for me to anticipate where things might go in the deep long-term. My thinking is its probably most helpful to scout out what the next most necessary small steps might be for 1.2 and 1.3 etc, adding things like better calibrated contract end dates and mission planning, rather than throwing my hands up and saying "everything is terrible! start over!"

Edited July 8, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Wjolcz]

17 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

rather than throwing my hands up and saying "everything is terrible! start over!"

Everything is terrible! Start over!

Seriously though, the career mode needs to be redone IMO. It wasn't any good from the beginning and it isn't now. The devs didn't think it through. After a proper career overhaul I will gladly see more things being added/changed. The core idea needs to be sane and stable first to make any changes to it. I'm not against your ideas, but I think adding them right now would make the career/science modes even messier than they are now. It simply would be a shame to have resources and time wasted, because of how bad the main system is.

[tater]

While I agree that the most likely solution would not be "start over," honestly, the best and easiest possible solution is... "start over." The career system is fundamentally flawed, IMO, and I really don't think it is capable of being more than a sort of side-quest system. Sure, maybe you could make a better side quest system, but it will still never actually be good.

Edited July 8, 2016 by tater

[Pthigrivi]

Well, my thinking is the side quests would be totally cool if it were more clear what the main quest was. To me its all about managing the explore and world first contracts. Those big first missions to other worlds are the heart of this game. Its not easy, but certainly doable to give some spinal structure while still leaving the how and in-what-order mostly to the player. 

[tater]

Yeah... I'm pretty much despairing of any improvement. Squad's solution was basically to just double-down on what they had by adding more---but still lousy---contracts. The base paradigm is to create novel missions by requiring the player to do some idiotic mission for funds/sci/rep, when the real way to get the player to have to use novel designs or missions should be because of physics limitations, or available tech/funds limitations (or both).

Edited July 15, 2016 by tater
autocorrect didn't like "despairing"