Interstellar: Voyage Between Stars

[Tech Support]

Beautiful !

[Hooligan Labs]

New post: Hallway Progress. The prefabs from the Sci Fi kit help a lot but I'm having to reorganize them to support my gameplay goals, including procedural generation of the habitation ring.

Read more here!

By the way, thanks everyone for the reputation! I have a lot going on but your feedback helps me try to keep up the pace.

[Hooligan Labs]

Update: New hall art! Starting to look like a real spaceship inside! This is the half-kilometer wide version with 200 rooms, where maybe a thousand people could live.

See more pictures here!

[gmpd2000]

Next devblog suggestion:

Events.

Air leaks, people dying for various reasons, etc...

[Hooligan Labs]

I think I can do that. I'm working on the game system now that measures how close your habitat is to suffering from disease, warfare, ignorance or apathy (all very deadly in space). If you have any events in mind that would push the people of a starship closer or further from those disasters then share them with me!

[gmpd2000]

I think I can do that. I'm working on the game system now that measures how close your habitat is to suffering from disease, warfare, ignorance or apathy (all very deadly in space). If you have any events in mind that would push the people of a starship closer or further from those disasters then share them with me!

I will name a few ideas I have:

Disease

Farther: Hygene education program?

Closer: Ration the medicaments, Make people careless about health.

Warfare

Closer: Maybe there's a group of fanatics of some sort of future religion (pastafarism) who wants everyone on the ship to eat spaghetti, since your ship doesn't carry spaghetti nor Italian chefs, they take the weapons and try to kill everyone that isn't one of them.

Only 3 because I don't have enough imagination right now.

Edited November 3, 2014 by gmpd2000

[Hooligan Labs]

This brings up an interesting distinction. As you are a computer program and the people on your ship have free will, you can only influence how they act. So you may set a school program to educate children on the importance of cleanliness, or you can zone more rooms for medicine production, but you can't actually make more medicine.

Also, these are more like trends. Disease is a trend, but an bioweapon attack by an extremist would be an event. Trends are dealt with on a high level by changing policies and room use. Events resolve themselves within days, if not seconds, by extreme methods.

If you have a room whose occupants have been exposed to a horrible virus then you better damn well seal that room. What follows is the choice if you will let doctors in to attempt treatment, risking the health of everyone on the ship, or if you simply wait for them to become inert biomatter for the recycler.

The choice becomes even harder when the virus attack strikes your electrical engineers. If they die, what if no-one else can figure out how to keep the lights on? Will the rest of your habitat die in dark?

[gmpd2000]

I have another idea:

If you are disliked too much by your passengers, then they may plan against you, and deactivate you, then, game over!

Possible causes:

You treat your passengers horribly (you may imagine your own causes), Computer-phobia, Mass hysteria, ignorance about AIs, etc...

[Hooligan Labs]

Going to post stories soon. First, I'm experimenting with new GUI and sharing animated GIFs of it!

Follow link for larger animation!

[Hooligan Labs]

I have been writing and re-writing example scenarios. I keep wanting to post but I have been making a lot of progress on gameplay and it's evolving / mutating rapidly, and I don't want to share anything that won't work with current gameplay design.

I have another idea:

If you are disliked too much by your passengers, then they may plan against you, and deactivate you, then, game over!

This is something that I've debated a lot. By my current gameplay goals, you as a ship and an AI can't be permanently deactivated - even if the habitat is destroyed and everyone dies, another civilization will rebuild you ten thousand years later because you and your ship are far too valuable. There is hard science to back this up.

I'm currently working through all the ways your ship's civilization can implode (and explode!). There are so many ways this can happen that it will be a full game unto itself. Having the people attack and destroy the AI would be like kerbals burning down the space center with torches.

[Hooligan Labs]

Big update!

4 Ways to Save Everyone from Dying in Space on Your Interstellar Generation Ship

Includes new pictures of gameplay, including the upcoming resource system and 3D GUI.

[gmpd2000]

Is this dead?

[Hooligan Labs]

Not dead! I will definitely say when it is, but I plan on making this work no matter what.

I just moved to a new house. Also, scripting in a reproductive system is very hard. Aging and death wasn't too bad, but when you have individual characters determining when and who they reproduce with is tricky!

[miracmert]

Why did I see this so late? This work looks freakingly amazing and promising!

[WinkAllKerb'']

Also, scripting in a reproductive system is very hard. Aging and death wasn't too bad, but when you have individual characters determining when and who they reproduce with is tricky!

Check/ have a look @ "Banished" if not done yet Hooli (& welcome back btw it might bring you / enhance some of your current ideas, concept, priority assign, etc. for scripting this kind of things.

Probably a good ref. for that actually imho. Seeing trough the code while playing mode on i mean.

Edited December 5, 2014 by WinkAllKerb''

[Hooligan Labs]

That is the weird thing when you get into game design. You don't just see the code, you write it! And you have to imagine what code best meets the game goals.

Banished has many similarities. But I think birth control in there is simply how many houses you have? That makes sense for a game about turning a forest into a city, but we need something else for a generation ship. What changes in a closed habitat is the people. So I need to create a model of life expectations and society and how it influences population growth.

[WinkAllKerb'']

That is the weird thing when you get into game design. You don't just see the code, you write it! And you have to imagine what code best meets the game goals.

Banished has many similarities. But I think birth control in there is simply how many houses you have? That makes sense for a game about turning a forest into a city, but we need something else for a generation ship. What changes in a closed habitat is the people. So I need to create a model of life expectations and society and how it influences population growth.

Not played it myself too, but from what(s) i read a year ago (or so) it's one of the first game that introduced aging, gender and fertility for managing the reproduction things. (Wich mean you can loss your town due to elderness years later if you not micro managed and planned the reproduction at the right time through aging+pop .gender+ fertility cross over) and there a few other nice little thing like that in this title can't really tell much more because was following it a few year ago but worth a look at some (of the few new and original) of the gaming concepts introduced within probably trough some relevant press article analysis or game directly dunno what could fit you best for your own project .

It's possible to "see"/"guess" the code indirectly from playin' a game/using a software, it's just a brain logical gate inverted dis/assembling in some way when you know a little about coding. Interest in that process is that it allow to grab logic idea and enhance them for your own project, wish i m not a so much rusted, slow, old/abandonned computer languages coder and xp player to be able to help more than that xD®.

Edited December 6, 2014 by WinkAllKerb''

[Hooligan Labs]

That is a good point. Micromanagement of population could be a gameplay factor. I will have to think about it.

What I am currently aiming for is a way to try building interesting or wacky cultures and seeing how well they do over time in the closed environment of a spaceship. Seeing if a chivalrous matriarchy, a barbaric renaissance or orthodox consumerism could survive seems fun to me. Especially when you throw in technical challenges. If I succeed, then people will talk about the game like, "Oh, sure, dynastic polygamy is fine if you have enough radiation shielding, but you will want to pivot to at least a feudal system or your authority is going to die off from mutations."

Of course, a lot of my coding is taking twice as long since I'm trying to leave it open to aliens too. It would be a completely different challenge with a bee-like race, with only a single queen, or hermaphroditic sentient trees.

[SpaceXray]

That is a good point. Micromanagement of population could be a gameplay factor. I will have to think about it.

What I am currently aiming for is a way to try building interesting or wacky cultures and seeing how well they do over time in the closed environment of a spaceship. Seeing if a chivalrous matriarchy, a barbaric renaissance or orthodox consumerism could survive seems fun to me. Especially when you throw in technical challenges. If I succeed, then people will talk about the game like, "Oh, sure, dynastic polygamy is fine if you have enough radiation shielding, but you will want to pivot to at least a feudal system or your authority is going to die off from mutations."

Of course, a lot of my coding is taking twice as long since I'm trying to leave it open to aliens too. It would be a completely different challenge with a bee-like race, with only a single queen, or hermaphroditic sentient trees.

Ender's Game reference?

[Hooligan Labs]

Ender's Game reference?

Well spotted, but no actually! The "piggies" in the Ender series have a really, really complex reproductive cycle, but they not hermaphrodites.

But this brings up an interesting scenario. I have currently classified ages based on human-like reproductive capability and work ability:

Infant: Does nothing but consume resources.

Child: Can work but not reproduce.

Adult: Can work and reproduce.

Elder: Can work but not reproduce.

The "tree" stage of a piggie's life cycle would be a unique situation where the being could reproduce but not work. Humans are almost never in this state except for the last few weeks or days of pregnancy. I'll have to consider this special case in the future.

Of course, this also opens up a whole new area of potential alien activity: metamorphosis. Butterfly from caterpillar, etc. That would be very difficult, but fun, to program.

BTW: Just programmed gestation period into the game. I'm also closing in on having births be possible to simulate. I'm focusing on just the females for determining when babies get made. Of course the other genders heavily influence this, but the code is simpler by starting with those who can actually make babies.

Edited December 10, 2014 by Hooligan Labs

[megatiger78]

IXS class?

[Hooligan Labs]

IXS class?

Are you referring to the model on the front page? Nope, that is a nuclear pulse propulsion engine, which is based on well understood technology we could use to build an interstellar ship now. It has a habitat ring on the front. That rotates to provide artificial gravity, which is really necessary for humans and most large organics to live for extended periods of time.

[megatiger78]

Are you referring to the model on the front page? Nope, that is a nuclear pulse propulsion engine, which is based on well understood technology we could use to build an interstellar ship now. It has a habitat ring on the front. That rotates to provide artificial gravity, which is really necessary for humans and most large organics to live for extended periods of time.

no I mean in the game could you arrive and find a IXS has done the trip in 3 months and set up a basic colony.

[Hooligan Labs]

no I mean in the game could you arrive and find a IXS has done the trip in 3 months and set up a basic colony.

Good point. This is how I plan on having it work in Interstellar.

1) Space is big. Really really big. If you started from Earth and an Alcubierre drive gets you a fantastic 10x light speed, it would still take you more than a year to get to the closest known potentially habitable planet (Tau Ceti e, I believe). Once you have occupied about 10 planets that far away, the next closest would be 49 years away (Kepler-186f). At this point you would have to expect your entire crew to be dead by the time they arrived, so you would need to have a second generation born on the ship to colonize it. And should you want to explore the center of the galaxy, which is about 27,000 light years away, you are looking at a 2,700 year journey.

2) We don't really know what is in deep space. We just know it's not empty. In Interstellar, it will have properties that explain a lot of what we do and don't know about alien life, and what that means for trying to cross it.

3) Society generally doesn't care about space. It's expensive, dangerous and unpleasant. It takes a monumental planet-wide cooperative effort to launch an interstellar ship. You may be playing as the only interstellar ship in existence, being refueled and improved a little bit each time that you make a journey to a new planet.

I think that makes for a compelling basis for the game.

[Hooligan Labs]

Update: Generations!

Read more here!