Exospace Update
— An Explanation of what Exospace is and where things are at.
Alright so it’s time I tried to explain Exospace, what it is, what already exists and the overall goals/intents of Exospace.
The quick gist is the following-
Genre: Sci-fi Adventure
Perspective: Top-Down
Game Engine: Unity Engine
The premise of Exospace is that you are a ship pilot who has been entrapped into the anomalous volume of warped space-time known as Exospace. From there the objective is mostly up to the player as Exospace is a high player agency game and the complexity of developing Exospace has been to the systems game aspects.
One of the big issues with Exospace is it really is not a one person project at the end of the day and a lot of aspects of the game have suffered for it. But still it is wild how much is already in and how the bulk of what was on the list of essential features already is implemented.
Those essential features being,
1. The player controller
2. The Drive System, or the movement abilities the player has
3. A Health System w/ attachable sub-parts (such as energy shields and weak spots)
4. Complex modular “arms” for entities
5. NPCs that you can communicate with
6. Faction System w/ global AND local reputation
7. Gravity (not used as much currently, but it’s in there)
8. Entities with phase/state based behaviors
9. In game economy w/ multiple currency types
10. Artifact System (okay, partially- the artifacts exist but no means of storing them or opening menus with them yet)
11. Flexible weapon upgrading for the player
12. A camera system that doesn’t fix the player to the screen center
After that, there’s these features that have yet to be added:
13. Accessible Planets w/ a global friction constraint for those scenes that impact the movement of player/projectile/entities
14. Saving and Loading
15. Game Event Management
16. Node based AI movement.
The last 3 are the hardest because one of the things that you learn when making a game is how complexity is not linear but compounding. Add a rep system and you have to add all the interactions reputation has. Add a means of friction to the game not reliant on Rigidbodies and you now have to find ways to apply it to all moving objects. And so forth.
One of the reasons I had chosen to emphasize developing the mechanical parts of the game has been mainly so that I can now when designing content know the constraints and work within those constraints.
