Design ideas

All subpages of this page, except general setting, contain spoilers.

The game is meant to be highly replayable via randomization and procedural content generation. Spoiler warnings are needed, however, because the plot is not procedurally generated, though not linear, either. Even after the first play-through not all mysteries are solved and different choices lead to different endings, with their unique endgames and complementary or partially contradictory explanations. However, spoilers are never needed for gameplay. In particular, all numbers that are not readily available through UI or game documentation, are randomized each game and related text content is reassembled accordingly.

The primary gameplay qualities influencing the world building are originality, distinct mood, replayability, open and emergent gameplay, the sense of owning and building something. Second come immersion, attachment to the heroes, good story linked with game milestones the player looks forward to, player comfort. The setting should also contribute to the ease of developing, extending and modding the game, so it has to be simple and accessible, within reason.

The main technical design principle of the game is KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). When fleshing out and encoding the game rules, this implies orthogonality: instead of a single attribute with 22 discreet values, have two attributes, 5 values each, 3 of the combinations never used in practice, or even explicitly caught and forbidden. The dozen most often tweaked game rule formulas and constants should be put in a separate file, for easier balancing. It's not possible to put all rules in one file, since a quarter of the program code is game rules.

The draft texts below are not the game's content, so they do not strive to be good prose and, in particular, they are not condensed. Some of the questions posed in the subpages will be answered as the design of the game progresses, some are intended to be answered differently in different game endings (and in ultra heavy spoilers and code), others will remain open for the players to create their own interpretations and explanations.

• general setting
• backstory
• spaceship
• script
• gameplay

Here are dead ideas that did not fit into the game, but may make sense in a mod, variant or another game.