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Home » Stars! Clones, Extensions, Modding » FreeStars » Don't Let the Stars Fade Away
Re: Don't Let the Stars Fade Away Mon, 29 January 2007 17:43 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Iconian is currently offline Iconian

 
Officer Cadet 2nd Year

Messages: 233
Registered: January 2006
Location: Nevada, USA
Now, time to go over a few specifics, so my post doesn't get too big.


Modules vs. Single Game
Quote:

I'm not entirely happy with the "one program does it all" approach. I.e: there would be greater freedom/evolution if several quite independent "blocks" that make up the game could be tackled on their own, by different (or even competing) people, each working on their platform(s) of choice.


I agree. If we can have several small groups of programmers operating at one time on different aspects of the single game, we can probably get it done more rapidly.

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I have to disagree here. If Stars! is truly dying and we want to prevent that, we need to attract new players and old players who have given up on it. We can't expect to do that if you have to download 10 modules and walk through a 5 page readme just to get a game started with your buddies. It needs to be simple to create and host games.


And I also agree with you. I have to confess that I downloaded ken's Nova on Saturday. I looked through the pictures but wasn't sure what to do. I returned to his site and found that I needed Microsoft Visio 2005, or something . . . which I don't know where to get, how to use, or even what it is really.

I think we need to combine these two ideas and get it all organized properly. We can have individual teams working on individual components or modules of the game, but at the same time we need a leader who can inter-coordinate the actions of each group. We need to make certain everything is compatible with everything else.

As I've said, I'm no programming expert. But, perhaps what we could do is have each separate team group on one particular folder of information for the game. We want everything to be compatible with everything else. We want it all to work in unison. This means that we have to leave a lot of room to move around. Don't tie anything down that doesn't absolutely have to be--don't hardwire stuff into the system until we're sure we can work around it. But more on that later . . .



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The game itself needs to be appealing to new players if we want to keep it alive. This is purely annecdotal, but the real problem I've had convincing my friends and family to play the original game are all based on its complexity. The game is pretty dang complicated to pick up for a beginner. The micromanagment required per planet is really high, and the tools in the game to help with micromanagment are hard to figure out (repeat orders for remote mining transports, moving pop around planets, auto build orders for new planets, etc.)


I can attest to this. I tried to get my brother to play Stars! a while back. We both have common interests with games like Half Life, Counter Strike, Thief 2, Square RPG's, and some others. Clearly, Stars! doesn't appeal to some types of gamers at all, but there are other gamers that it would appeal to, if it was sufficiently simple to get into. In this regard, I offer up a few different and associated ideas.

Occasionally I'll draw something using Microsoft Paint. Paint is a very simple program. The learning curve is, oh, ten minutes, maybe. I can do a few things with it. It does them OK.

I've also used Photoshop from time to time. It's much different from Paint. It's extremely complex. If I were to spend a few hours (10, 20, 30, who knows?) I could probably understand it well enough to use it all the time. Yet, I find myself returning to Paint continually because it's quick and easy.

Photoshop is like Stars!
Paint is like Starmonger,, Pax Solaris, or some others.

Each of those games has its own interesting set of features. In the past couple weeks I've completed probably 10 games of Starmonger. To contrast, I've complete 0 of Stars! in that same time period. Starmonger is simple.

Now . . . we can say, "That's OK. Stars! is a different kind of game. It's not meant for everyone." That's true. Even if it was more like Starmonger or Pax Solaris, my brother probably wouldn't like it. But at least it wouldn't overwhelm him.

I suggest the best of both worlds. Lunar Colony is a game I like a lot. It's easy to get into and understand. I played the tutorial several times, and once I understood I went to easy, medium, hard. Each time I changed the difficulty it added new features to the game.

So, let's do that with this. I think games are about options. Players love options. But, options can sometimes be overwhelming if there are too many of them dropped like a ton of bricks all at once. Let's make Nova (Stars! Revival, whatever we want to call it) in a way that anyone can get into it and do it easily, and later on more options and deeper layers of MM, etc can be added to it. While I've never been a huge fan of wide appeal (I suppose I'm quite an elitist), sometimes it's necessary. Sometimes it's valuable to have popular support.


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we've got to start somewhere and establish a "baseline" from which we can move forward.


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It's tempting to make all of this stuff usable by plugin modules, but your average newbie isn't going to be up for downloading the game, the server, the remote mining addon script and a host of other scripts just to make the game enjoyable. There are plenty more games out there that are fun to play and much easier to get started with.


Let's start from somewhere. With writing, one of most important things you can do (or avoid doing rather) is showing someone your work before it's done. On the other hand, I've learned the hard way that sometimes, you need to just get it done. Let's get started on something with several different modules. Each of several different people will work on a particular module for, say, two months. During that time the project coordinator will review what's been done and make sure everything's compatible. The individual modules will be available for downloading if people would like them during that time, but they wouldn't do much good. Then at the end of two months or so all the information gets combined into a single working game made available for download. This means that the programming platforms have to be compatible. I might be getting in a bit over my head here with trying to explain and understand, but the important thing is that everything work together, and that it's easily modifiable in the future so that we can pick it back up without difficulty and add many new features.


Nova?
Now, what is the starting line going to be? Have we decided we want to us Nova? Is Nova the clone that's most advanced to this point? Does anyone really know how far along Freestars is? I've heard that Freestars may not ever get finished--one programmer said in a post he was dissatisfied it was taking so long and was going to try it on his own. Does anyone know what's taken Freestars so long? And how can we avoid their problems?

Maybe we should take a vote on which clone would be best to work from . . . it should probably whichever is farthest along at the moment.

I think that probably one of the most important things we can do here is avoid duplication. In general, duplication=waste. There are a bunch of different Stars! clones out there. Let's not let them go to waste. I think we should contact the various programmers and see if they'd be willing to share their time and resources on a serious effort at making a Stars! sequel. Consider that with all those clones there's bound to be a lot of code lying around. If that code could be integrated into this effort, we could probably save ourselves a lot of work. We just have to make sure we don't spend too much time trying to get it all to "fit together." If we can get a hold of some of the other clones' code, let's assess how long it will likely take to integrate that code. If it would just be faster to program it from scratch, then we should probably do so.


Finally, if you do know someone who might be interested in helping out with a Stars! sequel/clone, why don't you just "ping" them to find out where they might be in the next few months? I believe we can go some pretty cool places, but it might require a fair amount of work and time. I think I could probably spare at least 15 hours a week . . .

That's all for now.



Yeah, bread too.

Don't Let the Stars! Fade Away

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