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Greetings, citizens ~
This is the 3rd and final part of our “End Goals document”. We understand that most, if not all, is not new for any of our veteran players. It’s meant for any new comers or players that were not up-to-date with any previous news posts and discussions.
We split it up to be used as additional dev blog news, the problem here is that we didn’t have anything interesting to say in a dev blog for several weeks as we were only doing bug testing and bug fixing so it had to be released on its own.
It’s clear to us that we can’t provide enough news to sustain a weekly dev blog which is why we’re changing back to a free schedule.
List of player roles:
~ Builder
~ Explorer
~ Industrialist
~ Trader
~ Fighter
~ Imperialist
Industrialist (Miner, Producer)
This role is relatively self-explanatory. As said before, you start small with limited resources. Through smart trading, you can get rich.
Some foundation for that is already in the game, but there is a lot of stuff missing:
This role of course ties in with the builder role as reaching high end blocks should be a form of progression. In addition to that there’s also the acquisition of trading and mining ships, as well as production facilities that needs building.
At the very beginning, players will mine with personal mining tools, then upgrade to ship mining, from there to fleet mining, with automated mining at the end, which ties in with the imperialist role.
Additionally, mining depends on region of the universe as well as knowledge and experience of the game. Later, possibly more resources will be added, including hard to get rare resources and other forms of acquisitions (gas mining, star mining, planet atmosphere “mining”, etc) to add variation.
Salvaging is similar to mining but focuses on collecting existing or derelict structures in the game. Salvagers would seek out recent battles (from players or events visible through scanning), or go for exploration to find treasure.
Producing also ties in with mining. Good building makes production a lot more efficient.
Both of them tie in with the imperialism role as well. To some extend it will be possible to automate mining and production operation in territory controlled by a player faction. These roles have similar progression stages as a builder and are the prerequisite to the imperialism role. The details of that depend on mechanics that are already planned internally.
Trader
Trading progression requires a player to do clever planning. Managing trade ships and their protection, as well as inventory management is a must. A sense of progression is given in terms of acquired wealth and influence. This role is also in several ways a prerequisite of imperialism.
NPC factions together with player traders will define the economy in the universe. One of the planned features of a universe redesign will be a tracking economy, which will automatically adapt to demand and supply of total resources in the game.
A producer will be required to build complex systems and automate their functionality.
The universe revamp and its addition of more resource diversity will add more specific demands which the player can make use of.
The difficulty in progression in these roles consists of being able to manage a more and more complex tasks, and more of them. The more value is shifted around, the more interesting of a target the player and faction will become for raids.
Fighter
The Fighter role is part of most other roles, but it also has some unique aspects to it, like being a pirate or a gun for hire. Even roles that aren’t directly affected, like traders, indirectly tie in with pirates that attack trading routes, as well as fighters to defend them.
Fighting includes PvP and PvE. The weapons and the power system it depends on, will have to be balanced to ensure good gameplay. After the power update, a weapon update is planned to not only adapt weapons to the new power system, but also add new features to expand the versatility and convert unused and weaker elements into something usable.
For multiplayer, depending on server rules, there will also be a possibility for players to “duel” for a betted value without putting their ships on the line. Similar to battle mode, just better in every way.
Also depending on server rules, protective zones can be done with the NPC system, like the trading guild area being a safe zone without fighting allowed, in which new players can get started up without being immediately spawn camped.
A fighter will concentrate on building powerful ships, tying in closely with the builder role. While fighters can organize in groups, the fighter role is a more “lone” version of the imperialism role. In terms of progress it can actually be a prerequisite of it.
A fighter’s progress would be measured in terms of their wealth and notoriety. Fighters would compete against other player and NPC fighters. Progression can be made visible by comparing their success in the universe. The more successful a fighter becomes, the more likely they’ll be targeted or used by players and NPCs.
Needed for realising this role are the universe revamp, the NPC faction system, as well as additionally the quest and event system + all requirements for the builder, explorer and trader roles.
Boarding will also be very specific to the fighter role. Making use of the game’s ability to create massive interiors and astronaut combat, boarding and astronaut exploration will be a big part of the game. An update to the weapon system, as well as other features such as functional interior, will be announced in future documents will be necessary to do that.
Other out-of-ship combat is also possible while exploring or in quests (arena). Definitely addition of out-of-ship NPC characters. Also addition of similar fauna system for planet creatures.
Imperialist
This is the ultimate endgame role. This role is the hardest to achieve and does simply not exist at the start of your game. It encompasses all other roles.
Essentially, faction functionality for players will include automatic faction mechanics. This means that a player can manage automatisms that only NPC factions have access to.
This will be realized in simple management, not being as complex as civilisation builder games, as well as not being geared towards being an RTS in terms of micromanagement. Doing something manual will always be multiple times as efficient. However, you can do a lot more, when you do things automatic.
Players will be able to define the types of ships and stations their faction builds and uses. The faction will populate sectors, which the faction takes manually. The players in that faction will receive income based on mining, trading and production, as well as have expenses in terms of upkeep and maintenance.
There will be a whole new mechanic for territory control in the game: population. More on that in further documents (see end of this one).
Your faction will also be able to actively do diplomacy with other factions.
Additionally, they will also be able to wage war, but a player cannot send attack fleets to fight battles in unloaded sectors. He can however go with a fleet to fight an active battle. There will be a mechanic to do territory contest indirectly, but that will be something completely different.
Endgame fighter and exploration goals will also probably be overlapping into the an imperialism role, because the sheer resources and power needed to travel and explore those will be immense, comparable to raids in scale and difficulty, as there will be goals available further and further out of “neutral” territory
By being versed in most of the other role, the player has a natural progression towards this roles. From here it is either about finishing the end goals in the game, which are exploration goals that require a huge amount of resources to achieve, or as absolute domination by diplomacy, power, or economy.
This role is possible to achieve with multiple players as well as alone. In singleplayer games, the player has the NPCs to contest with. On multiplayer servers, you also have other players to interact with.
The quest system will make it possible for a player in singleplayer to join an existing NPC faction after a while and eventually rise to being the leader of that faction as an alternative to founding an own faction.
For this role to fully work, all other roles need to be fully functional first.
Universe Revamp
As hinted at before in the previous 2 parts, we are going to do a complete universe revamp, focusing mainly on one galaxy as the main provider of content. This doesn’t mean you can’t go further out and discover other galaxies though, but exploration outside of the galaxy will not only be a lot tougher, it will be a main gameplay element to become strong enough to survive out there. The galaxy itself will be a lot more focused on less and smaller regions. There will no longer be an equal distribution of resources. Before we introduce the details of our plans, however, we first want to finish the power and weapon updates. By the time we will introduce our plans we will likely already be in the middle of implementing it.
Thanks for playing StarMade,
- The Schine Team
[doublepost=1502319103,1502318812][/doublepost]Just one thing to clarify for the forums: Reading the comments on the last blogs are often a bit discouraging. We appreciate constructive criticism, but some comments go beyond that into a more insulting tone. I know that these comments of course don’t represent all of the community as the majority is very supportive, but I feel like I need to clarify a few things:
Even though this company named “Schine” is making StarMade, it is really just all the people you see on our about page. Real people, no anonymous “the devs”. Indie game development isn’t a very lucrative job. The reason why we’re making StarMade is not for money. It’s because we love this game and want to see it done! At the same time we try to be as fair as possible to our players. That’s why we never made too big promises to generate empty hype and always kept a free version of the game to try out before buying.
As said, we are not in this to get rich. All of us are putting in a lot of hours and extra hours into making StarMade without much or no pay. I’m only taking what I need to live to make sure that even in the absolute worst case, we will be able to continue developing and finish the game.
This isn’t meant as a complaint about criticism, it is a clarification. We don’t dislike or ignore critical commentary, as long as it’s constructive. On the contrary, we think that constructive criticism is the most helpful. However, a lot of the repeating criticism is already addressed and planned for internally. The reason we don’t go public with those plans is, that even if it would reassure some of the critics, we have a principle to never sell complete promises without something to show on it.
Of course, in the long run that is sometimes unavoidable and we are guilty of doing so a few times in the past few years, but we aren’t afraid to scrap things if they turn out to be a wrong direction. This has always been our main principle and we drastically improved internal organization and planning to avoid false announcements in the future.
We will press on to finish this game with even more effort than before! Be assured of that!
This is the 3rd and final part of our “End Goals document”. We understand that most, if not all, is not new for any of our veteran players. It’s meant for any new comers or players that were not up-to-date with any previous news posts and discussions.
We split it up to be used as additional dev blog news, the problem here is that we didn’t have anything interesting to say in a dev blog for several weeks as we were only doing bug testing and bug fixing so it had to be released on its own.
It’s clear to us that we can’t provide enough news to sustain a weekly dev blog which is why we’re changing back to a free schedule.
List of player roles:
~ Builder
~ Explorer
~ Industrialist
~ Trader
~ Fighter
~ Imperialist
Industrialist (Miner, Producer)
This role is relatively self-explanatory. As said before, you start small with limited resources. Through smart trading, you can get rich.
Some foundation for that is already in the game, but there is a lot of stuff missing:
- Stick-shops need replacement to make economy work.
- Ties in with a universe redesign to make resource distribution more diverse
- Production needs more progression and be more complex without being tedious (high level producer with good use of logic), as well as a balanced form of unloaded production.
This role of course ties in with the builder role as reaching high end blocks should be a form of progression. In addition to that there’s also the acquisition of trading and mining ships, as well as production facilities that needs building.
At the very beginning, players will mine with personal mining tools, then upgrade to ship mining, from there to fleet mining, with automated mining at the end, which ties in with the imperialist role.
Additionally, mining depends on region of the universe as well as knowledge and experience of the game. Later, possibly more resources will be added, including hard to get rare resources and other forms of acquisitions (gas mining, star mining, planet atmosphere “mining”, etc) to add variation.
Salvaging is similar to mining but focuses on collecting existing or derelict structures in the game. Salvagers would seek out recent battles (from players or events visible through scanning), or go for exploration to find treasure.
Producing also ties in with mining. Good building makes production a lot more efficient.
Both of them tie in with the imperialism role as well. To some extend it will be possible to automate mining and production operation in territory controlled by a player faction. These roles have similar progression stages as a builder and are the prerequisite to the imperialism role. The details of that depend on mechanics that are already planned internally.
Trader
Trading progression requires a player to do clever planning. Managing trade ships and their protection, as well as inventory management is a must. A sense of progression is given in terms of acquired wealth and influence. This role is also in several ways a prerequisite of imperialism.
NPC factions together with player traders will define the economy in the universe. One of the planned features of a universe redesign will be a tracking economy, which will automatically adapt to demand and supply of total resources in the game.
A producer will be required to build complex systems and automate their functionality.
The universe revamp and its addition of more resource diversity will add more specific demands which the player can make use of.
The difficulty in progression in these roles consists of being able to manage a more and more complex tasks, and more of them. The more value is shifted around, the more interesting of a target the player and faction will become for raids.
Fighter
The Fighter role is part of most other roles, but it also has some unique aspects to it, like being a pirate or a gun for hire. Even roles that aren’t directly affected, like traders, indirectly tie in with pirates that attack trading routes, as well as fighters to defend them.
Fighting includes PvP and PvE. The weapons and the power system it depends on, will have to be balanced to ensure good gameplay. After the power update, a weapon update is planned to not only adapt weapons to the new power system, but also add new features to expand the versatility and convert unused and weaker elements into something usable.
For multiplayer, depending on server rules, there will also be a possibility for players to “duel” for a betted value without putting their ships on the line. Similar to battle mode, just better in every way.
Also depending on server rules, protective zones can be done with the NPC system, like the trading guild area being a safe zone without fighting allowed, in which new players can get started up without being immediately spawn camped.
A fighter will concentrate on building powerful ships, tying in closely with the builder role. While fighters can organize in groups, the fighter role is a more “lone” version of the imperialism role. In terms of progress it can actually be a prerequisite of it.
A fighter’s progress would be measured in terms of their wealth and notoriety. Fighters would compete against other player and NPC fighters. Progression can be made visible by comparing their success in the universe. The more successful a fighter becomes, the more likely they’ll be targeted or used by players and NPCs.
Needed for realising this role are the universe revamp, the NPC faction system, as well as additionally the quest and event system + all requirements for the builder, explorer and trader roles.
Boarding will also be very specific to the fighter role. Making use of the game’s ability to create massive interiors and astronaut combat, boarding and astronaut exploration will be a big part of the game. An update to the weapon system, as well as other features such as functional interior, will be announced in future documents will be necessary to do that.
Other out-of-ship combat is also possible while exploring or in quests (arena). Definitely addition of out-of-ship NPC characters. Also addition of similar fauna system for planet creatures.
Imperialist
This is the ultimate endgame role. This role is the hardest to achieve and does simply not exist at the start of your game. It encompasses all other roles.
Essentially, faction functionality for players will include automatic faction mechanics. This means that a player can manage automatisms that only NPC factions have access to.
This will be realized in simple management, not being as complex as civilisation builder games, as well as not being geared towards being an RTS in terms of micromanagement. Doing something manual will always be multiple times as efficient. However, you can do a lot more, when you do things automatic.
Players will be able to define the types of ships and stations their faction builds and uses. The faction will populate sectors, which the faction takes manually. The players in that faction will receive income based on mining, trading and production, as well as have expenses in terms of upkeep and maintenance.
There will be a whole new mechanic for territory control in the game: population. More on that in further documents (see end of this one).
Your faction will also be able to actively do diplomacy with other factions.
Additionally, they will also be able to wage war, but a player cannot send attack fleets to fight battles in unloaded sectors. He can however go with a fleet to fight an active battle. There will be a mechanic to do territory contest indirectly, but that will be something completely different.
Endgame fighter and exploration goals will also probably be overlapping into the an imperialism role, because the sheer resources and power needed to travel and explore those will be immense, comparable to raids in scale and difficulty, as there will be goals available further and further out of “neutral” territory
By being versed in most of the other role, the player has a natural progression towards this roles. From here it is either about finishing the end goals in the game, which are exploration goals that require a huge amount of resources to achieve, or as absolute domination by diplomacy, power, or economy.
This role is possible to achieve with multiple players as well as alone. In singleplayer games, the player has the NPCs to contest with. On multiplayer servers, you also have other players to interact with.
The quest system will make it possible for a player in singleplayer to join an existing NPC faction after a while and eventually rise to being the leader of that faction as an alternative to founding an own faction.
For this role to fully work, all other roles need to be fully functional first.
Universe Revamp
As hinted at before in the previous 2 parts, we are going to do a complete universe revamp, focusing mainly on one galaxy as the main provider of content. This doesn’t mean you can’t go further out and discover other galaxies though, but exploration outside of the galaxy will not only be a lot tougher, it will be a main gameplay element to become strong enough to survive out there. The galaxy itself will be a lot more focused on less and smaller regions. There will no longer be an equal distribution of resources. Before we introduce the details of our plans, however, we first want to finish the power and weapon updates. By the time we will introduce our plans we will likely already be in the middle of implementing it.
Thanks for playing StarMade,
- The Schine Team
[doublepost=1502319103,1502318812][/doublepost]Just one thing to clarify for the forums: Reading the comments on the last blogs are often a bit discouraging. We appreciate constructive criticism, but some comments go beyond that into a more insulting tone. I know that these comments of course don’t represent all of the community as the majority is very supportive, but I feel like I need to clarify a few things:
Even though this company named “Schine” is making StarMade, it is really just all the people you see on our about page. Real people, no anonymous “the devs”. Indie game development isn’t a very lucrative job. The reason why we’re making StarMade is not for money. It’s because we love this game and want to see it done! At the same time we try to be as fair as possible to our players. That’s why we never made too big promises to generate empty hype and always kept a free version of the game to try out before buying.
As said, we are not in this to get rich. All of us are putting in a lot of hours and extra hours into making StarMade without much or no pay. I’m only taking what I need to live to make sure that even in the absolute worst case, we will be able to continue developing and finish the game.
This isn’t meant as a complaint about criticism, it is a clarification. We don’t dislike or ignore critical commentary, as long as it’s constructive. On the contrary, we think that constructive criticism is the most helpful. However, a lot of the repeating criticism is already addressed and planned for internally. The reason we don’t go public with those plans is, that even if it would reassure some of the critics, we have a principle to never sell complete promises without something to show on it.
Of course, in the long run that is sometimes unavoidable and we are guilty of doing so a few times in the past few years, but we aren’t afraid to scrap things if they turn out to be a wrong direction. This has always been our main principle and we drastically improved internal organization and planning to avoid false announcements in the future.
We will press on to finish this game with even more effort than before! Be assured of that!
