- Joined
- May 26, 2014
- Messages
- 37
- Reaction score
- 26
First - I absolutely love the potential of this game and purchased it early on for that reason.
I believe StarMade is falling into the classic product trap of attempting to throw more features at a problem of stalling growth momentum. As has happened to many games before - steep learning curves and difficult/tedious UX are instant killers outside of a small niche user-base who can tolerate (or even thrive) in such an environment.
Complexity 1: Block Shapes
Problem:
One of the key attributes in StarMade is the ability to build stunning & functional(!) ships in a sandbox world. Unfortunately some of the same features to make this possible also greatly add to the tediousness of the UX. This is a case where the implementation gives the hardcore games what they need to make amazing ships - at the expensive of new & casual gamers.
As an example - consider a ship made from regular hull vs one that also uses wedges, tetras, heptas and corners. That's a 5x increase of factory configuration and/or store purchases.
Proposal:
Make Block shape an advanced build consideration (a la the Slabs slider) that consumes regular blocks from your inventory - rather than individual items.
This still leaves the master shipwrights with all the tools they need to make ships as per today, but makes the build process quicker and easier for the majority of gamers -> Less factory configuration, less distinct blocks to buy, smaller lists to read in blueprints.
As part of this improvement, it improves the UX of inventory, shops and factories by having smaller lists of items available. This change would reduce 347 blocks a gamer currently needs needs to explicitly manage (ones with all 5 shapes + ones with wedge options) down to only 100.
Backwards compatibility:
When actually placing the items on the ship, it can still map the shapes to existing block IDs in the ship data,hopefully keeping changes to the game engine low.
Existing inventory and factory setups can stay the same with distinct block shapes (IDs). Only full shapes will get the ability to pick which shape is used when building. I originally thought auto-converting everything to just full blocks could work, but that could cause issues with factories that pulled full blocks to convert to shaped blocks.
Removing a shaped item from a ship would return a regular block, thus eventually reducing the number of legacy blocks in game.
I believe StarMade is falling into the classic product trap of attempting to throw more features at a problem of stalling growth momentum. As has happened to many games before - steep learning curves and difficult/tedious UX are instant killers outside of a small niche user-base who can tolerate (or even thrive) in such an environment.
Complexity 1: Block Shapes
Problem:
One of the key attributes in StarMade is the ability to build stunning & functional(!) ships in a sandbox world. Unfortunately some of the same features to make this possible also greatly add to the tediousness of the UX. This is a case where the implementation gives the hardcore games what they need to make amazing ships - at the expensive of new & casual gamers.
As an example - consider a ship made from regular hull vs one that also uses wedges, tetras, heptas and corners. That's a 5x increase of factory configuration and/or store purchases.
Proposal:
Make Block shape an advanced build consideration (a la the Slabs slider) that consumes regular blocks from your inventory - rather than individual items.
This still leaves the master shipwrights with all the tools they need to make ships as per today, but makes the build process quicker and easier for the majority of gamers -> Less factory configuration, less distinct blocks to buy, smaller lists to read in blueprints.
As part of this improvement, it improves the UX of inventory, shops and factories by having smaller lists of items available. This change would reduce 347 blocks a gamer currently needs needs to explicitly manage (ones with all 5 shapes + ones with wedge options) down to only 100.
Backwards compatibility:
When actually placing the items on the ship, it can still map the shapes to existing block IDs in the ship data,hopefully keeping changes to the game engine low.
Existing inventory and factory setups can stay the same with distinct block shapes (IDs). Only full shapes will get the ability to pick which shape is used when building. I originally thought auto-converting everything to just full blocks could work, but that could cause issues with factories that pulled full blocks to convert to shaped blocks.
Removing a shaped item from a ship would return a regular block, thus eventually reducing the number of legacy blocks in game.
