1) I want to make sure I understood everything in the original post correctly.
2) I want to draw up some mock ship templates and see what the proposed system would function like
3) I want to attempt to min-max and break the system to see whether Doom-Cubes will persist (they were specifically mentioned in Schine's post).
I will detail my thoughts as I go, so that my pictures and suggestions make sense and so that any mistake or assumption I've made will be obvious.
A) All ships need a core
B) The size of the core determines total heat-sink capacity
C) The larger the core, the larger the heat barrier
D) The larger the core, the more chambers are needed
E) Only hull, decorations, and emptiness should be placed within heat barriers
Smallest possible ship:
Obviously that ship is mostly useless. So what would the first min-maxed ship be? This will show us what sorts of combinations we could make with small ships.
Max-Load Single-Core Ship:
Next, I am going to take the components from the previous ship and expand the core so that the ship doesn't overheat immediately. I rearrange modules to minimize how much hull is needed to protect components (again resulting in a square/sphere/cube). This will be the first ship with heat zones, chambers, and conduits.
Previous ship's components with a larger core:
With the previous ship it became apparant to me that ships will still have an optimized 'doom cube' target to work towards, and there will be little reason to use decoration blocks except around the core and chamber blocks.
Is there a sollution? What if all ship components had a heat-zone?
Previous ship, with non-overlapping heat-zones around all modules:
At this point I've come up with a few questions:
1) Can heat zones from multiple systems overlap? For instance, which of these two-core set-ups would be optimized?
2) How is heat-zone radius rounded? For instance, which of these has a heat zone with size 2?
3) When building a ship, how will heat-zones be displayed to the builder?
And a couple of comments:
1) This system makes optimizing a bit more challenging because it creates a 3D puzzle, but there will always be doom-cubes in the game because there are no artificial limits or system caps. A truly optimized ship in this particular system will be more of a sphere and it will be filled with Inner Hull to get that slight HP boost.
In all honesty, the most efficient method of building is to just keep the heat-zone of the core square-ish and continue building the old doom cube. Now the doom cubes are just going to be a bit hollow around the core (or filled with inner-hull). At the scale of the largest ships, using inner-hull would be worth it to get an extra 1k hp but a smaller ship couldn't care less about getting an extra 1hp.
2) Remember to keep your game mechanics simple. Who is the target audience for this game? Minecraft was huge because it was complicated enough to entertain adults and teens, but simple enough for children to enjoy. It had a good mod community so people could make it as complicated as they wanted, but out of the box it needed no tutorials at all. I think at this point Schine has ruled out most child players and are appealing to teens and up; but the simpler the game, the more players will be able to enjoy it.
2) I want to draw up some mock ship templates and see what the proposed system would function like
3) I want to attempt to min-max and break the system to see whether Doom-Cubes will persist (they were specifically mentioned in Schine's post).
I will detail my thoughts as I go, so that my pictures and suggestions make sense and so that any mistake or assumption I've made will be obvious.
A) All ships need a core
B) The size of the core determines total heat-sink capacity
C) The larger the core, the larger the heat barrier
D) The larger the core, the more chambers are needed
E) Only hull, decorations, and emptiness should be placed within heat barriers
Smallest possible ship:
This ship is a core (red) plus a thruster (blue), the first and simplest transport that everyone uses. The core is only one block so it does not produce a heat-zone and needs no chambers.
Obviously that ship is mostly useless. So what would the first min-maxed ship be? This will show us what sorts of combinations we could make with small ships.
Max-Load Single-Core Ship:
The idea here is to use one core (so there is no heat zone/chamber), but put as many ship components as possible. Mathematically, the goal is to have a ship that can use all components for only one second before the core heat hits 100% and the ship shuts down. Hull is placed so that all major components are protected, and I arranged components to minimize hull (which results in square shape). This ship is not functional, but any combination of modules less than this will be a viable drone.
Weapons: 3
Shields: 3
Thrusters: 3
Core: 1
Hull: 10
Decoration: 0
Weapons: 3
Shields: 3
Thrusters: 3
Core: 1
Hull: 10
Decoration: 0
Next, I am going to take the components from the previous ship and expand the core so that the ship doesn't overheat immediately. I rearrange modules to minimize how much hull is needed to protect components (again resulting in a square/sphere/cube). This will be the first ship with heat zones, chambers, and conduits.
Previous ship's components with a larger core:
Weapons: 3
Shields: 3
Thrusters: 3
Core: 2
Chamber: 1
Conduit: 1
Hull: 18
Decor: 1
The chamber (dark green) must be placed outside the heat zone (stripes), so we need 1 conduit (light green). No ship modules can be within the heat zone, so that entire side of the ship becomes hull with a couple light-grey decoration near the center. It was like playing a tetris puzzle, but the cube still happens (because my rule is to minimize how much hull I use, the ship always comes out roughly square. It would be circular if I cut out the corners).
The big difference here is that by adding 1 core I was forced to add 2 additional blocks (conduit and chamber), which resulted in a lot more hull to protect everything.
Shields: 3
Thrusters: 3
Core: 2
Chamber: 1
Conduit: 1
Hull: 18
Decor: 1
The chamber (dark green) must be placed outside the heat zone (stripes), so we need 1 conduit (light green). No ship modules can be within the heat zone, so that entire side of the ship becomes hull with a couple light-grey decoration near the center. It was like playing a tetris puzzle, but the cube still happens (because my rule is to minimize how much hull I use, the ship always comes out roughly square. It would be circular if I cut out the corners).
The big difference here is that by adding 1 core I was forced to add 2 additional blocks (conduit and chamber), which resulted in a lot more hull to protect everything.
With the previous ship it became apparant to me that ships will still have an optimized 'doom cube' target to work towards, and there will be little reason to use decoration blocks except around the core and chamber blocks.
Is there a sollution? What if all ship components had a heat-zone?
Previous ship, with non-overlapping heat-zones around all modules:
Weapons: 3
Shields: 3
Thruster: 3
Core: 2
Chamber: 1
Hull: 28
Decoration: 25
We still have only 9 modules total, but now we have a large amount of no-placement-zones. In order to keep the heat-zones in the 'empty space' I artificially inflated the ship's Y-dimensions with a couple of useless decoration blocks in the corners - this saved me 4 blocks at this size, but could save much more with larger ships.
This method forces the ship to have more hollow/inner-hull areas, making the ship larger and thus slower, which encourages thrusters more than weapons.
This creates more 'hollow/inner-hull' areas, but does not discourage cube/sphere shapes.
Shields: 3
Thruster: 3
Core: 2
Chamber: 1
Hull: 28
Decoration: 25
We still have only 9 modules total, but now we have a large amount of no-placement-zones. In order to keep the heat-zones in the 'empty space' I artificially inflated the ship's Y-dimensions with a couple of useless decoration blocks in the corners - this saved me 4 blocks at this size, but could save much more with larger ships.
This method forces the ship to have more hollow/inner-hull areas, making the ship larger and thus slower, which encourages thrusters more than weapons.
This creates more 'hollow/inner-hull' areas, but does not discourage cube/sphere shapes.
At this point I've come up with a few questions:
1) Can heat zones from multiple systems overlap? For instance, which of these two-core set-ups would be optimized?
Left rounds up at diagonals, right rounds down at diagonals. Neither are perfectly square.
And a couple of comments:
1) This system makes optimizing a bit more challenging because it creates a 3D puzzle, but there will always be doom-cubes in the game because there are no artificial limits or system caps. A truly optimized ship in this particular system will be more of a sphere and it will be filled with Inner Hull to get that slight HP boost.
In all honesty, the most efficient method of building is to just keep the heat-zone of the core square-ish and continue building the old doom cube. Now the doom cubes are just going to be a bit hollow around the core (or filled with inner-hull). At the scale of the largest ships, using inner-hull would be worth it to get an extra 1k hp but a smaller ship couldn't care less about getting an extra 1hp.
2) Remember to keep your game mechanics simple. Who is the target audience for this game? Minecraft was huge because it was complicated enough to entertain adults and teens, but simple enough for children to enjoy. It had a good mod community so people could make it as complicated as they wanted, but out of the box it needed no tutorials at all. I think at this point Schine has ruled out most child players and are appealing to teens and up; but the simpler the game, the more players will be able to enjoy it.
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