Life in a Spaceship

[Jackal]

At the begining, you vote to decide whever you get your own ship and crew, or you all share a ship and have one of the crew as a hero.

Crew

• Captain. Simply a tough guy, but if you all share a ship he is the one that bosses everyone around.
• Pilot. Well what do you think his job is?
• Engineer. There will be a room in each ship with 3 'buildings': Engines, Life Support systems and something else. The max hp of each building will be a third of the ship's. Every health point the ship loses, a 'building' (depending on the game time) in that room will lose health points , (so if the engines are destroyed, the ship can't move and if the life support is destroyed, everyone in the ship dies in 5 minutes). The Engineer's job is to repair these 'buildings'
• Doctor (Optional Extra). Heals the crew if they get in a nasty fight.
• Mercenary (Optional Extra). Just there to shoot any annoying person.

There will be jobs, some of them will require a certain skill. For example, a job at the hospital will require a doctor of at least level 3. There is also a battleground where there are 2 sides that are fighting each other (At the begining you pick a side). If you choose to fight in there, for every enemy you kill, you get 50 gold.

List of Jobs

• Hospital Job
• Blue Sun (Thats the super-rich food company) Can Machine repairer (requires engineer level 3)
• Member of Parliment (Need to encourage people to vote for you by saying the right stuff or you are fired.)
• Policeman
• Black Market Seller (Encourage villagers to buy your stuff by saying the right stuff)
• More

There is also an ability on the ships where you can board a player's ship and land on a planet/moon/space station. I've based the ability off of Banish, the only bad thing is that whatever you are trying to board/land on will be see-through, but thats not too bad.

If you want a home, (depending what side you picked) you either go to Londinium or Bellerophon. The homes will range from tiny apartments to huge mansions.

Ideas

• The Engineer could be able to construct a security system, so that when a ship comes nearby they get a little message, and if an enemy to them boards the ship a message comes in red and a big Alert sound comes.
• An autopilot function.
• Players could be able to take over a planet/moon by destroying the planet/moon center. This would be extremely hard to do, but if it was done, it would be extremely rewarding. You would get taxes every minute, however every 3 minutes you would get a rebellion from both land and space (basically you would have some poorly trained rebels on the planet/moon you took over, and you would have some old ships in space surronding the planet/moon you took over).

Problems
Models, actually Model. I was planning on basing the game on a few years before Joss Whedon's TV Series, Firefly was set (so probably around the year 2510). Problem is, I can't find a model that even remotely looks like a Firefly ship (Picture here). If you are a good model maker and you want a lot of credit for your work, make a model of that.

Ideas anyone?

Now version 0.01 has been released, had a bit of trouble uploading it on thehelper.net, so I uploaded it elsewhere. Get it here. Note that it is in .zip format and the map only supports 3 players currently (teal purple and orange).

Current Status:
Triggers 5% done
Terrain 70% done
Units 30% done

Overall 10% done

Design Notes
17th August 2007
Done the 0.01 version of the map. It is NOWHERE near done, but in the meantime enjoy playing it.
16th August 2007
Started and finished the Engine. When its hp is less than 50, the ship will be unable to move. Also made a start on the life support. I'm working on the preview now, I will have to think of something to spice it up a little.

 

[Miz]

Sounds more like a Space Colony then a Space ship
and is this a Loap?

 

[Xapphire]

This looks really interesting, I like the idea of there being jobs etc. This I think you should include:
-Rank Save/load and Character, so you possess a high quality rank and a good job, you know, with restrictions.
-Being able to have like a home on earth / etc.
-Jobs that are nooby, like for now the garbage man but then when you have like a certain amout of money go for treasure hunter you know.
-Random Spacealien Attacks
-And a Life, having kids, a little like loap more real life though.

 

[WindexGlow]

One of the more orignal ideas I've seen in a long, fucking time on this board.

+rep and I'll see into that ship if possible.

 

[Jackal]

This looks really interesting, I like the idea of there being jobs etc. This I think you should include:
-Rank Save/load and Character, so you possess a high quality rank and a good job, you know, with restrictions.
-Being able to have like a home on earth / etc.
-Jobs that are nooby, like for now the garbage man but then when you have like a certain amout of money go for treasure hunter you know.
-Random Spacealien Attacks
-And a Life, having kids, a little like loap more real life though.

On Firefly there are Reavers that do random raids on passing ships, they are ruthless monsters (but still human) take prisoners, rape them (ok I may leave that part out to avoid possibly being banned on epicwar.com) and skin their victims alive. They could be the equivalent of aliens.

I'll add the house thing onto the main post.

Sounds more like a Space Colony then a Space ship
and is this a Loap?

I would rather say no, for the reason that loaps are generally clones of each other with small differences. There are houses, the police's base, the mafia's base etc all in exactly the same place. The terrain of this map is completely different to that of any loap, and also on many loaps you can become president just by walking on a circle. So the member of parliment job will not be as simple as becoming president.

 

[Xapphire]

Oh sorry Ive only watched one episode of Firefly ^.^ K well pm me if you need helpo!

 

[Newbwc3]

Good idea

 

[Miz]

I still think its more of a Space Colony then a Space Ship

Space Colony is a City or etc. In space
Space Ship is a transportation vehicle that can go into space

But yet again it could be a huge space ship

 

[Jackal]

I still think its more of a Space Colony then a Space Ship

Space Colony is a City or etc. In space
Space Ship is a transportation vehicle that can go into space

But yet again it could be a huge space ship

Its just a space ship you can see inside, rather than just having a load/unload like a zepplin. Its not a city because
A) No natural resources or grown food (Unless you count some herbs someone may be growing in a plant pot.
B) No jobs
C) There aren't that many people living there.

 

[Jackal]

Bump.

Im going to release a preview of the map some time tomorrow. It will be protected to avoid someone stealing my map before its even started, however I will not protect the full release of Life in a Spaceship.

 

[darkholy]

I'd like to give some suggestions on gameplay

1. maybe we should be able to save a character and use the experience and level accumulated on the every new game. the saving and loading of character can be like something from The Black Road RPG

2. every map starts will give a random new planet for the crews to explore. each new game gives one long mission or a few short missions. mission can be randomized at a random planet
-ice planet
-ash planet
-lava planet
-green planet
-swamp planet
etc

3. examples of missions (randomized):
- mine 1000 value worth of minerals (zinc, potassium, etc)
- capture an alien creature for sale to the space markets
- eliminate aliens on the planet
- find an alien temple
- find an artifact from an alien civilization
- establish a space warp link between two points
- shoot down alien space craft
etc

4. whenever a mission fails, there should be some penalty on experience/level and money for crews



if the game is fun, there should be many trying to join new games to level up their character

 

[Jackal]

I like the idea about the missions. I will put that in.

 

[WindexGlow]

I spent about 30 minutes with that (Just trying out some new textures I got recently) If you like it I'll attach the .psd of it.

 

[darkholy]

is that in game graphics???

 

[WindexGlow]

Yes, it's the beginning cimatic in his wc3 game, it's only about 30 seconds long. There is currently 4 planned cimatic (god damn, firefox isn't checking my spelling ) that will have better qaulity than that.


Serioulsy though, the orignal picture is

I extracted the ship, and added some backgrounds and blends. No filters used.

 

[darkholy]

that is awesome!
how are you guys going to execute the gameplay?

 

[WindexGlow]

We're going to import several thousand pictures (1 picture for each frame)

Than we're going to have a trigger that goes like tihs
"Display cin_1_Frame_0001" to (all players)"
wait .01 seconds
"destroy last created display"
"display cin_1_frame_0002" to all players"
wait .01 seconds


ect. There's 40 frames a second (we had to loosen up memory size, it still looks amazing though). He's currently working on an engine to do this better and easier to manage.

 

[master maste]

Sounds cool if you were all working together as a team and can take over planets and fight aliens etc.

Fight boarding crews.

I think you should loose part of the name as the "life on a" sounds too much like loap and people might not play it if they dont like loap, or they might play if thinking its loap and get annoyed. . . just a suggestion.

But it sounds great.

Umm u said you were doing a 30 second clip, thats 1200 pictures.

 

[WindexGlow]

God damn you guys are gullible.

 

[Jackal]

I leave this thread for 16 hours and look what happens.

Good job on the picture WindexGlow, it looks less like it has been computer generated.

Ok then, any ideas for a new name?