Suggestions

Hi Bugbyte,

I recently fell on your website and I'm very enthusiasm about your game. it looks amazing and I can't wait to try it!

I was thinking about some gameplay ideas. I’m just dropping them here and hope that some of them can be helpful for you.



Events / Games Mechanics:

• First of all, what’s the idea about the environment/universe? How do we evolve across Space Haven universe? Is the ship traveling system to system or are events coming to us? Is the possibility to land on planets considered? (different biomes, water, gas, earth-like, volcanic, forest…).
  

• Presence of stations (Markets to sell/buy supplies, meet PNJ...).
  

• Multiple races can be present or if we stay in an only human world, different tribes, clans, corporations can be considered (with a reputation system among them).
  
• Possibility to board into other ships (different modes: assault, alliance, business/recruitment…) from shuttles breaking into the hull (attack) or from an airlock (friendly).
  
• Rare events can happen. Old alien structures with rare resources (artefacts) but can be dangerous situations. Or ship’s wrecks (in that case, no oxygen in the ship, characters will need a space suit to loot the place).
  
• Can the characters go out of the ship? To fix the hull for example? Or loot ship’s wreck mention above.
  
• Possibility of a mother station. The ship is a transportation vehicle to travel around the universe. When the ship is back to the mother station both become one unit through one airlock. So technically we display one “bigger”ship. Possibility to expand the base, production…
  
• So, comes the question about how to navigate between both? Having a “ship”,”base” buttons (drop-down button for example). When click on it we switch between both, so we can have a live management between both and never break the management (a notification system can help to know what’s happening in both locations).
  
• There can be different type of gates in the ship (bulletproof, fire proof, bio-hazard proof, water proof…).
  
• Characters can have stats, evolving from their actions (skills maybe).
  
• Characters customisation is a must!
  
• Having drones to help you to manage basic actions like hauling resources to one place to another, or just clean.
  
• The ship can go through asteroid field and can be damage if the protection of the ship is too less.
  

Having mission:

Through a communications room or by talking to other PNJ we can access to some missions:

• Transporting legal & illegal supplies.
  
• Produce specific objects, resources or material.
  
• Find a specific place and loot it.
  
• Bounty (kill or make prisoner).
  
• Raid.
  

Tools, Devices & Rooms:

Each rooms can be upgraded by adding components or furniture and will influence the status of the characters. For exemple, adding a shower in the room may make the character happier. That improve the rooms management gameplay. Having a pre-build/non customisable room is to avoid in my opinion. It’s too redundant and we will loose the ship customisation effect. We can have basic room to build and be able to enhance the room should be possible. Or we can define a zone, like room zone, and this zone need some components to be validated (like Theme Hospital)

You can find bellow rooms ideas:

• Medical support/Surgeon room (to heal and upgrade characters)
  
• Kitchen
  
• Farming area (produce food and oxygen)
  
• Crew rooms (bed, shower, restrooms) (Different type of room depending of the rank)
  
• Living room, Community room
  
• Cloning room
  
• Storage room
  
• Control room
  
• Energy/Oxygen room (different type of energy possible, combustible, nuclear, alien resources…)
  
• Garbage/Recycling room
  
• Engine room
  
• Jail
  
• Armory
  
• Decompression airlock (different types)
  
• Mining room
  
• Production of resources rooms (weapons, food, construction resources…)
  
• Scientists room (research for new gameplay elements)
  
• Ship’s weapon rooms (need characters to operate them and ammunition specific to the type of weapons, missile for missile launcher for example)
  
• Communication room (to communicate with other ships or to trigger event, like decision making events or pure trading)
  
• Shield room
  
• Safe room (in case of attack, from inside the room we can open all the airlocks or removing the oxygen inside the ships to kill the ennemies)
  
• Escape pods room (in case of attack and escape is the last option -> escape pods are back to the mother station. You save your crew and maybe they can haul some of the most important resources with them) but you loose the ship and everything in it. That will bring a good idea to not neglect the base or ship management, or the total opposite, invest everything in a ship and take the risk to loose everything and start from scratch if the ships destroyed.
  
• Drones room
  
• Spacesuit room/changing room (can be placed before an airlock)
  
• smuggling stashes
  

All the best!

Hey!

Thank you for the suggestions. We have many of the features that you mentioned in the game. Exploring derelict ships and looting them, very free building of own ship/ships, factions, stations are probably coming, character will have some stats and mood simulations and much more!
You will be able to build a lot of the rooms you mentioned, simply by adding facilities and placing walls as you wish. Even the shape of the ship is up to you. Almost everything in the game is built tile-by-tile, so there is a lot of freedom to shape and build your own ships.

Regarding landing on planets: That is not possible for now at least. Huge amount of work graphics wise to make it happen, but if the game takes off and helps us stay alive we might do it at some point.

Interacting and trading with other factions will be implemented, and we already have crew-to-crew combat. Although it's not deep at all at the moment but we will do our best to make it as good as it can be.

Amazing!

And one question you maybe mentioned somewhere else. But I saw you planned to release the game on pc and mobile. Do you plan to release both versions in same time or you favor one version to release first? And is a Mac version in your plans?

Yep! Planned platforms are PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS. The game should be very playable on tablets, but phones are a big question mark. We will probably get the game working on phones, but since the screens are so tiny that is the limiting factor.
It's just a question of if the game is enjoyable to play on such a small screen, remains to be seen.

We will probably launch the game simultaneously on all platforms.

Sounds good! It's really cool to make a simultaneously release! (usually we have to wait months or years to be able to play on one platform or another)

Thanks for those answers

Hey Bugbyte,

few questions/suggestions:

- Do you plan to incorporate some extraterrestrial life?
- Does it make sense to add some mech technologies? Like the Caterpillar P-5000 Work Loader in the movie Alien.
- How can the asteroid's environment (bioms) can be different? Landing in the same type of asteroid might become boring after some time. Instead, trying to find the best asteroid possible with a nice biom can be a nice task before establishing our base.
- How do you plan to make the space travel happen? Can we travel system to system? Can we orbit around a planet?
- A hacking system can be a good idea. To get information about any system, resources location... Or to help the crew defeating an enemy by lock their doors (or unlocking and let the air go out of their ship).


Keep up the good work!

Have a good day,

Grabin

Hey, Grabin!

Just yesterday we cooked up our plans for a type of alien we want to add. And well, I have to say we just jumped right into a similar type of concept as in the Alien movies, heh. Mostly because we want a possibility for crew members to be captured by the alien, and dragged into their hive room, where this crew member will be for a while suffering. You can try to save him!

This immediately creates a lot of options for many cool things. Like exploring a derelict ship, finding a hive, and then finding a new crew member captured there by the aliens.

We will obviously not make them look too similar to the Alien movies entities, but the base concept that they like to capture humans and keep them in their hive is the same.


Regarding mechs. We might add some bots and robots at some point, but we do not have major plans yet.

Asteroids are currently resource sources, so you will find different resources on them. There isn't any landing per se, and also the asteroid bases are places you can visit. We might create a game mode, where you can build an asteroid base instead of space ships, if this is something players want. But this would require a bit of work since it changes the game quite a bit, there wouldn't be hyper space jumping and star map exploring with an asteroid base I would say.

We already have space traveling working. It's a hyper space jump, and the ship travels in hyper space for a little while before jumping out and into the new sector. We have a simple star map already implemented. Once you have built the space ship fully with required facilities like ship engine, core and command module you can select a sector to jump to and off you go!

Hacking is a neat idea, we will see if we find a nice way to fit something like that into the game.

Hi Admiral Geezer,

ahah I can already see my crew member being drag off the ship screaming and crying!

Thanks for the feedback, it sounds very interesting!


I have some more suggestions:

Stash storage:
It can be a secret storage to hide important resources in case the ship is attacked by pirates. There can be 2 possible ending with pirate attacks. The pirates can kill all the crew, which mean that the game is over, OR, attack the ship, but by facing a good resistance or too much damage, they will be stealing resources as much as they can in the rooms that they are controlling and leave the ship.

Escape pods (or detachable room from ship):
If the situation is lost in the ship, in Pirates attack, alien invasion… and you don’t want to lose you experimented crew (and loose the game), you just need to bring them in the escape pod area, input the safety procedure code (like nuclear launch code, this code is necessary to avoid unwanted escape) and this part will detach from the ship. At this time your ship is lost and you will have to reconstruct from your escape pod or buy a new ship on the market. To make your crew survive until you go back on your feet you will have to store some supply here in advance before problems happen. You never know when thunder will fall on your ship. When the storm passed and you feel ready, you can come back to your wreckage ship and loot what is left in the ship (if human’s attack) or take the risk to face alien who invaded your ship.


Terrarium:
The possibility to have a room full of green and respirable plants. Adding fauna and flora to the ship. Maybe some experiments can be done on the plants. The results can be the plants are producing more oxygen (Good result) or the plants end up producing poisonous gaz (bad result). In that case the crew will need to wear hazmat suit to go inside the room and kill the plants. Consequently the room will not be usable during the time the gaz is totally gone.


Gravity room:
This room is used to create gravity in the ship. If destroyed, the gravity is not anymore present in the ship, the speed movement of the crew will be slow down and more complicated. So, in the crew’s skills can be added a Non-gravity speed movement. Some crew can be better than others in non-gravity environment (by choosing a crew member with a better non-graivity skill we increase the efficiency of harvesting outside the ship).

Hey!

Thanks for the great ideas. We have indeed thought about terrarium type of modules, right now we only have the grow pods. But there are a lot possibilities to link these plant types to the gas/temperature system.

We also have a really cool idea for "reset" of the game in case of death or losing the ship. Your idea is very cool too. Will write it up.

I'm glad if my ideas are helping you! You are making my perfect type of game !

Also I was thinking about other stuff,

Teleportation Technology:
This technology can add the ability for the crew members to move across the ship faster. BUT, to get and use this technology, it’s not an easy task. To get this tech you have to find different tech parts in some alien, more advanced species' ships or in the black market. Also to operate the teleportation you will need a specific control room. To operate this tech you will need some alien resources that you will have to provide to the teleportation control room. You will have to assign one crew member to this task to make the other crew members benefit to this tech.


Reputation across the universe:
Depending on which society, crew, clan… your reputation across the universe will impact your relations between the different encounter you will face during your journey. Some sellers more friendly with some specific clan will give you different prices on their products depending on your relation with those clans. Also if you meet a ship and have a really bad relationship with their clan, they might just shoot you on sight.