Vanguard Day #001 - Epic Games Center - Please Comment on the Game Ideas

[Flix Interactive]

Greetings Pioneer...

This post is linked to the blog update found here :: http://www.edenstargame.com/community-vanguard-day-winner-announced/

Please read through the post and comment on ideas by quoting the idea that you like or dislike in your reply, let us know your feedback so that we can consider it when looking to loop it into the next stage of design reviews.

Thanks again for your support and keep and eye out for more Vanguard days in the future...

Team Splintermite Fog

Idea: Enemy Atmosphere System
A corrosive atmosphere emits from hives, changing the environment, resources, and creatures within it. Destroying hives and deploying Eden Kits pushes the fog back, providing a sense of pressure and delivering the player short term goals; affects single player and multi-player equally. In addition to this, destructibles produce different resource when in fog or destructibles provide no useful resources when within the atmosphere.

Feedback:
This idea definitely reinforces the RTS and struggle of power aspects of the game and really reinforces the idea of terraforming. There are a decent amount of technicalities to consider, but this is in essence is a great vision for how the corrosive atmosphere is worked into the game world mechanics and a great way to take it forward.

Team Tameable Flare

Idea: Tameable Creature System
The player can craft microchips that allow control over one enemy at a time.

Feedback:
This feature is well thought out and presented, it unfortunately breaks the current design that the aliens are a menace and a threat. Implementing this would deteriorate the danger aspect of the game but could possibly work if we looked at applying it to neutral fauna in the future.

Team Red Sparks

Idea: Blink
The short range Blink would allow the player to move very fast (instantly) over very short distances/e.g. into or out of combat. In situations where wall-run is available, the player can “blink” from wall to wall, chaining blinks together.

This ability would also be upgradable to enable Eden Kit to Eden Kit teleportation as a “Fast Travel” ability. The beams of each Eden Kit would need to be visible from one beam to another in order to be able to fast Travel between locations.

Feedback:
Combining the Blink ability with close-quarter takedowns/melee would be great fun! It fits in with some of the original vision that we had for the movement system, this would take far more design to implement with multiplayer, i.e. it cannot be easily implemented as before, with the slow motion, when considering multiplayer, but this would work nicely as an upgrade to movement based gameplay.

Fast Travel over greater distances is a nice idea between Energy Relays or Eden Kits, we may not be able to implement it exactly as described, but this is a nice idea for future iterations, we would have to consider balancing and if it took away from the danger of leaving your base, rather than adding the ease-or-use/remove the boredom of long and uneventful travel that fast travel systems add to a game.

Idea: Enemy Biomes
Enemies congregate around Hives and gather minerals from their biomes, their territories increase in size over time. When the player kills either a creature or hive, materials are spawned that correspond to their biome, enabling the player to craft additional items not previously available within the terraformed zones.

Feedback:
All of this! Perfect and exactly what we are looking for in our current designs with the AI manager and planetary threat. Take a look at our latest concepts on the Trello board and you can see how this is evolving. I prefer the idea that the Alien Biomes exist naturally and only the presence of an Eden Kit will terraform the environment into the current foliage/environment in Eden Star.

Team Avengers

Idea: Quick Build Menu
Num-pad style of quick build menu, i.e. “0” bring menu up, “1-9” selects the item. Assign Buildables to the Quick Build Menu with a drag and drop system integrated into the Crafting Menu.

Idea: Advanced building
Allowing you to place multiple structures by assigning them to a template, by selecting an already existing arrangement, these could also be saved into your Quick Build Menu.

Feedback:
A grid like selection menu could work much better than a single column design we have right now in terms of readability. The proposed controls only cater to PC gamers who have a numeric keyboard, this excludes console/pad and even laptop users and therefore would need to be thoroughly re-designed to cater for all inputs
This system doesn’t mention anything about choosing which material you want to build from, but what we could do is include that in the “assign craftables to menu” step, eg. Brigmanite cube and tennal cube take 2 separate menu slots.

Team Arkade

Idea: Discovery Journal
As you explore the world you collect information in a Journal, which allows you to understand and navigate the world better. Collect resources or Scan enemies to unlock information about them, dependant on the amount of times you encounter the material type or enemy, depends on how much information is added to the Journal, e.g.

10 resource - Description
25 resource - Location
50+ resource - Frequency
10 Encounters - Description
25 Encounters - Strengths/Weaknesses
50+ Encounters - Hive Location

Frequencies let you track minerals of interest on the map. You can select a Material Frequency for a quick one button “ping”. Pinging highlights matching objects or enemies. Pinging can aggravate enemies.

Feedback:
The journal idea is great, it gives the player a low level, long-term completionist goal, as well as short term goals of reaching tiers of progress. The gameplay driven information gathering would require a lot more design and could greatly improve player driven goals if implemented correctly.

The ping, if it’s supposed to highlight objects around the player, it’s rather redundant because you need to see the object to see the highlight, and if you see the object then you've already reached your destination. But if it’s a map or a compass of sorts, then it has a lot of merit for giving directions.

The challenge of the journal is making sure it doesn't boil down to an a-typical system, rendered obsolete by a single wikipedia page. So the unlocks must be gameplay relevant and also would become far more rewarding if procedural content is added.

Team Just Deserts...

Idea: World Biomes
The world is divided into distinct biomes with distinct aesthetics, environmental hazards and resources. Enemies would “evolve” to inhabit the biomes, and therefore act differently depending on which biome they inhabit.
Proposed biomes: Terran (normal), Cold, Hot, Hive (zerg-like);

Terran (normal)
Cold has slow movement and freezes
Hot has exploding enemies and fire
Hive has toxic atmosphere

Biomes would also have specific weather traits, alongside Biome specific bosses that if defeated, make the biome easier to colonize.

Feedback:
Biomes are a big source of exploration for any open world game, there are many factors that we need to consider, including the Materials that each Biome hosts, the predominant fauna and Enemy types within each Biome, the features that affect the player.
The idea of the enemies evolving to match the biome is interesting to think about, but I am unsure how dynamic the gameplay relevance of this feature would be. In this scenario it may be better to have creatures that are specific to each Biome first.

Team Natural Hazards

Idea: Natural Hazards
Vines overgrowing unattended bases, blizzards decreasing RMD’s and armour’s Energy/Power, hornet-style aliens attacking from trees if destroyed, sandstorms that obscure vision, carnivorous flora, volcanoes, gas clouds, moving floating islands (erratic ground), hot springs which damage if traversed, acid rivers - instant death, need to build over, electromagnetic storms which interrupt energy flow.

Feedback:
These are more ideas than designs, yes, but some of them are could work in a modular fashion and others add very little or too much to gameplay. Vines attacking unattended bases sounds like an addition or an alternative to deteriorating structures. They both address the need for base maintenance, but vines are aesthetically and technically more work than deterioration of structures outside of the Eden Kit’s shield. Damaging, sculpting or moving ground; however this is implemented, could be really interesting for the player, but i’m not sure it would fit the current intended gameplay loop.

Team NUGS

Idea: Neoblastic Ultrasonic Geoscope (Mining Stick)
Craftable Mining Stick (like dynamite) Consumable, made from common materials, e.g.: Ironite, Ceramic, Protonite. Must be Crafted at Eden Kit, and can only carry 3 at time. Place/launch one in into an area, wait for countdown, it explodes, minerals drop to the floor and you can collect them. The references depict a spike-like missile, which looks like it could be fired from the RMD in a straight line.

Feedback:
This one is very simple and a great alternative to the grind of Harvesting. The idea that the item is Consumable, similar to a grenade sized orb is nice. Instead of actually exploding, it could emit an energy that destroys all items within range and, when the Materials spawn, it could then absorb the resulting Materials, collecting them all within the orb for the player (in an explosion and then absorption). Once used, and the Materials are collected, the orb acts like a Material shard itself with a short lifespan, meaning that the player must then absorb the orb before it disintegrates (losing all materials with it).

Team Bilbo Swaggins

Idea: Quick Build Menu
A quick build radial menu. Items and categories appear in the circular space around the reticle. Press left click to place, right click to create. The system could produce temporary objects:

Mini turrets
Baiting Dummies
Lights

Feedback:
In it’s initial incarnation, the idea could act as a rucksack to survive at night more than anything with some interesting feature ideas. The designs describe more of an alternative way to build new items, rather than addressing any issues with the current system. There is no mention of anything to do with selecting which mineral is to be used to craft the structure, however the designs for the radial menu and the quick selection of assets is really nice. The mechanic also meets a need in the fact that the quick-selection of items and the quick-build ability is an essential part of the whole system.

Team Harvest

Idea: EM-Harvester
EM Harvester is a consumable which can be placed on the ground to gather nearby resources. It has a limited range around the box unit to which a drone floats about collecting resources and can be set to focus on specific resources such as Fibre, Alloys, Energy, or a combination of them all. The EM-Harvester can be upgraded to increase its radius, yield, and speed, but the more upgrades it has, the louder and more threatening it will seem to Fauna.
A working Harvester will attract wildlife and other players. It needs to be protected.

Feedback:
Instead of using a drone, the Harvester could actually be a drill that mines beneath the landscape. This could be a way to mine completely random materials from what is too sturdy to mine by RMD. You would place it like a structure and then defend it. after it’s done you pick up your semi-random resources.
This could help us overcome a few key design challenges;
Provide players optional short-term engaging goals
Provide some materials for random others (you need some to craft the harvester of course)
Provide us a simple system to mine the landscape

Team Moon Moons

Idea: Armour Energy Allocation System
The player has the ability to redirect limited amount of energy to different parts of their armour, which changes its movement capabilities. Each slot would give specific optional bonuses at the cost of other optional bonuses:

Feet - Jump height/distance
Legs - Sprint speed/duration
RMD - Force Push/Jump Assist
Body - Gliding or Thrusters
Head - Scanner or Zoom or Nightvision

The system can be unlocked gradually with crafting. Some areas of the map/biomes would require armour with specific capabilities in order to access them.

Feedback:
This is a nice addition to the basis of the armour customisation system. It could be very exciting to customise your movement this way but i’m not too sure that the examples given would need to always be specific to the attribute, but zones of armour could collectively contribute to perks in a modular fashion, balancing on this would be a challenge.

Team Hungry Hungry Hippogryphs

Idea: Thruster Pack
The Thruster Pack would provide gliding capabilities and could be used to hover across short distances. To equip it, you change your armour.

Feedback:
This is a nice idea and, If we were to do this, we would have to consider combat connotations of being in the air. How ground and flying enemies react to you while you are close, etc. We could use a double jump mechanic to activate this, i.e. jump off the ground - jump and hold - glide.

Because glide would never take you up, i think it could work very well. Unless we included geysers, that could push you up also.

[Alpagaus]

Hmm, what exactly are these? Are You posting some people's ideas, Your idea with explanation for community to comment on them, which features they'd love first, or maybe it's some repost from some forum? :P Some of those ideas, in fact every one - is nice - but I am unsure if I, Spamer, should comment on any of these =]

[Flix Interactive]

Originally posted by Alpagaus:

Hmm, what exactly are these? Are You posting some people's ideas, Your idea with explanation for community to comment on them, which features they'd love first, or maybe it's some repost from some forum? :P Some of those ideas, in fact every one - is nice - but I am unsure if I, Spamer, should comment on any of these =]

I've updated the post and linked the original Blog info :) Hope that makes more sense now!