The design of a game where you're alone on a distant planet

Hi everyone,

I've played games that take place on another planet, like first-person simulators, colony establishment and development, multiplayer ones with procedurally generated planets, and so on...

Most of the games I've seen in this genre, are somewhat boring, or simply don't have a good enough design.
I'm thinking to make a game where the player can explore hand-made and interesting terrains, craft weapons, encounter dangerous creatures, expand the base, grow plants, and so on.

Now I know that there are already games that do that, but what I would like to see is a little bit of mistery and SF added to it, not the really long, sometimes boring simulator games, not the ugly procedural generated ones, a game that keeps the magic of being on a distant planet, and adds good game design and a great atmosphere to it.

Those are the things I thought would fit such a game:

-First person mode
-Crafting
-Gathering and exploring
-Inventory
-Player Status System(Health, Oxygen, etc)
-Growing Plants
-Base building (limited, not like other games that are building-oriented)
-Creatures
-Weapons (that can be crafted)

Does anyone have ideas of what could work and not work in such a game?

Thanks, Chris.

 

*cough* no mans sky *cough*

 

No man's sky isn't hand crafted. []

EDIT: At least, not in the way the OP means. [] It's a procedurally generated world (some might say THE procedurally generated world).

 

oh and I thought he just meant the ugly procedural ones

I'm rather confused about what is being asked here though, is it about, if all of that "content" mentioned would be fitting into 1 game?

 

For me, it's very hard to imagine a game like that that kept a mysterious, scifi atmosphere without a handcrafted story.

I know Skyrim isn't the best example, but whatever atmosphere it had was totally dependent on the story and main plot, inasmuch as I played generic quests and looting I didn't feel that atmosphere at all.

So I think if you want a scifi game with real atmosphere and mystery, it has to be first and foremost a story-driven game, which so far has not been able to be generated procedurally. If you want to build an open-world looting game on top of that , it might work, but it also makes your workload huge. Something like Far Cry 3 sort of succeeds with both but that's because it has a great character-driven story campaign as well as a top-notch open world survival thing, and that makes it a huge, complicated project.

I'm not too optimistic that No Mans Sky will be very 'atmospheric', but who knows I could be wrong.

 

It's important to anchor a game to some core ideas when the setting is as open as "planet NOT Earth." For instance, is the game about the place or the person?

If the former, then I would say procedural generating the planet is out of the question- if the planet is always changing then the answer to the question "where am I?" wouldn't have much depth to plumb would it? If the identity of the player takes a minor role, then the bigger questions to answer become "Is the planet deserted?" "What happened here in the past?"

If the main idea is "Who am I?" then there is much more latitude to work with when it comes to environment, because we can always anchor the game on the actions of the player. The important questions become self-focused, and the design elements start to naturally click into place. "Am I alone?" "Can I survive?" "What am I doing here?"

Starbound provides a great example of this- you beam down to a random planet and proceed to do Terraria-Minecrafty things. When you build a house, you gain the ability to craft a distress beacon- but as soon as you do, a spaceship filled with laser equipped penguins swoops down and attacks you, destroying your house in the process. A decidedly un-Minecrafty thing to have happen, and a very much scripted, story-minded event. It works, because it is anchored to the actions of the player, and not a specific environment or location other than "outdoors."

By layering systems on top of each other, it is possible to design mechanics that work well anywhere- like in MGS V or Far Cry. Guards are their own, self contained systems, but when placed together they interact in ways that make them a different problem to solve, rather than the same problem 4 times over. The day/night cycle works no matter where you are, but at outposts it causes a changing of the guard, which presents a unique opportunity for the player. Systems that layer on top of each other to create more depth can keep a game from becoming stale just because your procedural generation algorithm didn't make the Hagia Sophia out of soapstone automatically. The spotlight focuses on the mechanics rather than the environment.

 

Your idea is so generic at the moment that it covers everything from Doom to Comander Keen to Factorio to Don't Starve to Kerball Space Programme.

What is the game meant to be about? What is the player doing?

 

Some design decisions are considered not as fun as others regardless of the setting. In particular very few first person perspective games hold my interest.
With that said - I've collected a couple 'other worldly' themed games very recently on my steam wishlist. I really don't know why other world themed games have all the sudden caught my attention, it's kinda weird.
Anyway here's a list of some you might find interest in, or some that may have been detailed in the list of boring games on other planets. I haven't played any of these games so I can't say if any are good are not.
Some of these might not be newer games but they are new to me.

No Man's Sky
Duskers
Lifeless Planet
Planetbase
Stasis
Environmental Station Alpha

 

You can try something like in The Martian (2015) or Riddick (2013) movies...

 

That certainly might work.
For the "planet", or "celestial body" I was thinking of Titan, which is a satellite of Saturn, it's similar to Earth but still very different, it contains rivers and seas of methane.
It is speculated that different life forms might exist on the surface, which could inhale H2 instead of O2, so they should be weird and different.
Another thing is the atmosphere tint, which is orange and sometimes greenish, and Saturn can be seen in the sky, which can offer a spectacular view, mainly at night.
As for gameplay elements, Titan gravity is very low, about 14 - 15% of our planet Earth, which is 1.4 - 1.5 m/s^2, and because the atmosphere is so dense, even denser than ours, you could fly with a pair of wings, or other easy to use device.
Alot of things can be thought of on Titan, that can create an interesting, deep, fun, and new experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)

 

Who is your target audience? Quite a number of the posters in the No Man's Sky subreddit have mentioned that they have only seen a handful or less of games that filled the niche they were interested in. Likewise a good number have mentioned that they will likely play it for a while and then move on.

Success of a game is dependent on many factors. Simply throwing a handful of common concepts into a game is not guaranteed to make it successful. If it was then every single survival game out there would be dominating the market.

 

I flew by this a few months back:

http://www.thesolusproject.com/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/313630/

It's kinda-sorta what you describe. It is also keeping interesting not by survival mechanics alone (which I really. REALLY dislike in any game, no matter what genre, this one's keeping it very light), but by design and implications.

You are supposed to land on a faraway planet that's "somewhat close to Earth in conditions so we can survive, maybe" with the most advanced life being plants. And then you start venturing into quite obviously artificially made caverns with engravings and drawings of... not spoiling it. Play it for yourself

To be fair, I haven't invested more than single-digit number of hours in it though, like I said it's the crafting/survival system that I hate, if it were turned into S.O.M.A.-alike campaign story it would be insanely awesome in my eyes.

Also I am not sure why nobody mentioned yet ... is this such a relatively unknown game or what? I think I heard about it even some ways back but there wasn't a playable release yet.

I'm glad people are mentioning No Man's Sky a lot. Though it still seems I'm the only one gushing over that game like a small child before Christmas.

 

Titan, ever since the 70s has been a "what if we can live there / explore it" kind of planet. Obviously, we now know that is unlikely but it would still be a great please to build a game around. And as others have inferred - just being on a planet isn't enough to base a game on. But when you're ready to put together some prototypes etc., our tool may be able to help. Here is a concept one of the Landscape Builder team put together.

 

You're not the only one eagerly awaiting its arrival. My impressions from the vast number of interviews and videos is that it's very close to the sort of game that I would enjoy for very long periods of time. Frequent delays though were just wearing down my patience so I started avoiding any discussions or researching into it further.

Better to focus on other pursuits till it finally comes out so I won't be burned out before it actually launches.

 

The first question that comes to my mind when I open a Sci-Fi book or I watch a Sci-Fi movie is "How did they end up in such a situation?". Talking about games, what makes a good Sci-Fi product, at least to me, is the developers ability of justifying every possible game scenario and situation in a logical way. I doubt that anytime soon someone will wake up on Titan withouth remembering anything about his past, without a radio, and only a rusty piece of metal to defend himself from creatures we've never seen before, so if this is what you want to show in your game, you should motivate it in a (pseudo)rational way. If you really want to make something appealing, you should start thinking about what brought your player on a different planet, why is he alone (if he is, of course), why the planet is different from reality, and what was his purpose in the mission. Once you can answer all these questions, you already have an interesting story, and you can start building a world around it. If you start building your game around the crafting system or the vegetation, you might risk to adjust the story to the design features, which is bad, really bad.

 

Yeah no kidding, we're frequently joking that our game's "deadline" [no actual deadline] is August because once No Man's Sky is out, that's it, what we've made, we've made.

And just as we cool off of that, Mass Effect Andromeda is supposed to be up early 2017. I hope you've all caught the new E3 trailer? Kinda-sorta related to topic at hand even.

 

My knowledge of that game ends at "It's procedural and very colorful". I've mostly avoided trailers etc.. Is there any real indication that it won't be a shallow grindfest like Elite Dangerous?

 

Well for starters I'd recommend not avoiding trailers. Avoid gameplay videos but not trailers.

Apparently there is some sort of central point to it all, the little we've been told is that the point is to finally upgrade your ship and yourself to be able to travel to the center of the galaxy, with your journey getting more difficult the closer you get.

But honestly, even if there was nothing concerning the plot at all, I'd shell out cash just for the ability to look up at the night sky, pick a star, sit in my ship and go to it, as was primarily shown in one of those very early trailers that got me hooked (I think first mention was E3 2013 if I'm not mistaken).

 

You could do this in Spore. And that game got old really fast.

I am looking forward to trying No Man's Sky. I'm just not sure it will be as amazing as its put out to be. Then again, the Minecraft generation might love it.

 

None of the footage they've shown has given me the impression the game will be anything like Elite Dangerous.

Spore had atrocious gameplay mechanics once you got beyond the second or third stage. Plus the worlds in Spore were overly simplistic and not at all interesting to visit. Plus if I recall you were frequently having to defend your world in Spore and you couldn't do that while simultaneously exploring.

 

Pretty much this. The ability to visit different planets is not that exciting if the different planets are all identical to the one you start on.

 

I can have fun without a plot, but I need interesting decisions to make and emergent goals that naturally guide the flow of the game.

I consider that great news!

 

Agreed, and I firmly believe this will be the case, because Sean Murray of Hello Games has very specifically said that the game will NOT be an MMO of any sort, it will be completely playable offline and in singleplayer if you wish (you can sync your discoveries with Atlas server whenever you connect but it's not mandatory).

I truly don't believe he would be making a point out of that, if the game were boring on it's own.

I dislike story-weak games like, say, GTA, it's not built to tell a wrenching story, it's a "look here's a big sandbox, go have fun" type of game and I am not very interested in those. Case in point, to reply to above, I actually stopped playing Spore after 3rd stage, just like Ryiah mentioned And I'll probably get stoned for this but I actually don't like and never have played Minecraft. *runs and hides*

And here I am, impatient over No Man's Sky release. Go figure

 

One thing that might really benefit a "marooned on an alien planet" game is an imaginary friend - like Wilson the volleyball in Castaway, or like the companion cube in Portal, but with actual lines of dialogue or narration because the main character is imagining it.

 

That's one of the best ideas I've ever heard for any survival game. If one is talented and experienced enough to properly realize this, to have the emotional impact it should, I'd buy it.

 

Why are you so fixated on hand crafting everything? Procedural generation is how games of that kind of scale are even possible to make. I feel like you are biting off a huge chunk of work that may or may not ultimately improve the experience of the player too much. Procedural generation not only cuts down on work, but also makes worlds unique. A game like you are describing would be quickly mapped and the magic would be somewhat lost.