Permanence brainstorm
Flayra
Game Director, Unknown Worlds EntertainmentSan Francisco Join Date: 2002-01-22 Member: 3Super Administrators, NS2 Developer, Subnautica Developer
Game Director, Unknown Worlds EntertainmentSan Francisco Join Date: 2002-01-22 Member: 3Super Administrators, NS2 Developer, Subnautica Developer
Hey all,
One of the aspects of the game that excites us the most is the idea of the player being able to have a huge effect on the world. This was something we talked about a bit at PAX and got a huge response from, so it's something we really want to create all through the game.
Some examples from other games:
- DayZ - you can truly lose all your stuff if someone kills you.
- Rust - you can truly lose all your stuff if someone kills you or breaks into your house.
- XCOM - you can truly lose your entire squad, which you have customized and grown over many missions, if you're careless (amplified in the Iron Man mode).
- Dark Souls - you can truly lose tons of souls (experience/money) if you're careless.
- Walking Dead - your choices can cause a character to die out of your story completely. (also, this shows that loss+permanence does not need to mean a motor-skills-difficult game)
For Subnautica, we've been thinking about things like:
- In "hardcore" mode, you have permadeath (no saving, game ends and is deleted on death)
- When you scrape along the sand in your sub, it should leave a "trough"
- When you hit coral with your sub, you can destroy it, which makes other creatures not able to live here.
- When you drive through "kelp" in your sub (called Creepvine), you can destroy it.
- Being able to dig tunnels into the terrain with the drill-arm of your exosuit. You could alter the appearance of the landscape or connect caves together.
- Being able to pull the DNA out of one creature and inject it into another creature, giving it the ability to glow, increasing its size, or making it more or less friendly. You can also do this on yourself, giving you new permanent characteristics (changing your vision mode, making your skin glow, etc.).
- Being able to make an entire race of creatures extinct.
- Being able to take a race of creatures from near-extinction to abundance, through careful stewarding of eggs on your sub, then releasing the newborns back into a safe environment.
- Being able to inscribe symbolic messages into the world for other players to find.
- When you die in hardcore mode, other players (in Hardcore mode) can find your remains (and loot), and can send you a message thanking you for it.
The purpose of this thread is pick your collective brains for your ideas as well. We really could use more help here!
We want ideas that:
- Represent both "loss" and "growth" (ie, it's not just about destroying the world, but changing/improving it through nurture and care)
- Are player-centric: ie, they happen when you're around. We're trying to avoid big ecosystems that can happen off-screen and can be complicated technically and design-wise, and where the excitement is out of view.
- May or may not allow the world to go out of whack. If you have to restart, that's OK, but only after concerted effort trying to kill all plants or capture all holefish or extinguish the Reefbacks.
What kind of things would YOU like to do?
One of the aspects of the game that excites us the most is the idea of the player being able to have a huge effect on the world. This was something we talked about a bit at PAX and got a huge response from, so it's something we really want to create all through the game.
Some examples from other games:
- DayZ - you can truly lose all your stuff if someone kills you.
- Rust - you can truly lose all your stuff if someone kills you or breaks into your house.
- XCOM - you can truly lose your entire squad, which you have customized and grown over many missions, if you're careless (amplified in the Iron Man mode).
- Dark Souls - you can truly lose tons of souls (experience/money) if you're careless.
- Walking Dead - your choices can cause a character to die out of your story completely. (also, this shows that loss+permanence does not need to mean a motor-skills-difficult game)
For Subnautica, we've been thinking about things like:
- In "hardcore" mode, you have permadeath (no saving, game ends and is deleted on death)
- When you scrape along the sand in your sub, it should leave a "trough"
- When you hit coral with your sub, you can destroy it, which makes other creatures not able to live here.
- When you drive through "kelp" in your sub (called Creepvine), you can destroy it.
- Being able to dig tunnels into the terrain with the drill-arm of your exosuit. You could alter the appearance of the landscape or connect caves together.
- Being able to pull the DNA out of one creature and inject it into another creature, giving it the ability to glow, increasing its size, or making it more or less friendly. You can also do this on yourself, giving you new permanent characteristics (changing your vision mode, making your skin glow, etc.).
- Being able to make an entire race of creatures extinct.
- Being able to take a race of creatures from near-extinction to abundance, through careful stewarding of eggs on your sub, then releasing the newborns back into a safe environment.
- Being able to inscribe symbolic messages into the world for other players to find.
- When you die in hardcore mode, other players (in Hardcore mode) can find your remains (and loot), and can send you a message thanking you for it.
The purpose of this thread is pick your collective brains for your ideas as well. We really could use more help here!
We want ideas that:
- Represent both "loss" and "growth" (ie, it's not just about destroying the world, but changing/improving it through nurture and care)
- Are player-centric: ie, they happen when you're around. We're trying to avoid big ecosystems that can happen off-screen and can be complicated technically and design-wise, and where the excitement is out of view.
- May or may not allow the world to go out of whack. If you have to restart, that's OK, but only after concerted effort trying to kill all plants or capture all holefish or extinguish the Reefbacks.
What kind of things would YOU like to do?
Comments
Wiping out a species by accident as a consequence of my gameplay, I am totally on board with. From a personal perspective, I see this as a real opportunity to create a greater awareness of how fragile underwater eco-systems are, and indeed any natural eco-systems are, while presenting it in an engaging and fun game.
Going along with your idea of being able to extract and distil DNA to create abilities, it would be nice if you could be able to automagically share you 'recipes' with friends, so they can create these things during their current life. The key is that when you die, you lose all those recipes. You only receive a recipe that is 'discovered' by a friend, if you are playing at the same time. You can accrue many recipes during your player lifetime, but once you die, it's a fresh slate.
For example: making things more friendly (smaller brain mass) makes them easier to predators to hunt them (meaning more predators). Larger species require more food which might extinguish smaller preyed on species.
As for the sharing of Soul_Rider recipes, perhaps you could have a number of saved designs that you can share with your friends, but are unable to be used in "hardcore" mode. I also keep having this visual concept of putting in Mega Man save codes formed from only TGAC, though that honestly does not sound like the most fun.
While I am no means any sort of game designer I have a hard time picturing how you can develop a game that is rewarding to play for both styles. I feel you would end up with a more shallow game as a whole trying to play to both sides. A compromise could be made if you go the route rust went where you lose everything you had on you at the time however on respawn you retain the "recipes" your character has learned so its not a true reset.
Personally speaking for an exploration game I need to feel some danger. The risk of losing my sub (if i died while in it), everything in it and the gear I have on me would certainly add to my enjoyment.
Something to think about at least...
I very much like the idea of finding the wrecks of other Subs and gaining the tech/research they had
One question though, does this mean there will be a multiplayer in "hardcore mode", or will these wrecks be randomly generated as a part of the terrain that person died on (in a seperate isntance of the game)?
On DNA alteration: I think that altering DNA should be risky every time it is done, especially with crew members.
For Instance:
Enhance the lungs of a crew member so that they use less oxygen/can breath under higher pressure (for exploring deep, tight caves)
- Small risk of genetic rejection, incapacitating/killing crew member until a cure can be found (unless dead)
Assuming that crew member came through fine, you then want to alter them to also have bioluminessence (too see in those deep dark caves)
- Higher risk of death/incapacitation due to an already altered DNA structure
-- Some DNA types can be flat out rejected and kill/incapacitate the crew member (like adding carnivore DNA with plant DNA?)
Other than that, being able to destabalize an ecosytem by killing coral/kelp/animals like you were already talking about sounds perfect and fun, though gathering "materials" from them (DNA, scales, teeth, etc.) should carry a risk of "overfarming" said resources (forcing more exploration, or risking destablization)
Anyway, these are just ramblings, hope they help
Don´t drink and drive!
As i understood it, the mothersub is like a floating headquarter that circles slowly in a huge area, inorder for you to find it easier it is broadcasting a signal back to you.
For exploration reasons you are able to Scan the area in it, and set a global point of operation which its circling, you´re not able to manuvere it directly.
Like a shark it has to stay in motion inorder for it to provide O2 and energy for you through filtering techniques.
Not beeing able to drive it into kelpforests due to its size is an easy way to limit explorational capabilities early on. Not good if kelp gets into the engines.
Driving it against "the wall" could result in a lack of beeing able to create oxygen and most likely moss+reefs will grow on it once its stationary
but the upside is that you won´t loose track of its position any more. And as long as you can provide oxy and energy through other means you´ll still be able for research to do on it.
Another possibility is that once its stationary, you won´t actually transport unintended leeching fish from one biom to another, that sucked onto the mothersubs hull.
I also think kelpforests and maybe additional anomalies should jamm the mothersub communication channels.
being able to crave a tunnel through a cave to move on i like it already!
At the setting sun, the mystics realize that their time is ending. They sing their song and start heading west for the last time.
Imagine a pod of whale-like gentle giants, abandoning their home to travel to a sacred place. They are the last of their kind, and when they arrive they will die and disappear forever.
As a player, you can observe, but you can't hinder them from their course. They are like the Ents, a relic from an earlier age in a world that is no longer fit for them.
Mild terraforming sounds like an excellent plan and also gives the exosuit a dedicated purpose. Expect players troughing their names into the sand and carving their faces et. al into the rock. Speaking of:
Spore has a similar concept of sharing player created content. I really like the idea of secretly extracting parts of one players world (like shipwreck + surrounding, carvings) and procedurally embedding them in another players world. Oh the mystery!
How about leveraging the Steam marketplace for this? Farm your game for DNA samples, trade them with your friends on Steam. Or sell them on the market for real money. BTW: Does the game studio get a share of those revenues?
Secondly, I would like to be able to build my own ecosystem either by myself, or with a limited number of friends.
Concerning messing with DNA, I'm not sure if it's possible to keep the sense of discovery and wonder. When you look at other games, it's easy to look up receipes on the internet, and see how you create a certain effect. By making it all random you could avoid that, but then you also lose the ability to discover something cool, and use that again.
How about a possibility to be reinserted into a lost game. Something like a new expedition to the planet, some time after the accident, where the world have changed slightly, and you can rediscover the remains of your previous expedition?
Essentially, the world exists outside your current play through and is reused on your next game unless you ask fora new one. If you lose in Dwarf Fortress you can come back through later and find a horde of goblins setup in your former home. In SN, that would mean that unless you rebuilt the world you would come back to an area you had wrecked and find the remains of your stuff and get the chance to think about how terrible the ecosystem in the area is and how it was totally your fault.
Also, of course to take some or all of your old loot.
So basicly you wreck / lose something and after awhile the ecosystem takes it over. New habitat for different species etc.
This could work for your corpse aswell: 1st meat-eating species come and pick your bones, then your skeleton becomes part of the coral / plants growing.
Also, as a more conscience terraforming effort:
treehugger.com/natural-sciences/biorock-stimulating-coral-growth-with-electricity.html
Or artifical fish-structure / hiding spots:
Or what about 'adopting' different creatures by raising them as a surrogate mother, making those individual creatures behave differently to the player (also when they are fully grown and dangerous looking).
Would be super-emo if those creatures would also make it back to their 'mother' when they feel their end is coming.
The other side of the coin: annoy / torture creatures when they are small, watch your back when they get big!
So basicly relational-histories with individual creatures as a form of permanence.
Keep 'em coming.
That concept can be pushed very far and would not be that complicated for simple things.
- ice floes (travel over and dive under the cover of ice)
- night and day affecting visibility and the creatures who come out to "play"
- May 4th - "Star Wars Day" - have two suns that day, as an easter egg ("binary stars" as on Tatooine)
- fresh water "lava" - a nature program on the BBC showed that when ice melted and ran off heavy surface ice to the sea floor, the different densities of the water meant it didn't immediately mix with the salt water. When it got to the sea floor, it would flow like lava before solidifying, killing anything caught in its' wake.
- some limited flight capability (like a hang glider) to avoid large predators like this polar bear swimming around
- creatures giving birth, and perhaps tasks associated, such as newest polar bear in the world and polar bear cub rescue
What I mean is that the former completely generates a new universe and the latter re-rolls that same seed only with options to include any previous species decimation or terraforming.
Also it would be neat to include a wreck of your past life somewhere in the soft reset world.
Edit: I see other people have similar ideas.
A player should be able to set something in motion, go off and do something very far away, and then periodically come back (or use a remote camera) to see what changes have occurred. At the very least, the player should be able to place (a limited number of) "beacons" in certain areas, so they can be actively monitored (and consequently play-out in real time) even though the player is not nearby.
in case it was actually not suggested yet: if species have chances of (more or less) visible mutations, it could be a nice way to encourage players to keep a species alive over longer time periods: you could extract that DNA or otherwise benefit from those mutations.
possible advantages:
the more population there is, the higher your chances to find these mutations. this could also encourage players to revisit previous regions and add visible diversity among big groups of a single species.
on top of that, it might feel more sciency for the player to figure out the possible mutations each species can have (i guess some mutations could occur among multiple species, others could be unique to one species; some might be frequent, others very rare).
if some mutations are more subtle than others (e.g. changed behaviour), you will have a reason to "study" them every once in a while and go "oooh look at this beauuutiful snake" and add its DNA to your collection.
ofc this approach can also be combined with the current concept of injecting new DNA and also things unexpectedly going out of control...
edit: the chance of random mutations might also increase the replay value. instead of having a randomly generated world, you have random mutations which means random DNA (kind of like a roguelike: basic stuff is usually easy to get, but you are also given rare and possibly more powerful random stuff every now and then). not only are you driven by exploring mutations you might have missed in your last playthrough, but you might also try out a new playstyle by making the best out of what you have been given. one might say this concept contributed greatly to the high replay value on games like pokemon or FTL.
If you pick some, and leave at least a few, they will eventually grow back. The more you leave, the faster they will grow. However, its not just the player that would affect this. Certain animal/fish species may eat the plants (especially the prolific/fast growing ones), keeping them in check. As the amount of plants goes down, the number of animals in the area will also go down - hopefully eventually resulting in an equilibrium.
A player caused tsunami from digging too deep or a post-tsunami map (part) could open up some interesting gameplay possibilities.
For the "hardcore mode"
i would definately find it a bad design motif if saves were deleted on death.
Maybe, as wel as deleting on death - it saved a sort of "Special" save, which is more of a record of how well you did that.. "life" - than a savegame? that would make more sense, i think.
I make, for francophones, a little traduction (like for the other subject) in french. It's really not perfect, but good enough for francophones who didn't understand well english. Hope it will be usefull. If someone have correction on it, tell me (thanks).
Notes:
- If a player has no Subnautica friends currently online, it could pick a handful of other (random) Subnautica players and feed their events (anonymously) -- something like "Another player [1] has found an illusive cuttlefish, ate it, and died".
- There should probably be a spam filter such that only X events are shown every minute (the rest would be ignored)
- Provide user option to show: None, Friends only, Friends and Others (default)
players already see achievements done by their friends on their community page btw. some games like plague inc. give you the option to share the result of a game on facebook etc. (though i don't use facebook or twitter so i have no idea how feasible/annoying this is).
The devs get a tiny share, but in my opinion that's a horrible idea for a singleplayer game. If it was multiplayer with factions and PVP, yeah, that could work. Singleplayer though? That would be like microtransactions in minecraft.
Going back to the infamous Spore, other players species, or nurtured civilizations showed up in your game as you explored which was less than the game advertised pre-release but did provide some connection to what other people were making - unfortunately the marketplace to view and download other players creations was much more interesting for that, such that randomly encountering something someone else made very rarely added much to the game.