I never said it is small, it’s just miniscule compared to playerbase of GTA or even other procedural games like Minecraft or Blockscape.
Here you are comparing the player numbers of large, commercial projects to the popularity of free to play projects. I think it is more appropriate to compare the potential popularity of our game to free/simple game projects rather than to large commercial ones, especially ones that are 3D!
I think the popularity and genre of other games do nothing with this project. Even if 1 person play a free or commercial game every day somewhere on the planet earth, that something that would be nice to achieve, and 4ian is right. We should make something fun, well designed in first place. But I’m still not sure about GTA as “driving cars in city”. How about GTA in Space?
We could have space stations where we can walk around in top down view, pick missions, trade, upgrade our ships, weapons, buy new ships and play arcade games. In space we could do mining for resources, exploring, scan for anomalies and play some kind of puzzle games to analyse anomalies. Anomalies could leave to hidden sectors, forgotten ancient, alien space stations with full of deadly creatures, ship wrecks with useful parts…etc We could also attack other ships or attacked by other ships, board ships (something similar to FTL) and steal or hack it shield and steal it cargo, or simply destroy it and salvage useful parts. Maybe we could also land on planets but only to be a bit varied, no huge cities and vehicles only some trees, river lake around a station where we can do exactly the same as on a orbiting space stations the only different, it is on a planet in nature not in empty space. Feels a bit different time to time, though we could do some exploring and action missions on planets.
This game would be some kind of space exploration sandbox action game.
A bit of GTA
-top down view
-freedom, we can go anywhere, we can do anything
-civilians on space stations walking around, spaceship traffic around stations
-we can fly any space ship and interact with objects in the gameworld
A bit of Survival Squad
-we could find some horror action or simply action without horror on ancient alien space stations and planets on our own or with crew members
A bit of FTL
-we could board ships which would look and feel similar
-maybe even could have huge capital ships with very similar gameplay to order crew members and operate the ship and it weapons
A bit of X
-mining, trading, exploration in space
A bit of Mass Effect
-in case anybody would have a good story idea, we could implement a similar action oriented RPG gameplay and missions in to the game world.
Great idea, ddabrahim! When do we start? I am good with GraphicsGale so I could make some pixelart for the game.
//edit: Also we could make stations procedurally generated, akin to Spelunky (on Derek’s site it is explained how algorithms work, so it should be relatively easy to replicate it). Although we’d need custom pseudorandom function seeing there’s no way to set seed ATM (unless I miss something). This should be easy as I did some pseudorandom functions when programming for DCPU16 and C64/Atari (never did anything worthwhile so I didn’t post it).
I saw the words “GTA in space” and I was instantly sold. Great idea ddabrahim!
We can start the development as soon as we can bring together a well designed concept and a nice ToDo list. 
We should really discuss all the features of the game, how tings going to be. I know it can be long, but we really have to take
time and discuss everything in the next days, weeks before we start anything.
As I don’t have time to go through everything in one post, and probably even nobody wants to read 10 pages in one go, and hopefully everybody have ideas and suggestions, so we should discuss only 1 thing at the time in details.
Let start with the structure and components of the Ships.
Personally, I’m really like the way as it works in EVE Online.
We should do something similar but only a basic, simplistic version of it, in my opinion.
Every ship would made up of 4 main components (for now)
- cargo to be able to store any items in our ship
- slots to be able to fit basically anything to our ship, for example, weapons, ammo, shield generator,
scanners, engines, upgrades …etc everything is require 1 or more slots depends on the size and level - power generator to power our shields, weapons, engines basically anything, this is also require a slot
- engines to be able to move our ship
Every ships cargo is permanent, can’t be changed, bat can be upgraded using slots. we can decide to use 1 or more
slots for cargo upgrades to have more cargo space available on our ship, but in this case we are going to have less slots available to fit anything else.
Everything else, power generator, shields, weapons, ammo… everything can be changed or upgraded.
What components can fit to our ship, simply depends on number of available free slots, and power.
Everything is require slots and power even power generator require slots. The number of slots, simply depends on size of the ship.
In EVE Online, they use even different type of slots, you can’t fit anything anywhere and the number of slots also depends on type of the sip, but I think for now, we should go only with a basic concept for v1.0 we can go further with this later in v1.X
What components can be available to fit in v1.0?
-power generators
-engines
-missile weapons
–different type of ammos
-energy, laser weapons
-jump drive to be able to jump anywhere within certain distance in KNOWN, DISCOVERED universe.
-mining laser
–different types for different materials, every laser can be used on every material but specified lasers are better for specified asteroids
-teleport beam module to be able to board other ships and teleport anything from space, from ships in to our cargo
-security system to protect from hack attacks (to take down shields, weapons…etc)
-shields
–different types against missiles, energy weapons and also against teleport beam
-scanners
–different types: to see ships, to find anomalies, to find asteroids with specified minerals in it
-cargo space upgrades
-engine power upgrades to increase generated power with a small but useful %
-energy weapon upgrades to reduce power cost with small but useful %
-autopilot module, (the player ship can use (pathfinding) automatism to travel from A to B )
-mining laser upgrade to increase speed of minng but also increase power requirement
Any more ideas for components, structure of ships?
Remember that, every single part require slots and power. Every part is available in different levels/sizes, as the level/size is bigger it requires more slots and power and so you can’t make a super ship, at some point you have to consider to buy a higher level model of ship with more available slots or buy and use multiple small ships and specialize fitting for different tasks, such as fight, mining, transporting, exploring, speed (we could have racing missions too 
)…etc
I have one more idea to mention, inspired by EVE. We can discuss the details later when we get to trading to discuss, but I want to mention it now and ask your opinions, as I think this would be super feature and also effects components. How about, online trading in the game?
The game would be single player, but the trading module can be multiplayer so every player who playing the game, they could trade with each other. We could have a trade terminal at stations where we can sell things to other players and buy things from other players. Later we can turn the whole game in to multiplayer to have co-op missions or be an MMO but I think that would be too much for now, we should keep the game single player, except the trading module.
The problem is, the components and maybe even ships should be manufactured by players to make sense such trading module.
So, basically we also have to make a decision if we want to make community driven economy in the game through online trading or
we simply use rare items, rare blueprints systen in game.
A community driven economy would mean, every components even ships are manufactured by other players ONLY. The game provides,
only basic things to get started but to go further it would require online trading and a real economy.
The players have to buy blueprints and have to mine resources to manufacture items using blueprints.
But we have to force players to use trading terminal. Mining should be time consuming, components should require a lot of resources to manufacture and blueprints must be very expensive, so if the player would like to mine resources, buy blueprint and manufacture something on his own, it would cost a lot of money and game time.
The basic idea is that, people can do mining and sell asteroids or refined minerals to other players.
A player who has blueprints and money, can buy the asteroids or minerals and manufacture the item and sell it in trade terminal to other player. Online trade terminal could make it a bit more live even as a single player game but only if the game going to have many active player who build and keep alive the economy.
If nobody mining, manufacturing and trading that would cause the whole game to be dead.
So if we decide to do something like this, we have to be ready to keep economy alive by manufacturing and selling things (probably we can solve this on server side) until the game gets popular and players start to build and push the economy.
I don’t know much about network programming, but I can imagine this as trade files on a server.
A trade terminal could basically read and write this files. If player put something up for sale, the trade terminal would create an entry in trade files on the server, and the trade terminals would simply read this files every sec or so to show an updated list.
If a player would buy something, the trade terminal would simply delete the entry from the files.
Any feedback, opinion, suggestion on components and online trading would be great, once we can agree on something final, we can move
on the next topic which can be anything and can be started by anyone for discussion. If you have an idea for the universe, stations, missions, any part of the gameplay, share it and start a discussion about a concept
Regarding procedural stations, would be great but only if we can designing the stations to fit procedural
generation and we can implement a good algorithm, otherwise I would prefer stations designed by us from bottom to top.
Though the universe can be random. Stations, planets, asteroid belts, clusters…etc can be in random locations, directions and
also we could have different type of stations, planets, asteroids…etc selected randomly or based on location.
This way every time we play, can be a bit different.
But we can discuss this when we get to universe, planets, stations…etc.
I think that’s way too much stuff to aim for on the player ship! 
Cool idea (slots, etc.), but it’d be hell to program so it work properly. I’ve once made shoot-em-up in MMF and getting just TWO upgrade slots to work with several upgrades (a.k.a. R-Type, I think - not sure if it is R-Type, but there was some game that gave 2 upgrade slots ofr first ship - never did fare far in it tho). Not to mention system you are proposing.
But I still insist that space stations should be made procedurally so you won’t come upon exact same station every once in a while.
These are basically only variables with values to make ships, space, gameplay a bit more interesting.
You can think of this as optic tuning on your cars in GTA except, this is more like stats tuning, no optic tuning for now only stats, BUT later we can even make ships modular and change parts of the ships as you upgrade it. If you change the engines, you could see the new engines on your ship, if you add weapons, you could see the new weapons on your ship, staff like this but not now in v1.0
Otherwise what would you like to do with your ship in space?. I thought about mining, combat and exploration mainly. How would you make these things interesting without such content? How would you make space interesting?
I thought about 5 slots for basic ships because of many components and also some components would require more slots to make it even more tricky (fun) for players to upgrade and customize their ship. For example, If I would like to do exploration, I need shields to protect my self, jump drive to be able to jump safe location if things go wrong and scanner to find interesting things (anomalies) in space maybe also a scanner to locate other ships around me, and also if I find something valuable maybe I want to put it in to my cargo to take it home, so I’m going to need a ship with a relevant cargo space or cargo upgrades and transport beam or salvage beam. This is already 6 components for only one of the few things that you could do in space, so even 5 slots going to be short especially if you want to use higher level components as they require more slots (and power).
So it could make a bit challenging to find right fit for your goal, but the number of slots is not final of course, nothing is final.
Anything can be changed anytime during the development but we need something to get started.
I’m not against procedural stations at all, but the stations would be very important parts of the gameplay just like space, remember we would also do missions, explorations on stations not only in space, and procedural generation can be really useful. But the stations also have to be nicely designed, if we can procedurally generate nice design, I’m fine with procedural stations. I think first we have to work on station designs, once we have some, we can have a look if we can write an algorithm that can reproduce similar design. We have to try it.
tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/
This might give you some ideas. Replace “rooms” with “external layouts” and it’ll be explained.
The problem with the procedural generation is that, I would like to have nice detaild stations in the game, and as it got more details, the more difficult to generate procedurally, also very improtant for certain locations to be placed as it make sense and nice.
But how about that We could build the stations from several nicely designed parts and we can put different parts into different categories, similar to spelunky (0,1,2,3), and simply, we could design multiple parts for every category and randomly select and load parts of the station as a puzzle.
We could start with a station seed in the game world (even in random location some of them). The seed would choose a specified or random station type, and every part of the station would be selected randomly from multiple designs based on the type of the station and category of the part to make sure every part is matching and don’t get mixed.
Station types can be active, abandoned, ruined, human, borg, klingon, sith, gungan
Any suggestions, ideas?
But still have a question, how this parts can be built? Normally the whole scene is built in GD editor, but in this case
we can build only parts in GD. How we could fit them together?
I was also think about the player ship have too much components to aim for.
Though I would like to add as many or even more, but as 4ian suggested we should start with a smaller version
and enhance it later. So how about that if we could change/upgrade/add weapons, ammo and shields only?
Every ship would have 1+ weapon slots for weapons, 2+ upgrade slots for shields, ammo and other possible upgrades, a power generator to limit the size of energy weapons, and shields, a mining laser for mining, a salvage beam to salvage ship wrecks, a transport beam to be able to board ships and beam down to planets, stations,a scanner to find anomalies and a cargo space to be able to carry items. All of this things would be fixed, can’t be changed, removed, added or upgraded and it would be differetn ship to ship. Some ship would have bigger generators, other ships would have bigger cargo, other ships would have more weapon slots.
Any suggestions, ideas?
I was also think about my “online trading” idea and I think would be nice, but new items also a good
reason to explore the universe and play. If we going to have an online trade option, no reason to explore
because we cun buy anything. So I think we should drop, not only the idea of online trading, also general trading,
In the game no trading would be, only manufacturing.
Certain stations would have manufacturing system, maybe we could even have Manufacturing stations where we can build
anything we need and the station have to offer (weapons, ammo, shields maybe other things later) but we need to have the resources.
To gather resources, we have to do mining, and salvage from ship wrecks and ancient, alien, desolated stations and huge ships.
Manufacturing would be a good reason for exploration and also to find some action on foot not only in space.
Any suggestions, ideas?
That’s my whole point. Make station “sections” as external layouts and generate stations like in spelunky. Of course we’d need many pieces to make it not repetitive, but I could work solely on designing those.
What is the AI doing in this game? Are we going to have other ships that may be friendly/neutral/hostile? Are we going to have AI controlled stations and trading type stuff (like a simplistic kind of X universe)? What are the main goals in the game? We could maybe have some kind of achievements system for stuff like make 1000000 through trading or destroy 1000 enemy ships or save a planet from an invasion?
Nothing special, only fill the game with life, enemies and targets through
-people walking on stations
-space traffic around stations
-also security units on stations and around stations
-enemy ships (pirates) in deep space
-enemy NPC’s, dangerous creatures, aliens on abandoned stations.
-be targets if you want to be really mad and just destroy everything
Yes. Kind of, at least going to have pirates who going to attack us and we can attack any ships and salvage the wrecks, I’m not sure about friendly as it would require some kind of fraction system.
I did want to have trading in the game, but as I mentioned before, new items can be a good reason to explore and gather resources, so how about that if no trading in the game only manufacturing on stations, planets? We could manufacture different things, different places but we have to gather resources first and take them to the place where it going to be manufactured. Maybe we could also break down items we find for resources.
As long as we don’t have any story idea, the goal of the game would be simply exploration on your own or through missions in space, on stations, maybe also on planets to gather resources, fight enemies and upgrade your ship. Kind of mindless shooting really. But I also would like FTL like ship and crew management in case of huge capital ships and survival squad like shooter action on stations and planets.
A good story idea or ideas for missions could help.
I never thought about this. Any ideas?
For achievement, the player could get XP points after everything it completed such as missions, mining, manufacturing, resource gathering, destroying other ships…etc As the player have more XP points, new items can be unlocked on manufacturing stations. This way not only resources, also XP points is required to manufacture new items.
Items to manufacture can be:
-shields
-weapons
-ammo
-upgrades
For both, ships and player character, so yes, how about that if the player character would have also upgrade slots to add/change weapons, ammo, personal shields, medkit…etc?
If we can have crew members on our ship, even crew members could get XP individually as they exploring stations and planets with us and could have slots too for weapons, medkit…etc so we could upgrade not only our ship and player character, also our crew.
So AI in case of crew members could follow orders but mainly follow us, heal us in case we get injured and shoot enemy targets…
Not very original idea, but something. Any suggestions?
Having crew members, playable characters and explorable ships is adding an unbelievable amount of coding to be done in the game.
Anyway, I think this is becoming too much talking and not enough coding… Someone needs to implement a base for the game. I am willing to start doing this next week if no-one else does.
Too much talking? I’m only sharing ideas for a community project to discuss but really, nobody have any ideas, suggestion, opinions for anything 
Darkhog suggested procedural stations and that’s all, you think that high number of ship components is way too many things to aim for, crew members, exploration and playable character is way too much coding but now you saying that we should stop talking and do coding
Okay, once any community project is started by anyone, I’m more than happy to participate on weekends
How about putting some git repository to/from people could check out/in code for the game?
I know I’m new here, but this thread caught my attention. I didn’t read every word on all 4 pages, but I got the gist of it.
If the point of the community project is to show off what GD can do, why not do mini-games? Each mini-game can be done by different people with coordination, and it would be easier/quicker to do. Add an overall game to tie them together, like Mario Party does (but I’m not suggesting a board game style), and keep consistent characters and themes, there are a lot of people who would be interested, and it would show off GD nicely. Also, keep it kid friendly, but interesting enough for adult players. Kids can be future devs.
I haven’t been using GD for very long, but I can already see that it is extremely flexible. It all depends on effort. The engine is there, all that would be needed is graphics, sounds, and people interested in doing the work.
If you really wanted to take it even further, the people creating the games could also write tutorials. This would expand the GD tutorials greatly, and when people play it and say, “This is awesome, how did they do it?”, they can find out first hand.
Just my thoughts.
Hi,
I’m really really interested in participate in this project because I think there’s a real urgency to make a standard tech-demo game that shows to the world the capabilities of GD.
I had read the entire thread and I have some things to say (it’s just my opinion):
1. Game idea is cool.
2. This project is intended to show the GD engine and IDE capabilities, right? Ok, then stop talking about “programming”… there is no need to perform a single line of real code in GD to make a game; in fact, that’s one of the main features of GD. Putting orders in a logical sequence is just scripting and it’s still hard work.
3. Project is getting bigger and bigger since the planning stage and it will lead to nothing. In my opinion you need to cut some features and start with the smallest functional game.
4. Project needs people working at specifics tasks.
5. @Darkhog idea of a respository is a must. You need to set a dropbox or googledrive folder to serve as repository.
6. Along with the repository it had to be some rules and structure:
----- There have to be a “safe” copy of the last functional version of the project.
----- Every scripter needs their own copy of the project in the repository to work in.
----- Changes and improvements to the main (safe and functional) copy must be implemented after previous discussion.
----- There have to be an implementation agenda.
----- Every scripter had to work in it’s own specific task.
----- Only one scripter is too much work for one person, two scripters is fine, three scripters will work fine if they abide the rules, more than four scripters will be a real nightmare.
----- There have to be one and just one project director that implements the changes to the main copy. Everything needs to be open to discussion but only one person beholds the last word.
7. There have to be a development priority: sketching some concepts, temptative sprites and scripting are the highest priorities, final art assets and animations is the second priority and music and sound fx is the last (if it’s not a rythm based game).
8. Scripters will realize soon after start to script that they needs some sprites and animations to mock-up the idea, so it’s not important if sprites and animations at development stage are sketchy or incomplete, they all will be changed to the final polished versions in posterior stages for. It’s ideal that the concept artist or animator make this sketches.
People that you need working togheter in a development team:
----- A director (the director would be also one fo the scripters).
----- At least two scripters.
----- A concept artist (just one) (in a starter project like this, concept-artist, static-sprite-artist and animator can be the same person, also if there are many people working in the graphics, the concept artist can serve as the director of graphics/animation).
----- A animator (or two).
----- A background/static-sprite artist (or two).
The music composer and fx specialist work starts when at least a demo of the game is ready. So it’s not necessary search for music composer until the near end (but if someone offers his work at some early stage that will be great).
Things that I can contribute to the project (if you want):
----- Scripting consultor: I had previously work as software development and business process consultor and I know how to “clean” code and scripts, I’m very good at recognize spaghetti patterns in logical systems and I can serve as the one that reads the already made code and gives advice on how to polish it and put all the parts together. Although, I don’t want to serve as a former scripter because I prefer to work in another areas. Think of it as a grammar corrector 
----- Concept/static sprites artist: I’m also had previosuly work as graphic designer and illustrator so I can make some graphics for your game.
----- Animator: if the project stays small and functional (I hope) I can make some basic animations for it. I use programs like Synfig Studio and some vector-based tools to calculate tweening between key frames and then export the frames to a raster sequence. My current avatar is an example of an animation loop I made for the main character of a game I’m currently developing.
----- Music and SFX consultor: if you want to keep it small and make some domestic music and sounds I can explain to someone with basic music composing knowledge how to use a synth-sequencer studio like FL Studio or LMMS (I make my own music for my games with LMMS). Although, I don’t want to serve as main music composer for the game.
Let me know if you’re interested
Here are some examples of my artwork (you can check my deviantART page at [spam]erdo-dp.deviantart.com[/spam] some of my works there are pin-ups and and are mature-rated so you need to have account on deviantART to see the full gallery):
