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Notch Wants To Make a Firefly-Inspired Sandbox Space Game
silentbrad sends this snippet from PCGamer:
"After stepping back as lead designer of Minecraft earlier this year, Notch has been considering what to do next. ... While he's still deciding exactly what he wants to work on, he told us that he'd quite like to do a sandbox space trading game like Elite, 'except done right.' Notch is aiming for something with a bit more character than the classic trading sim. Instead of being the spaceship, you'd be a character inside the spaceship. 'I want the space game that's more like Firefly,' he said. 'I want to run around on my ship and have to put out a fire. Like, oh crap, the cooling system failed, I have to put out the fire here.' He hasn't decided to make the game yet, and doesn't mind if someone else takes up the reins. 'If someone steals the idea before me, that's totally fine. I just want to play that game,' he said."
I want that game
Mark Anthony Collins
Hot shot Dev wants to build an open ended space sim?
Is Derek Smart possessing people now?
(I kid I kid, Derek. The Verge's article about you rocked.)
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Is Notch his real name or just his street name on... developer... street...
... Notch is awesome. He just wants to play that kind of game. and will make it if necessary.
Anyone remember Sundog? I remember having to run and patch up a broken item on my ships engines so I could warp away from pirates. Those were the days!
But don't you dare write it in Java (but please make it cross-platform). Don't judge me, I can be as demanding as I like.
I loved the idea of Elite but the implementation (particularly the later ones) was always a bit off for me. The crew based thing would be quite a bit of fun. Have a game that is part space shooty, part RTT or TBT crew management.
There is a kinda related indy game a couple guys have up on Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-than-light. It is a space ship game with crew management and that sort of thing, but more a pure tactics game, not a space shooty/sim which is what I love. Also not Firefly, of course. Still, worth a look if that kind of thing interests you. Used to be a demo on Onlive, but hat expired so now al lyou can do is watch gameplay videos and the like.
It's been an oft-asked for feature in Vegastrike. And they've already got the flying around in space and trading stuff covered. Maybe he could do the "I'm just a space janitor" portion that no one seems to want to do?
In case there are Elite fans out there who haven't heard of it; check out Oolite http://www.oolite.org/. It's an open source version that is nicely done. Available on Linux, MacOS & Windows.
I won't be once walking in stations and DUST are complete. That should be any day now...
If he puts that idea up on kickstarter, he get my bucks in an instant ;-)
I also want to play that game. Wanted to play it for 15 years. Yes, I know there are/were some contenders out there, X3, Evochron Mercenary, Privateer... while each game had it strengths, they lacked the overall appeal of Elite. I want to fly the depths of space and over the surfaces of alien planets. If there is trade, factions, vast space, missions, an optional main quest, decent combat, and then at the end of the day I can get out of my spaceship to take a stroll on an alien colony, I will create my own little shrine dedicated to Notch.
Make it so!
I thought EVE Online already was the sandbox space/trading sim "done right" 8 years ago when I first started playing it.
I like it so much in fact that I haven't taken a break longer than a week since 2006.
FTL
It is a spaceship roguelike where you actually control the ship up close, rather than directly.
Glad it got funded, these guys sound pretty good and the idea sounds solid.
Would like to see him have a try at it. So little actual decent space-trading games that are full-on, large or even fun.
So many of them are just a plain chore to get in to, and you can lose everything just like that.
Quite literally a second job to get in to in order to even play most of them.
SunDog ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy ) - such a great game when it came out
-- "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." -- HL Mencken
Minecraft is already perfect for exactly what he wants. The thing generates whole worlds, putting in trade and flying from planet to planet mechanics would take a lot of tweaking but the groundwork is there already. People have built plenty of starship models in minecraft, there's even a mod that makes ships fly. I would love it if minecraft had some depth to it, like planets that can be saved (on smaller scale), space stations, trade, ships. The cubelike universe wouldn't look that pretty, but it's simple, easy on system resources, and IMHO is good enough.
I thought EVE Online already was the sandbox space/trading sim "done right"
Will it let you burn the land, or boil the sea?
... is the name of the board game that encapsulates this perfectly: flying around in a ship while also running around inside the ship. Its a good game.
My team and I are making a game that I thought of when I read Notch's description. You don't put out fires or such, but you are in control of your player character who can run around a ship. http://www.indiedb.com/games/ensign-1
yes, AOL. Hey, I just graduated highschool and my parents had aol..and it was free.
Does anyone remember that sapce economy game on AOL that was text based, you started out getting a basic pilot license and a cheap ship, then you could be a transporter of commodities, supplier or trader? you could own planets or galaxies or just a business on a planet?
I've been trying to figure out what it was for years now and cannot remember the name..I remember when AOL changed their games to a pay structure, it left. I remember someone created a basic graphical hud for it right afterwards but for the life of me can not remember the name...
anyways, I think that game is basically what everyone wants, just graphical instead of text based and sandboxed where you can "create" the worlds..
This sounds a bit like Sundog. I loved that game for the Atari ST.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Wayne Holder and I did it 27 years ago for the Apple II. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
I'll pay cash money for that.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
When was the last time you had to put out a fire on Eve? Eve Online is a trading sim, not an adventure game like he seems to be describing.
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I can't play a space game where the ships have a maximum velocity, other than c.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
...let this come to pass.
run twisty, twisty, kill someone.
run twisty, twisty, touch something
run twisty, twisty, kill twenty someones.
run twisty, wind up behind a closing door and kill a big someone with helpers.
get a new style for your armor.
That, I believe, is pivotal to its success.
Lots of people have wanted to do space games. I've wanted to as well. A key part about doing such a thing with multiplayer (or even just the internet now) for me has been the use of computing. Folks have been building aimbots forever. What if the rules of the universe, and the ships, were only roughly (and/or inaccurately) described, and each player/ship had a limited amount of processing to figure them out and optimize the ship?
So I see Notch has a working 6502 emulator, and even a crude display system.
Boy, wouldn't that be cool if he actually built the game I've been longing to play? You know, he probably won't, but a sufficiently chaotic system with players coding things like navigation, weapons targeting, guidance, engine FADECs, that kinda stuff? As long as the failures are fun too, it'd kick ass.
I think I had that on the Atari ST, if I remember right...
What happened? Why no remake yet? Now is the time! An iPad version would be nice.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have also been playing EvE for a long time, and would REALLY love for Notch to take a shot at giving EvE a run for its money. CCP is a little too used to no real competition and could REALLY use some. Plus I could see Notch taking a 'graphics are secondary' approach rather then CCP's 'graphics are uber important ooh look at the shiney!'.
An EvE like game focusing on trade and war rather then pewpew could be awesome.
I thought EVE Online already was the sandbox space/trading sim "done right"
Will it let you burn the land, or boil the sea?
or mod the game so the Death Star is taking out the U.S.S. Enterprise with the Battlestar Galactica at its flank? (and Col. O'Neil with Samantha Carter busy working to take out the main reactor core of the Death Star)?
So if someone is shooting at your ship, he would rather be the guy patching the holes than the guy piloting the ship who makes sure you get away safely?
I would rather be the pilot.
Is Notch still making that happen?
Notch offered to be an investor, but it looks like they got enough money from Kickstarter that they don't need any outside investment (yet).
He needs to address the destruction of the Minecraft bukkit community that he himself instigated.
Yeah, Bukkit is so fractured that it was the first "outside" piece of software updated to be compatible with the current release of Minecraft. How is that again?
I'm totally already making this!
http://www.scrumbleship.com/ - Open ended space sim with a focus on construction and real-life accurate simulation!
http://www.indiedb.com/games/scrumbleship - More pictures available here.
Cheers!
-Dirkson
The description reminds me of Wing Commander: Privateer. It had an enjoyable story-centric sequel along similar lines.
In a set of stories I'm writing, there's an effective speed limit of 0.1c. You can go faster than that, but then you risk sand-grain-sized particles getting through your shields. It may be a bit hand-wavey, but it keeps in-system speeds down to where it actually takes a few hours to get from one place to another. Plus, it's slow enough that you can pretty much ignore relativity which makes my brain hurt.
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It's called "X: Rebirth" and is a follow-on to the quite successful X series of games (the current version being X3:Albion Prelude). These are pretty much Elite type trading/fighting sandboxes, but with multiple ships, remote controlled fleets (ie you can buy traders and set them off on autopilot trading for you), fighting (of course, but with wingmen ships or just sent your fleet of frigates or carriers to defend your trading sectors from the bad aliens, robot aliens or pirates), plus missions to keep things interesting - both small "transport a passenger to x", and large "follow a whole set of missions in a series to do something major".
What's a bit special (and controversial in the X community) is that the new game will be based around a single spacecraft (previously you could decide what kind of ship to pilot) but that has different 'rooms' to play from - so your co-pilot can be set to fly while you remote-control your combat drones or play the stock market or whatever.
Read more on the developer's forums
Nobody's quite sure exactly what it'll be like, but I think we can be confident Egosoft will pull the rabbit out, X3 served me very well for over a year, and I still didn't manage to finish all the plot missions. You can buy X3 on steam or impulse (or whatever impulse is called nowadays) for next to nothing, it cost me $10 in a special offer that seems to be repeated regularly.
...Spacecraft!
Bello vel Pace Paratus.
Why not?
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
then you want to play Frontier, which was the sequel to Elite. It has relativistic combat... and it was shite. You and the enemy ship hurtled towards each other, then past each other with a fraction of a second where they were close enough to hit each other, then turn around for the slow decel, and then repeat all over again. dull.
Now, a "real-life" space-game would be much more like Harpoon (an old naval combat system) where you'd chuck remote missiles at each other which would be intelligent enough to do something to the bad guys when they got near them, with counter measures to defend yourself. Obviously this makes the game much more like a tactical sim instead of fighter pilot dogfights, but that's what you get for letting physics in.
a little slow to the draw. its called faster than light. SunDog was a good one, but its a little dated now.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-than-light
"Nothin's twixed my nether regions what aint been powered by batteries." Oh, dear lord. sweet sweet lord. I will play Kaylee's character uh huh.. I have to go now.
When they release the shooter spinoff DUST514 it will.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
You dumbass hogs, what you ain't catching is the fact that Notch wants to make a gorram game of the Firefly 'verse. Personally, I'd love to play this game, especially if it takes place after the events of the film.
You're mixing up "Psychonauts 2" with "Double Fine Adventure" (a working title). The former, Notch offered to be an investor, but the amount he offered isn't enough on its own to actually get the game made. The latter is a different game by the same developers, and is the one that was funded by Kickstarter.
Between Starflight, Star Control, Mass Effect, and Elite, Wing Commander Privateer all of these games did about 2/3rds of what I want and 1/3rd of what I thought was tedious and fill/broken.
In Starflight, it got the "character on a space ship" correct enough, but that was about it for being a character, when you hailed ships, the game only checked to see if you had high enough training to understand the other race, and sometimes had a race conflict (the space-dinos didn't like the space-trees)
(Starflight and Star control are similar and spiritual sequels to each other, as is Mass effect to SC2)
In Mass Effect, everyone is a human and while I think the conversation system was correct for the game, it reminded me of starflight, in that you pick the friendly, hostile, or somewhere inbetween choice.
The space-trading part, Starflight had down pretty good, and Elite too it miles farther, but Elite tended to render half the game play to "autopilot" and space combat was terrible (I prefer'ed wing commander privateer over Elite on the combat aspect, but Privateer ran out of stuff to trade super-quick.)
In planetside trading, Elite didn't do much, Starflight let you mine for minerals or capture/kill native lifeforms. Mass Effect let you do that too, kinda. The Mako in the first game was a terrible analog to the terrain vehicle in starflight, it drove like a shopping cart, and each planet had like exactly one thing to find, where as star flight had plenty. Mass Effect 2 dumbed this down into something non-fun.
What I kinda want to see is more "inside the ship" because few games ever really do this right. Mass Effect for example, you had exactly one ship that was static. Except for the beginning and ending of Mass Effect 2, you never see anything really happen to the ship. Oh yes you can do upgrades to it, but they're all outside.
Firefly and Andromeda have some overlap in how you'd approach a space-trading game. Where Andromeda's approach is to create Order, Firefly's is closer to creating Chaos. It's a theme you may have seen in several Japanese anime shows as well, but I think only Cowboy bebop really fits in the theme.
Though if I were to create such a game, I'd just layer it into micromanagement and macromangement, and players that want to take control over the micromanagement will be rewarded, and players who don't want to bother with it will just have to "pay" for other characters to join their crew and take those jobs. The player can even not be the captain. At a super-macro level, you could have a fleet or armada of ships to go raze worlds or colonize them or whatever, but you'd only ever be able to directly command your ship, all the other fleet ships need their own captains. You could do stuff like "attack my target" or "abandon ship" and be rescued by one of the remaining ships in the fleet.
But if you want to take the realistic concept to it, real large capital ships probably can't turn on a dime without crushing their crew with inertia or tearing the ship apart, and this was something I always found horribly unrealistic, even in star trek games.
I guess he wants to work on an actual game.
When was the last time you had to put out a fire on Eve?
The day Crrcible was released by graphic card went on fire while rendering _one_ avatar in an empty room at 20fps.
Eve Online is a trading sim, not an adventure game like he seems to be describing.
Eve Online is anything you want it to be. It has no arbitrarily imposed goals, you choose your own destiny and how you get there.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Both of these are pretty great looking... http://blockaderunnergame.com/ http://www.ftlgame.com/
"he'd quite like to do a sandbox space trading game like Elite, 'except done right."
What a pompous fucktard. Elite *was* done right. So was privateer, freelancer, X3, and many others. This guy is so full of himself.
I guess you should simply read what Notch said himself about this whole incident:
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/17681692985/hype
Here's something about the developer:
http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/3/21/2884331/redemption-derek-smart-flame-line-of-defense-battlecruiser-3000AD
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
I keep coming back to this quirky game because it starts with a space ship and from there you have the standard fare (trading, missions, fighting, mining, etc.), purchasable upgrades, treasure hunts,...
However it also includes a tactical fight/FPS hook, adventure text missions, a kind of arcade game, upgrading local command posts (though you can't fight enemy ones, and yes Pirate bases are my enemies), staving off alien invasions... Oh so much good stuff. When it decides to work correctly... Though about the worst DRM there is and the ever quirky: hey, something's for sale over there - why can't I purchase it or put it on layaway?
So I'm thinking the technology as a good start, not the storyline - it can be hard to judge a real threat until it's killed you though... Hmm, but combining that with some Star Trek:Online parts... hmm...
8-PP
Vega Strike is the furthest-along general purpose space sim and it needs love.
The most-requested feature AFAIK is still continuous planetary flight
The second-most is FPS, so there you go.
They DON'T have the trading stuff covered in that game, though. First of all, the planetary navigation interface is awful in every way. Second, they don't have a functional economy. I stopped playing because your actions have no consequences beyond your reputation score. That's dumb. I won't play any space sim that goes deeper than combat that doesn't have a functional economy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Eve Online is anything you want it to be. It has no arbitrarily imposed goals, you choose your own destiny and how you get there.
Goals are not the only important parts. To pay an adventure game, you need affordances which Eve doesn't provide; for example, not being able to walk inside your own ship automatically disqualifies Eve as a potential candidate for the game Notch is describing.
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I suppose you'll be in your bunk.
That game is MY idea.
Notch can have it though. He certainly has a better chance of bringing it to fruition than I do.
Harpoon! Now _there_ was a skill game. Plus anticipation, vigilance, knowledge, patience _and_ fast thinking, panic and triumph, caution and boldness and flat-out daring with devastation the reward for crossing over to foolhardiness, the briefings always enough to deduce a good initial plan but never enough to get you there without scouting or spot-on anticipation, always the feeling you _could_ have won and the urge to do it all again.
Hey! They're still selling it! And they added a beefed-up-realism-version! Top hit for Harpoon game. Oh, god, there goes another sixty bucks, at least I'll probably wait til summer.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
One of the oldest tabletop RPGs, and the first to emerge with a rules set that wasn't a spin-off of Dungeons & Dragons, was Traveller, a science fiction RPG modelled on the galactic empire genre of science fiction -- a genre that itself has much to draw upon, from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, the Aliens movies, to China Mieville's Embassytown. One of the original designers of Traveller commented that Firefly was as close to a Traveller TV series as he could hope for.
The classic premise for a Traveller campaign is a band of merry rogues, travelling from system to system in a small merchant vessel, usually at odds with the powers-that-be, who tend to have a hard time catching up with merry rogues with their own starship.
There are a couple of lines of Traveller still in publication, such as GURPS Traveller, featured prominently at your Friendly Local Gaming Shop, at least as of Friday.
I hope this gets made. It's not like Braben is going to pull his finger out and make "Elite 4". And even if he did, given his recent attacks on the second-hand market, I don't think I could bring myself to buy it from him. Sorry, not "buy", "license the ability to play" and until such times as Mr. Braben decides he needs more money and changes the DRM codes.
yup, harpoon always was a real-world naval combat sim, not a game. Written by some old naval admiral or somesuch IIRC.
Now, there was a boardgame based on these rules but set in space, with 1-shot missiles with x-ray lasers as warhead (so they didn't have to get too close to the target), and repair crews. Can't remember what it was called unfortunately as I played it about 20 years ago.
Looking forward to punching trees for the wood to build my first spacecraft.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Not exactly an MMO...
I think the game you are looking for is called StarFarer. http://fractalsoftworks.com/ It's still in alpha, but it's progressing well so far, and the alpha is playable and modable today.
It sounds like he may just want to play Vendetta Online (www.vendetta-online.com) but with a slightly more granular experience.
That only really happened if you left the flight control assistance on in combat.
If you turned this off (with the poorly labeled 'Engines Off' button), it wasn't too hard to keep your opponent at close range.
Damn, and I had 4 mod points expire on me yesterday...
Run around putting out fires!? Hell no
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating