Character Creation Musings

A) STATISTIC ROLLING: Starfighter General will ‘roll’ your character.

Traditional rolling of characters meant players would sit all day for thousands of rolls til they got the best character, akin to grinding before the game. This is lame so most do not have this.

I give a limited number of rolls per day, so you will run out and play your character while still having the fun of rolling.

There’s little incentive to multi account since there’s enough crew to get a good roll on vs the hassle.

So Starfighter General will have character rolls! I am not aware of other MMORPG able to have cracked the design on this one.

B) SKILLS: Starfighter General uses the Intergalactic Bounty Hunter unpublished RPG ruleset: www.crystalfighter.com/igbh. Its been called the most fun pencil and paper RPG ruleset ever and I wasn’t going to use it since MMOS normally have a different progression, but I dropped down the attributes to fractions knowing D&D online was successful. So get ready for the most fun PNP RPG ruleset ever!!!

Now skills are just like Wasteland, later Fallout series. I took D&D, made armor actually reduce damage(for real), and added skills related to attributes. It rules… Straight rules. Problem is… When you start the game, some skills are super less useful than others… Like in space, you ain’t going to be throwing hand grenades much… Even if you do simulated bar fights on stations, you ain’t goin to be throwing hand grenades as much as repairing your ship or shooting plasma bolts…. So I was at an impasse when letting people choose their skills. I know if I let the character creation go unmodified and people chose skills at the start there would be many many many gimped characters for the first run.

Gimped characters are players who realize they made bad choices in character select weeks ago and then play the game with “buyers remorse” thinking to either remake the character or just push on knowing they’ll never be that strong. As a MMORPG designer, you never want your players to get a “my character is gimped mentality”. It is mitigated by buffing weak stuff in patches, but knowing your core design will lead to it, you have to avoid it.

I did this by removing the starter skill selection screen completely! Instead, you will play the game skill less. You can still attempt using skills in game without a skill, but you have a -5 penalty. You can even learn skills just by getting really lucky using skills over and over again. So its not big deal to start with no skills…

The kicker is when you try to do something in Starfighter General, it will tell you what skill you used so you know what to train later if you like doing that activity a lot. Then you’d have to seek out a trainer for that skill, pay em or do a quest or something. Then boom, you have the skill, consciously knowing you wanted it for what your character would be, viola, no gimping…

Of course your role you want late game may be different than early… Then you may want to roll a new crew member for that purpose. One crew member probably won’t do it all anyway. You do want many crew members for many purposes, especially when you staff your capital ships later.

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#1 IN THE WORLD at Starcraft/Broodwar/Warcraft3/Diablo2 Hardcore/Command and Conquer3/Starcraft2 2v2. GOAT.
Before Pinky and The Brain, The Parapalegic Mice Team existed, and I told everyone in my school for weeks in hopes someone knew someone at WB/Disney/HB to make a tv show of two mice taking over the world. Next Year Pinky and The Brain was out.

1) 10-1000x things rendered with new DOTS/ECS UNITY tech that unlocks more than just one core that most video games use: Parallel Processing done right.

2) Networking that pushes the envelope where no networking has gone before. People laugh at this like it is impossible to innovate, but I marketed it to Midway in 2003, and they laughed too. Meanwhile it was working in house as a Tekken style(3d fighter) MMO with part of what today is known as rollback code. Midway’s manager was mocking what is today’s standard thinking rollback and such was impossible. Infinite action players same zone, limit only by video card and other hardware, networking ain’t a limiting thing anymore.

3) Lore/Game Mechanics based on a custom TTRPG (Intergalactic Bounty Hunter) that most everyone liked more than any RPG. RPG rules are based on Wasteland from the Commodore 64 set in space. The space flight is the spiritual successor of 90s DOS Xwing vs Tiefighter hits that everyone was disappointed ended. I had to make my own RPG, Dungeons and Dragons armor not reducing damage did not sit well.

4) First MMO designed for late game. Everyone enjoys mmos until power capped and then get bored.
There is no power cap to begin with(just a log log logarithmic progression), but there are many many many other end game design elements to make it so want to keep playing end game! The grind is there, but better and more fun things are around too! You can build up a super big fleet and it get destroyed to pieces and you start over again. You have a power floor level that you can’t go below so you’re always building permanent power, but temporary spikes of power surges and galactic dominance for fleeting moments give a rush. The larger the fleet, the larger the fleeting moment.

5) Easter Eggs: Will contain literal Easter Eggs. You find an Easter Egg in a quest. Then you hide somewhere in space. Every day it isn’t found by another player, you get a daily reward that increases. When they find it, they get an instant reward! Then the egg comes back to you. Enjoy. Go find some place obscure in the game, space is big.

6) Space Dungeons: Competitive zones with different rules, find em, dominate em, and can you find the clues around space to find the one which will be dropping special event rewards?

7) Resource Trading like Elite, but also factory building like Factorio and Satisfactory. Your economy and drones can build stuff up, but make sure no pirate, NPC or player tries to sabotage your supply chain. There will be illegal substances like fictitious drugs and contraband weapons which you can profit from greatly, but you risk your cargo being scanned by a random and getting a bounty on your head.

8) PVP bounty system. Everyone can PVP at all times. Stakes are low if your ship explodes. If you get attacked without declaring aggressive mode or an opponent to duel, the aggressor gets a bounty on their head in accordance with the damage dealt to you. If this bounty gets high enough, and they get caught, they will be put in jail. When they log on for the next few hours or days, their character can play only in jail, and visitors come see him and such. Enjoy roleplaying being a prison inmate, or just use a different crew member on your account. Developing many crew members is a thing for when you fly capital ships.

9) Grand Space Opera-> 4x emperors around you trying to conquer the galaxy like Master of Orion on a 500 billionish system scale! They ain’t even players at first, just NPCs waging war. Who’s side will you choose? Will it be based on morality or space bucks? Ok soldier of fortune, what it will be? Do it for the money, until you realize money doesn’t mean anything living under a totalitarian empire.

10) Omnipotent roleplay: Earn your right into a a movie anime by great roleplay! Live game masters in about 6-12 months after the content updates roll through. We bias people with Founder’s RP tokens some and good manner role players who stay in character(we have chat logs and even game logs). This promotes good role play even when not live GMing. Who doesn’t want to bring their friends to a movie and surprise em with their own character in it? So stay in character for a better game! https://www.starfightergeneral.com/live-role-play/

Punky-Pulpy action, Levels, stats, skills, talents, items, fleet amassing, and great apocalyptic space plots, trippy Lewis Carrol level Mad Hatter humor along the way. It’s really weird to see how this synergizes from a game design standpoint. Players naturally want to level up and power up… That’s the twink min maxer in all of us. So when humor, plots, intrigue, or NPCs getting your blood boiling to action vs them happens, you get stoked, rewarded, happy and tossed off your axis. Then when resolved, you look back and get serious about powering up. The core of a RPG gamer is always powering up, it is something we can’t get rid of, but the core of a game designer is to get you out of a spreadsheet mindset temporarily… And then you appreciate both more. So tacky humor, along serious pulp action and serious leveling up game mechanics… It is like a symphony of fun.

Game made by a soul gamer out for the player’s best interest. 150,000 hours experience #1 in many online ladders world. I don’t care about money. I just want to play games and help the poor and sick. I want you to have faith in the spirit of love.

Are you down? Cuz I need help, like crowd source and pray for me to get this out faster. If you don’t help me, it’s still coming out.

or

Get and Play Starfighter General for Free (type of morally good free that doesn’t exploit or abuse players and gives all the content available).


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