Populance: A vibrant NPC community

Hello,

Today I got the last annoying tech for a long while done… I knew it would be a mountain top of experience of relief… What I didn’t know was that God would drag me to despair just before getting it.. It dragged on for days, and what I thought would be the final 5 minutes ended up being hours and hours of tech wall nightmares. I pleaded with God because I was brought to a huuuge low… And then an hour or so later I beat it… The relief felt magnified because it wasn’t like I just took one more step… It was like I erupted from below the mountain to flying above it… God used the dichotomy of despair and success today to show me the exhilaration of it, and I’m relaxed now after a few hours at the gym.

The patch with immediate encounters/items/leveling is quite close, maybe within a week or so. But on the mountain top almost immediately after I finished, I realized I could use random encounters to simulate a living/breathing galaxy of other NPC ships all doing their thing. It might end up being like the Busy world of Richard Scarry, in space,lolololol. It’s quite exciting since each npc has 160 personality traits bell curved to make their decisions… They could literally start weak, amass a fleet by mining/defending and then want to take over the universe like a 4X alien leader on Master of Orion. This is all way easier done than said/designed. So I gotta design it up and it will go in the next couple patches.

After the Populance, I’ll add the stars and proceedurally generated galaxy. Multiplayer will just naturally slowly condense as the patches happen and the dimensions align. We’re looking good, actually we’re looking Stellar.

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.

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.

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.

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.