On 10/16/2018 9:56 PM, Reuben Staley wrote:
[snip]
Okay so overall, this is a decent idea, but I don't really want to play
this version of it. Why? It suffers from Boilerplate Syndrome. This is a
feature of proposed new minigames where the core mechanics are too
lightweight for their own good. Many hypothesize that the proposer
assumes that people will just add on with new proposals and create a
well-balanced game after the fact. Contrarily, minigames infected with
Boilerplate Syndrome tend to be forgotten quickly due to a lack of
interesting mechanics in the already existing game.
The best way to combat Boilerplate Syndrome is to add interesting
gameplay. I don't know where you want to go with this so I'm just going
to throw some of my ideas here and leave you to be insprired.
(1) How about instead of a destroyed switch, ships have hit points and
you have to repair the ship using coins or some other asset. If a ship
has 0 hit points, it becomes immobile until you buy another ship, which
resets all of your switches
(2) Crewmen can be hired for money. The more you have, the faster you
can repair your ship. When you are defeated in a space battle, the enemy
can capture some crewmen to aid them.
(3) Ships are upgradable. "Modules" can be added to a ship to increase
the maximum value of your different switches. When you're defeated in a
space battle, the enemy can steal some of your modules. When your ship's
hit points are 0 and you have to replace your ship, you can attempt to
salvage some modules before resetting.
(4) The number of sectors is two times the number of active players.
Each sector has two wormholes open at a time. You can travel back and
forth between any two sectors connected by a wormhole. When a player
deregisters or becomes inactive, two random sectors are deleted and all
wormholes move to sectors that exist. Each month, the wormholes all
change. (this takes lots of effort to keep track of but it's cool)
(5) If you're famous, you can decrease your fame by 1 to gain either
coins or voting power or modules or something.
That's all the ideas I have. I hope you can figure out how you want the
future of this proposal to look.
Hm. See, I get what you're saying. A lot of these ideas are similar to
ideas I had originally, but they were scrapped in an effort to not make
it too big, as Aris nudged me to do. However, I didn't consider that it
could potentially go too far the other way and not be interesting. I do
quite like ideas (1), (2), and (5), and they could definitely be
implemented. The other two, maybe, maybe not.
