Yes, this is the longest post I've ever written in my life, and it is only going to get longer.
Note: At the moment, this is incomplete. This is basically a culmination of all the IRC ideas, ideas from trem.net, and other ideas I felt would be cool to include. It will form the base of our actual gameplay design document. Furthermore, currently, I am going to emphasize the the larger gameplay aspects. Aspects that affect the entire team, or both teams; things like stages, building, reasearch, and upgrades. Things that involve individual classes, structures, or weapons will be handled only once we have finalized the more general gameplay.
Gameplay
Basic
Unvanquished will feature two teams, aliens and humans, each with a unique set of abilities, structures, and strategies. The goal is to eliminate all the enemy players and their ability to respawn (eg, kill all players and spawns).
Humans
Humans will primarily rely on ranged weapons and be less mobile than the aliens. The human tech is near futuristic weaponry and structures. The human team’s strength is its adaptability. There are no classes for the human team, the right equipment should be chosen for any given operation.
Weapons
Construction Kit
Machine Gun
Chainsaw
Shotgun
Laser Rifle
Mass Driver
Minigun
Pulse rifle
Lucifer Cannon
(names subject to change)
Buildables
Reactor
Telenode
Defense computer
Armoury
Medistation
Machine Gun Turret
Tesla Generator
Synergizer
Repeater
(Names subject to change)I'
Upgrading/Research
Humans get upgrades by building synergizers. The more synergizers humans build, the more upgrades they can receive. synergizers must be built at least (insert minimum distance here) apart. Synergizers mine much necessary resources that the humans require to research new technologies such as weapons, buildable structures, and upgrades. Building a synergizer also gives the humans buildable material to build new structures. Synergizers give an exponentially decreasing amount of building material per time interval as the game goes on. Thus, as the game goes on, older synergizers will produce less and less resources requiring expansion. Once an area has been harvested, it cannot be harvested again by the same team. If a synergizer is destroyed and rebuilt within the same area, it will begin to collect resources at the same rate as it was collecting before it was destroyed. Repeaters can be stacked to allow power to more than 20 bp worth of structures. This style of resources can be extending to doing things like adding powerups to existing buildables. This is strategically viable as powering up an existing structure will be cheaper than building a new structure, and a host of power upped structures may be more efficient than one new structure. The power up idea is just a theoretical idea however.
The Tech Tree vs Stage System
The Tech Tree is an interesting idea, but ultimately not viable due to teamwork issues in public games. However, a meshing of a tech tree and a stage system could be interesting. Below are some proposals on how to handle how upgrades are added:
- Stages: Build N synergizers for Stage 2 and N + M synergizers for Stage 3.
- Tech Tree: For every synergizer built, pick a weapon/structure/upgrade from the base tree. Then more synergizers are built, either expand the initial tree or buy a new base item to begin expanding that.
- Stages + Tech Tree: Still thinking about this one. More details to follow.
Sudden Death
There will be no need for any sudden death mechanism. Smaller maps should be played when lesser players are on. Dynamic map rotation based on player counts should become the defacto standard and the recommended players per map should be more rigorously followed.
Resources
Resources can be found on all map surfaces unless specifically denied by the mapper (and some other surfaces that would not make sense to have resources on eg., lava).
