Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
100 lines (72 loc) · 3.25 KB

DESIGN.md

File metadata and controls

100 lines (72 loc) · 3.25 KB
Raw

Design Doc

Elevator Pitch

An automation game where the space in which the player moves around and interacts is hierarchical, like a filesystem.

Influences

Thanks to @dwrensha and @tom7 for ideas.

Goals

Narrative Structure

  • The standard automation game trope of: at first you do things manually and at small scale, and proceeding up to more automation and larger scale.

  • There should initially be one "computer" the player is operating within, and they should eventually gain access to other machines, maybe with different "architectures".

Entities

  • The objects in the game world are like files and folders.

  • Their properties include a name, some resources that live on them, acls.

  • Resources feel like quota that can be spent constructing things or acting in some way. There are perhaps generic ones like:

    • cpu cycles
    • filesystem space
    • ram space
    • network bandwidth and maybe more specific ones, like
    • cpu cycles for: file type conversion, model training, rendering, (de)compilation
    • filesystem or ram space for: text files, graphics files, executables, etc.
    • "privilege points"
    • local vs. internet bandwidth quota

  • Resources only exist on files and directories.

  • The player's inventory consists of, optionally, one file.

  • Later in the game this may be expanded to multiple files.

  • Some files are too large ("heavy") to be picked up, but can be moved incrementally by executables.

  • Executables can draw cpu-quota from the directory they're immediately in. This is sort of like powering cells with power poles.

Player Movement

  • There's a notion of current directory, and current selected file. Moving up and down directories, and among files within a directory, is basic and easy.

  • However, it may be obstructed by locked directories or other similar mechanisms.

Engineering Puzzles

  • Factorio's mechanics, especially space age, poses some tacit engineering puzzles. How do you manage waste on Fulgora and Gleba to ensure pipelines don't back up? How do you cope with spoilage on Gleba? How do you efficiently arrange Kovarex refinement on Nauvis? I'd like to have a similar battery of open-ended problems arise naturally without explicit demarcation that a puzzle has started or ended.

UX

  • There are real-time elements to gameplay. The primary one is time as a cost, as is typical for automation and idle games.

  • Universal immediate legibility is not always a goal: I would like to push hard on putting concerns like monitoring, alerting into game mechanics. This means that portions of the state of game may be intentionally opaque until they unlock, design, and/or deploy explicit mechanisms to help them understand it.

Non-Goals

  • I have no plans to support multi-player