Von Neuman Devlog Ep 1

While I wrote some devlogs on things before this one is the first from my Strategy game (Von Neuman). I plan on making this a weekly entry with the current status. It wont always be long but it will engage people with the game and #bevy

A lot of people want to show and write code but as it is a strategy game I find it is also important to actually sit and write things down. This week was one such week and I would like to elaborate a bit on the overall idea I have for the Gameplay.

All games draw inspiration from sources and as a (very) long time gamer, I have many to draw from. While the multisystem style map is very much inspired by Conquest: Frontier Wars the gameplay is not wuite fixed as a complete plan. I have a vision and things I know I want to let the player experience but details will only come once the code is written. My main vision is to go a bit management style but not management of the economy as has often been done but rather managing the battle. Small things like withdrawing and engagement of the enemy should be done by the AI controllers of the respective ships. I forsee a couple of general traits that these ships will have but depending on balancing need and additional game mechanics those might change. There will be light craft that range from small drone like fighters and bombers to laser bristling corvettes and attack boats. These craft wil generally swarm an enemy in hit and run attacks. Utilizing while possible in system jumps or sprints rather to get out of action before comming back for an attack run. Supporting those small craft are the medium Warships which are more like your naval vessels, firing missiles and sometimes having gimmick wargroups like the stealth wolfpacks that focus on hit and run. Most types of ships will be this size. Of note is, that all of the ships so far with maybe some exceptions are incapable to transit to other systems. They need either carriers to base them on or Jumpgates to go to FTL. I will detail the exact FTL mechanics I want to implement in some future log. Only Capital ships are capable of going to FTL by default and those ships will be expensive. While balancing and community feedback might change this, it is my goal to make these large ships large but also vulnerable without a fleet. A must build for late game but you cannot simply focus on making a pure battleship fleet. So lot of gimmicks will be counterable by having a decent fleet but it is hard to win with just battleships. There will be three kinds of weapons. Laser and Plasma Beams for short range and point defense, Missiles for long range mass engagements and Torpedoes which come in many forms and destructiveness, from your simple pure fusion nuke to high velocity impact busters. Imagine Torpedoes more like specialized attack drones with one time use rather than a bit bigger missile.

While I have more factoids in the design document, this is as much as will write here right now. I did also adapt the code from Digital Extionction for my use cases and made some ideation on the editor on how to define the weapons and place the entities into the correct models.

You can find the mdbook sources and code on Github

Until next week: —Toasty