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Ostranauts - spaceship management sim set in NEO Scavenger universe - now available on Early Access

ERYFKRAD

Barbarian
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Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Not many posts where one :love: button is insufficient.
 

agris

Arcane
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dcfedor your post instilled new excitement in me for The Space Game.

Going back to your inspiration and love of Alien(s), do John Carpenter's films exert any influence on you? I think They, The Thing and Escape from New York are all in the orbit of your cultural influences.
 

lophiaspis

Arbiter
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Oct 24, 2012
Messages
379
dcfedor

Thanks a lot for your detailed response. It did a lot to alleviate my concerns. My main fear was simply that the game would be focused on bland stuff like mining and trading. However, I do think it would be nice to have those options, just not as a main focus.

I believe your design problem stems from the fact that your game wants to be two things at once: A Firefly simulator and an Alien simulator.

You want to simulate both the lonely survival-horror of facing the Xenomorph and scenarios like Event Horizon, and the thrill of being a quasi-mercenary space adventurer in a developed society, in the style of Han Solo and Malcolm Reynolds.

(By the way, I really respect your design philosophy of striving to emulate something outside of videogames, rather than just rehashing old games. This is how all great games are made.)

One way you could simulate both these experiences is by either having two different modes, or even two different games in the same engine: one set in a developed society and another in a ruined society. But the best solution, if you can pull it off, is combining the two in one game. This could give your game an irresistible rhythm, like RimWorld or X-Com switching seamlessly between their building and combat modes. And I certainly think this is what you should aim for.

The problem is that without careful calibration of both gameplay and setting, these modes will clash with each other instead of creating a harmonious whole. Make the setting too civilized, and the survival horror won't bite, the player won't feel alone against the horrors of the universe. Make the setting too apocalyptic, and there's no space society to play Han Solo in, there's no point in a reputation system or career system or any kind of advanced social interactivity. I stand by my contention that the setting ought to be a lot more apocalyptic than it is now - right now it's just bland. But you're totally correct that you still need pockets of civilization to support a functional capitalist economy and trade networks. So it seems like what you need is a semi-apocalyptic setting.

Semi-apocalyptic settings are fairly rare in videogames. The best example I know of is Steve Jackson Games' Autoduel/Car Wars setting. I think you're a GURPS guy so you may have heard of it. In Autoduel, civilization has fallen, but not fallen entirely, just enough for the barbarism to be a cool contrast. The United States has been devastated by economic collapse, rebellion, plagues, and limited nuclear war. Many states have seceded, and large parts of the country are untraversable wasteland terrorized by gangs of mutants and biker-barbarians. The Federal Government still holds onto the East Coast, but has become a cyberpunk dystopia where the most popular entertainment is televised bloodsports - hence Autoduels - and is a military-corporate dictatorship in all but name. I think this setting is a good model to achieve your desired mixture of Firefly with survival horror.

So how about this 70/20/10 setup:
-70% of the space colonies are unrecognizable. They have been warped by supernatural horrors, taken over by bizarre extradimensional entities, had all their people vanish without a trace, etc. This is where you have to scavenge for good supplies, and where you are sent on dungeon-style quests. These places are either totally hostile or at least eerie and altogether inhuman, and nobody knows much about them past the cheerful pre-clusterfuck nonsense in the Ship Computer, so the player must explore on his own. They are equivalent to Autoduel's mutant-ridden American Wasteland.
-20% are still human, but only barely hanging on. They have suffered economic collapse, war, rebellion, alien invasion, and have reverted to primitive social forms, and are in desperate need of all kinds of supplies. You can make some bank by selling them supplies, you can do trade runs between them and other colonies, and you can have the moral choice of extorting them for higher prices, although they might attack if they don't like you.
-10% of the colonies have most of the power in the still-human parts of the System. They still have recognizable capitalist economies. But they have in no sense survived the apocalypse unscathed. Their economies and political systems have in some cases collapsed in revolution, in other cases had to totally reorganize in order to survive, and they have become extremely authoritarian and ruthless. They are equivalent to the remnants of Autoduel's US Federal Government, and I think the government from The Hunger Games would also be a good inspiration. They could send you on drug runs to keep the desperate masses pacified, and you would hear all about how they use bloodsports to keep order. These are the guys you have to work for if you want to live, and they still have fairly developed technology and trade networks, even though everything has taken a huge hit. This is what gets you the cyberpunk/Firefly/working stiffs vibe, and it lets you keep your cool career and social relationship systems in a way that doesn't kill the tension. What gives you a better cyberpunk/space adventurer vibe? Working for a bland, preppy un-apocalyptic corporation in a peaceful, civilized system, or working for a hyper-ruthless, post-apocalyptic dystopic corporate regime as the last stand of civilization in the midst of sheer horror? And of course you could have a few states that are less dystopian too. I believe such a world design would satisfy the narrative demands of the dualistic gameplay as harmoniously as possible.

Now that I think of it, the 1984 Autoduel game itself might actually have some gameplay ideas. You should definitely have a part where you can enter the gladiator ring, and it's done as a normal NS combat sequence plus audience reactions. It was a missed opportunity to not have something like that in NS. Maybe their top entertainment is zero-G knife fights.
 

dcfedor

Blue Bottle Games
Developer
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Messages
111
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Seattle, WA, USA
Thanks folks! And "fucking masterpiece" is high praise. Maybe too high. I'd lean more "flawed gem" or "cult hit." NS does some things right, but it's definitely not for everyone :)

agris, that's an interesting question. I think you're right that John Carpenter's work is very tonally close to NS and this upcoming space game. I really dig his stuff, even if I didn't grow up on it. I probably was influenced a lot by him indirectly, though. I think his impact on pop culture (particularly the sci-fi and thriller stuff I was weened on) is significant.

lophiaspis, I think it's possible to have one's cake and eat it, too, so to speak. That the overall proportion of civilized vs. non-civilized space won't necessarily limit which stories are possible, or how the game feels, tonally.

For example, think back to Alien, or Aliens, and the universe portrayed in those films. In both cases, the status quo is corporate wage slaves. A sort of cyberpunk in space. The average person is shackled to an endless career of paying their bills, to the degree that some sign away everything (including time with loved ones) to freeze themselves for long-haul mining.

Despite that hum-drum backdrop, we have a story of horror, loneliness, scarcity, and strife. It doesn't matter that there is a vast corporatocracy with future tech and infrastructure because it's not here. It's across the System/Galaxy from here, which might as well be another plane of existence. Here there is a horror show. A highly localized apocalypse.

I can't recall what I've revealed about NS's space setting, so it's possible it sounds more boring to outsiders than I see it. Abandoned settlements, extreme prisons, reclusive submariners, labor uprisings, missing ships, unexplained "events" at research campuses...nevermind the vast orbital graveyard that is Earth's orbit.

There's stability to be found up there, for sure. But space is a big place, and the stuff we don't see and can't explain still outnumbers our paltry colonized footholds.
 

dcfedor

Blue Bottle Games
Developer
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Messages
111
Location
Seattle, WA, USA
To be fair, he noticed it. I was just too dense to absorb what I was reading :)

Mike said:
Frontiers also features a deeper set of living world systems. Things change and evolve more as you play, and you can influence factions, reputations with characters, even the outcomes of trade wars.

I'll be interested to see how that living world plays out, though. It's rare that a game does this in a way where it feels like a developing relationship, rather than a +/- modifier to barter prices, mission availability, or chance of battle. I'm hoping to foster a sense, even mildly, that your crew and contacts care what you do.

But so does every designer, I suppose!
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

Filthy Kalinite
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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Bubbles In Memoria
https://bluebottlegames.com/content/maiden-voyage-fixing-saves-and-pathfinding
Maiden Voyage, Fixing Saves and Pathfinding
Hey Folks! Managed to fix several save game and pathfinding issues, launch my crew on their maiden voyage today, but not without issues.

The first order of business was to finish fixing the save game bug that over- or underpopulated ships loaded from a save file. The issue turned out to be in the Star System's "spawn ship" code. It needed to decide whether to load a ship based on a template or a save file, and was always assuming template. Checking if the ship had any objects loaded into it yet was sufficient for solving this, since if we have none, we want some, and if we have some, we don't :)

I solved a few minor bugs after that, to regain momentum. The career screen had incorrect dates on past jobs, and crew could show up as items in the barter screen. So those were fixed fairly easily.

Once those were done, I retried hiring my crew from OKLG and setting-off. However, I ran into issues after getting them aboard. My ship was now considered a station, due to sloppy code during docking. Oops!

On my second attempt, after hiring my crew, they refused to board my ship due to pathfinding issues. It turns out the pathfinding code was using a bitarray to keep track of already-checked tiles (a performance optimization), but this got confused in cases where ships docked, and the bitarray indices didn't match ship tile indices.

The fix turned out to be in the code already, and I had stopped using it for some dumb reason. Basically, each tile has a boolean "are we checked yet?" flag I setup exactly for this, but only used in other processes. Switching this back solved the cross-ship issues with pathfinding. (And for those wondering, this didn't undo the performance optimization. It turns out the pre-optimization code was doing expensive array.indexOf calls every step in nested loops, and the "checked?" flag avoids this, too.)

Okay, third time's a charm, right? Right!

I shepherded my crew to my ship, closed the airlock, requested pushback/take-off clearance, and I was away! Set in the course for the nearest derelict. A mere 2.97 days travel at 2gs constant burn...

And here we are. Sitting in a tin can. For 3 days. Craig, Lindsay, and Brooklyn, wandering around chatting, avoiding eye-contact, attempting to sleep, pooping. So far, the trip is maybe 0.5% done, as we're mostly in real time, or 2x real time.

I've found a few bugs so far. Two different rebuff interactions had bad pathfinding info setup, so AI could get stuck wandering around the ship until manually "jogged" back to reality. I fixed those. Also, there seems to be a bug in my room atmosphere code, which I'm still tracking down. Possibly another save/load bug. Though, save/load seems to be behaving for the most part now, so I can save progress during the trip and resume later.

More importantly, though, I think we've identified a major weakness in the game design. I hoped to make these trips a realistic length ("days" is expected), and have the entertainment come from watching and making the AI do stuff. Kind of like the Sims, only better. Ideally, like watching Firefly until arriving at the destination.

Alas, procedural, needs-driven AI probably won't cut it as it sits now. There's only so much chit-chat worth watching before I want something to do. I didn't actually try anything, though. Which I could have. Force certain interactions. Try to minimize low points in their moods. Hm, forgot about that.

But yeah, this warrants some thought. I can insta-teleport to the destination and deal with this later, as we still have some salvage/sell-off/salvage loops to toy with. And there is also the "plot" system mostly lying unused. But those things are activities at the ends of long trips, so the stuff in-between either needs to be more fun, or less long...

https://bluebottlegames.com/content/clothes-and-body-temperature
Clothes and Body Temperature
screenshot-2018-10-15.jpg

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Unfortunately, some sickness going around the household here, and I may be next in line. Hopefully that won't be.

Back in the space prototype, I've continued the slot work from last week. This time, the focus was on clothing. I had three sets of clothes used on my old crew, so those body part sprites were already done. And last week, I added two sprites for unequipped clothing, so they could be displayed as items on the floor. They were just missing the data files to make them available in-game.

That, however, turned out to have a hurdle to overcome: which slot to use? The browncoat clothing was blue pants, a brown coat (naturally), and shoes. So I could go with the old NS slots and have one for pants, one for the torso, and one for each foot.

However, the EVA suit is a onesie. That means you'd have it cover all your body slots when you put it on. And that makes per-part clothes tricky.

There are some ways to handle that, but for the sake of simplicity, I decided to just have a single "body" slot for now. Each set of clothes is a complete outfit. And some day when I have more time, I can try breaking it into piecemeal clothes.

Once that was done, it was a snap to copy most of the helmet data to make clothes items. And in today's picture, we see Lindsey Lindsey wearing the browncoat outfit, and approaching the EVA suit in the utility room. The user has to manually unequip the current clothes if they want to wear the clothes on the ground, or else the AI will just pick them up. Similarly, one has to manually drop the clothes on the ground before equipping them.

All stuff I hope to smooth out in future work.

Anyway, the clothes now equippable, it was time to look into temperature. The game already tracks temperature as part of the gas dynamics, since pressure and temperature are interdependent. So the remaining work was to make the human body temperature react to ambient temperature. And lucky for me, NS already has code and data for that!

So for the rest of the afternoon, I ported the old NS body temp code over to the space prototype. And converted it's old Fahrenheit data to Kelvin, so it would be compatible with the other values in this new engine.

As of now, crew spawns with core body temp, min and max comfortable temp (dry and wet), passive rewarm rates, and body insulation. The next step is for me to attach this code to the crew and test it out. And finally, to add reasonable stats to the browncoat and EVA suit items for testing.

Hopefully, that'll be smooth sailing. There's a slight chance that I'll run into stats dropping below zero, which can cause bookkeeping issues in the current system. (E.g. if a stat is at 3, and an item causes -5, it bottoms-out at 0. And later, when that thing is removed, the game will "undo" the -5 and bump it up to 5.)

However, there are ways around that issue if it comes up. We'll have to see!

https://bluebottlegames.com/content/heat-rejection-and-exchange
Heat Rejection and Exchange
Hey Folks! News is a bit earlier today, as we have a school potluck to attend in a few minutes.

After stumbling over the "louvered" radiator style idea yesterday, I couldn't get it out of my head. Instead of massive, flat panels sticking out like sails, I could use louvers like you see in today's screenshot, on the right. Basically, they're small radiators, they still direct heat away from the ship and each other, without departing from the ship styles we see in our favorite sci-fi. The numbers won't add-up in reality, but they're about as "hard" as the idea of having a TW fusion torch on your ship that doesn't instantly vaporize the entire ship's mass.

So in other words, we're being consistently hard-ish with our science.

Under the hood, I just added a bit more code to my heater so that it could optionally pump heat out the other side. Whatever it does to heat on one side, it does the opposite to the other. In this new system, the heater just has an ignored output, as you'd expect from an electric heating element.

The cooler, on the other hand, applies its effect on the interior side (the white box with green LED and blue snowflake label), and the opposite effect on the exterior (louvered) side. And for now, I'm treating it like an ammonia coolant loop that's run between the interior cold plates/heat exchangers and the exterior louvers/radiators. It sits at 200K, just above ammonia's freezing point. And in practice, basically works like the AC in Rimworld (with a minimum operating temperature of approximately -70C).

I still have a bit of tweaking to do on the numbers, as it has a much slower effect than the heater right now. This is mainly due to the fact that the heater has a temperature of 1000K, and the cooler 200K. This means the difference between air temperature and heater is ~700K, while the cooler is more like ~100K. I think I can get around this by fudging the surface area and volume stats on the cooler to make up the difference.

It's working, though. Even hooks up to the thermostat if I want it to. So we're nearly done with regulating cabin temperature on our ship! Might be worth trying to yank the overheating/hypothermia conditions from NEO Scavenger and slap those into this system, as it shouldn't take long. It might not matter yet, but I could see crew hypothermic/overheating via their stats if it works.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
https://bluebottlegames.com/content/teaser-teaser

Teaser Teaser

screenshot-2018-12-13.jpg


Hey Folks! Not a lot of progress today, as quite a few interruptions and admin work got in the way.

What work I did manage to do, however, was for the upcoming teaser video. And today's image is a teaser for the teaser, so to speak. Joshua and I were chatting about possible scripts for the teaser, and I think we've settled on this establishing shot: we see NEO Scavenger hex tiles, and we pan up into space. From there, we show off in-game footage of the new game.

The point here is to answer a question a lot of folks have when they hear about this space game. "Is this a sequel? Is this a new setting?" Right off the bat, we see this is in the NEO Scavenger universe, and we'll even get a bit of context to explain how these two worlds coexist without much contact. We also can see that, while Philip wanders the Earth down below, this other set of characters is doing their thing up in space.

Same universe, parallel stories.

That's the hope, anyway. I think it should be pretty clear once folks see it. Not to mention eye-catching for both fans of the original game, and newcomers wondering where the camera is going to point next.

Behind the scenes, I've been coding something in Unity to approximate NS hex maps, but to also show this fade off into the horizon, leading eventually to a star field. Since getting a smooth panning shot of this in NS would involve a lot of custom coding (remove the UI, add fading hexes and horizon, etc.), I decided to just use a fresh scene in Unity. I originally was just going to mock it up in Photoshop, but it turned out to be really slow and tedious to line-up all those hexes.

Scripting to the rescue :)

Anyway, once this is working, I should be able to either capture the panning shot and send the footage to Joshua, or even just send him the app so he can run it there and capture what he needs. Unity to the rescue!
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
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Oct 6, 2012
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1,874,662
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Roanoke, VA
Grab the Codex by the pussy
I started playing NEO Scavenger for the first time yesterday at roughly 9:30PM. It is now 9:48PM the following day and I am just now going to sleep.

That game is a fucking masterpiece.

Maybe in a few days, your character will live longer than ten minutes after the intro... if you're good.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
I started playing NEO Scavenger for the first time yesterday at roughly 9:30PM. It is now 9:48PM the following day and I am just now going to sleep.

That game is a fucking masterpiece.

Maybe in a few days, your character will live longer than ten minutes after the intro... if you're good.
don't forget to sell the necklace you start with, it's worth a lot
 

agris

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Apr 16, 2004
Messages
6,761
And take every opportunity drink water / fill water bottles, you can go a long time without finding any!
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Official announcement incoming...: https://bluebottlegames.com/content/steam-page-approved-email-newsletter-prep-etc

Steam Page Approved! Email Newsletter Prep, etc.

screenshot-2019-02-01.jpg


Hey Folks! Inching forward on marketing push each day, here.

I received word that Valve approved the Steam "Coming Soon" page for the game, so that can launch at any moment now. I made a few adjustments there, hooked it up to my developer/publisher page there, and I think it'll be good to go after one final review.

I also managed to finish the email newsletter today, which I wasn't expecting. It involved updating the mailing list to weed out suspected bot subscribers, back during a time when Mailchimp allowed opting-in without confirming emails. Cut the valid recipients by 66%, but I'd rather that than trigger spam blacklisting anywhere.

There's one or two things I could add to this website, such as a larger "Settings" page, or other info pages for the game. But otherwise, it's looking like I could maybe launch this thing next week? Scary!

For now, it's possibly my last weekend of relaxation. I'll probably be stressing out after the announcement, keeping up with feedback and questions :)

Have a good one, all!
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
https://bluebottlegames.com/content/tomorrows-announcement-day

Tomorrow's Announcement Day!

screenshot-2019-02-12.jpg


Hey Folks! Development took a back seat today as I mostly focused on reviewing announcement material one last time before tomorrow. Pretty much as soon as I get to work tomorrow, it's all cylinders firing to get the word out.

That means new subforums, new discord channels, getting twitter and reddit accounts ready. News posts crafted and ready to go. I put together a couple of gifs for easy tweeting/sharing, plus the Steam store page stuff I've been working on, like teaser video, screenshots, descriptions, wiki content...it's a lot.

It's also been a while since I had a lot of eyes on me. Probably not since NEO Scavenger launched on mobile, and even that was minor compared to the launches back in 2012-2014 as NEO Scavenger released for the first time on various sites. I don't enjoy the pressure, if I'm being honest. But I think it will be a relief to get the word out and see what people like vs. not.

Much as with NEO Scavenger's long, public development, this is going to be a project that grows based on player feedback. I learned a lot about what people enjoyed and ignored as NEO Scavenger grew, and I hope this to be the same.

So it might be a few days before I'm back in the dev seat, since PR can get a bit time-consuming right after an announcement. But hopefully, we'll be full Steam ahead again soon!
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
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Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth




https://bluebottlegames.com/content/announcing-ostranauts

Announcing Ostranauts

capsule_main.png

Hey Folks!

I'd like to tell you about my latest game, Ostranauts.

Eight years ago, I began work on NEO Scavenger. And after five years of updates and ports, it was time to begin working on a new game. That game started as simply "space prototype," but has turned into quite a bit more.

So what is Ostranauts?
Well, if you have a minute, here's a teaser video:

Ostranauts Announcement Teaser

Ostranauts is a detailed simulation of owning and living aboard a spaceship, in a solar system where honest living is a slow death sentence. Set in the NEO Scavenger universe, where Earth has suffered cataclysmic collapse, the rest of the System lives on in a state of capitalistic dystopia.

Players will create their captain, build or customize their starting ship from the spoils of their career history, and find ways to keep their motley crew in line, fuel in their tanks, food on their plates, and the debt collectors at bay.

If this sounds interesting to you, you can learn more at the Ostranauts Steam page. Wishlisting it there will give me an idea how much interest there is in this game, and how much time I can spend on it.



And if you know anyone else who might dig this type of game, let them know! Spreading awareness is something everyone can do to help me continue to make games like this.

Thanks for your time, and I look forward to seeing the stories you create in Ostranauts!

Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

PS: Is this a sequel to NEO Scavenger? Not directly. Think of it more as a parallel story involving different characters, but in the same universe. An official sequel, continuing Philip Kindred's adventure, is still on my wishlist of games to make.
 

buffalo bill

Arcane
Joined
Dec 8, 2016
Messages
1,004
Can't believe I've totally missed this, even though I freakin loved neo scavenger.

I'm having trouble figuring out what the gameplay will be like. Sorry if this is a stupid question, but will this be turn based?
 

agris

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Apr 16, 2004
Messages
6,761
Steam page said:

dcfedor

:love:

edit: if you want to be really authentic, you could make the red buttons be START/GOOD, and green STOP/BAD. I used an old Hitachi SEM from the 80s back in school that had a great physical board in front of you to run it, including the dubbing (although JP not mandarin), and the START/STOP buttons for the gun were RED/GREEN. Fun times.
 

Zenith

Arbiter
Joined
Apr 26, 2017
Messages
296
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but will this be turn based?
According to Steam page, the main simulation is rtwp + fast-forward. But yeah, it's hard to judge how it's going to play, or even if stuff like combat is going to be interactive at all. Then again, it was hard to judge NEO Scavenger without playing it.

Anyhow, it's gonna be worth it just for the new Josh Culler's soundtrack alone. The one OST that made me actually look up a genre and go on a hunt for similar music for the first time since forever ago.
 

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