Orion Skies

  tl;dr: Some concepts from Magic: the Gathering to be used in Orion Skies . What Is This About?    Over the past several months, my focus has been on building the Tech Generator . The initial impetus for that was a desire to adapt design concepts from Magic: the Gathering  "cubes" to an Escape Velocity context– I've built a few cubes, and was hoping to use some of my familiar systems & methods in Orion Skies . Building the Tech Generator has forced me to deeply explore the weapon and outfit mechanics, and their balance considerations, in the EV series, which has helped me think about the ways Magic  concepts might translate. Additionally, "cubes" in Magic  have hundreds of unique cards, and if I am to make that many distinct technologies in Orion Skies , a procedural generator will facilitate that process greatly.    At this point, I think I have a paradigm pretty well worked out for how to design a lot of gameplay elements in Orion Skies ...

    TL;DR: The Tech Generator is now generating all of Nova 's weapons, and myriad variations thereof. Next steps will be generating Nova's outfits, then I'll polish it up for version 1.0.   Progress Update    Since the last blog post, two major milestones have been achieved: A lot of "cleanup" work has been done to make the Tech Generator more intuitive and user-friendly. It is now actually generating all of the weapons in Nova (and many variations on them!).    Next steps will include the following: Adding Nova's outfits. Adding a few fields that are supported by the Nova engine but unused in the Nova scenario. Cleaning up the generator some more to make it as intuitive & user-friendly as possible. Adding how-to-use documentation. "Releasing" the Generator at Version 1.0. :)   Weapon-by-Weapon Commentary     I'd like to spend the rest of this blog post commenting on each type of weapon in Nova, and how the Tech Generator...