Major Design Breakthrough!

TL;DR: Many pieces of the design have fallen into place – in particular, an overall design framework and an outline of Orion Skies's world, both of which leave lots of design room for the details.

    Life continues to be extra busy lately! You may recall that my wife and I bought a home recently, and getting it all set up is taking a lot of time. Additionally, work has really ramped up, and in the midst of all this we decided to adopt a puppy? (He is adorable but also is a handful!)

   I haven't had a lot of time to sit down at a computer and work on Orion Skies, so instead my work has been happening mostly during my commutes, during which I often think about Orion Skies and come up with new ideas etc...

 

Massive Breakthrough

   Building on last month's worldbuilding breakthrough with creating a complete history of OS's setting, as well as game-design breakthroughs based on my work on the Tech Generator, I've finally gotten a "complete" framework for Orion Skies! This includes a full & complete world outline, as well as a full & complete gameplay design, which fit seamlessly together and facilitate, rather than restricting, the flexible creation and integration of specific elements of the game.

   It's a very abstract step, but I can't overstate how huge of a milestone this is. I'm now free to readily come up with ideas that fluidly fit into the greater whole. Previously I'd come up with different ideas for different aspects of this plug-in, and then wonder about how/if I was going to make them fit together; now they just work, and I can freely create. :)

   There are a lot of things that I don't want to share yet, because I want first-time players of Orion Skies to go on a compelling journey of discovery; and I'm working hard to make sure there will be lots of exciting things waiting in the nebula fog to be discovered!

   With that said, here's a map of publicly known territories of the Orion Nebula!:

(Click to enlarge.)

About the Map

   First of all, two notes about scale:

1. This is clearly just a fraction of the entire Orion Nebula, the northeast corner, centered around a sub-nebula known as "De Mairan's Nebula". No one has ever explored the entire nebula – perhaps you can be the first??
2. This map is actually very zoomed out from the Hubble image it is based on, and there's a lot of detail missing. I don't yet know how large of a nebula background image I'll be able to use in Cosmic Frontier; my hope is to be fully zoomed in!

   I also want to note that everything here is potentially subject to change between now and the release of Orion Skies– but it's unlikely to radically change.

   And, for folks worried about spoilers: the locations of these territories of the nebula are generally pretty well-known amongst spacers, including the player, at the start of the game; however, there are many details of what specifically lies within each territory or at each location, which this map doesn't show, and which will need to be discovered by visiting those places in your ship.

   Here's a quick "key" to the map; most of the specific places, people, nations, and organizations it mentions are described in my previous blog post about lore:

• Solid gray line: An old TUMAINI route for exploration further into the nebula. Although TUMAINI is long gone, their navigation posts along this route have all been refurbished or replaced, and it now serves as a trade highway.
• Dashed gray lines: Old TUMAINI routes that are not as maintained nor used as much as the main "highway".
  
• Circles: Selected systems. There are many other accessible and/or settled systems, but these ones help illustrate the map's structure.
• Ark Ship Landing: The massive "ark ships" are able to travel great interstellar distances, but are not well-suited to travel within nebulae; this location on the edge serves as a loading-and-unloading dock for visiting arks.
  
• Nyerere: A highly habitable world discovered long ago by the East African Survey Corps, which is now the most populated planet in the Orion Nebula.
  
• Villages: A number of small settlements on partly-terraformed worlds, where the majority of people live off the land via subsistence farming.
  
• Towns: Slightly larger settlements, to which people travel for commerce and trade.
  
• Research Posts: Recently established stations whose scientists are trying to re-learn some of TUMAINI's old knowledge, and re-establish travel to areas of the nebula that have been cut off for decades.
  
• Former TUMAINI Development Territory: Regions of the nebula where the TUMAINI program had previously been conducting exploration and terraforming operations, but have been cut off ever since TUMAINI's collapse.
  
• Proxima Corp Mining: Systems where Proxima Corp (one of the galaxy's two corporate superpowers) is conducting lucrative mining operations. They use the main "highway" to transport the collected resources to the ark ship landing, and thence take it out into the wider galaxy.
  
• Restricted Area: A region controlled by Proxima Corp. Special corporate access is required to enter.
  
• Banditry: The cargo-laden transports along the highway are excellent targets for bandits in the dusty bridge across De Mairan's Nebula...
  

   "But what about the color-coding?" you might ask. The color system goes far beyond this map and is worth a section unto itself! I'll explain it down below.

Credit to Richard Garfield for inventing this, and the staff at Wizards of the Coast for continuing to develop it over time; the "color wheel" from Magic: the Gathering is a brilliant and powerful tool for designing game worlds.

Color Wheel

   Backstory, trying to make a long story short: I play Magic: the Gathering. It's a fantastic game, worth checking out if you're into tabletop gaming or fantasy games. In Magic, some players like to create "cubes", which are basically standalone play sets, in many ways analogous to a Total Conversion plug-in for EVx. I've created a few "cubes" and developed a lot of ideas and techniques for doing so, which I was hoping to find a way to use with Orion Skies. Part of why I created the Tech Generator was to get a firm-enough grasp of EV's mechanics and strategies to be able to translate concepts from Magic: the Gathering cubes into EVx and thereby use them with Orion Skies.

   One of the core design elements of Magic: the Gathering is the "color wheel". Magic is divided into five colors – White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green – each with its own unique properties in terms of magical capabilities, philosophies and mindsets, elements they comprise of a society or world, etc. This color wheel is used as a guide for all aspects of creating new worlds and sets for Magic: the Gathering. It smoothly integrates worldbuilding with gameplay, while facilitating variety and complexity in both, and is flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of approaches when creating multiple/numerous unique worlds. It is at the core of everything in Magic.

   One of the things the color wheel does for Magic is to define what game mechanics each color has access to, "how" each color approaches its goals in-game, and what each color is "good" at vs "bad" at. A discussion outlining what that means in Magic for each of the colors would be prolonged and isn't really necessary here. Here's an MTG Wiki article that goes into it, for those interested.

   Mechanically, EVx is very different from Magic, so translating those ideas into a form that Orion Skies could use took some intensive exploration, which was part of the point of creating the Tech Generator. I believe I have managed to create a working system for such translation, and it is now guiding my work on Orion Skies. This system will certainly evolve and improve once I am able to start creating actual game content on the Cosmic Frontier engine, but it is already extremely useful for my design work.

   In any case, here is a basic summary of how the five colors of Magic can be found in Orion Skies:

• White: The color of governments, soldiers, and the pursuit of order. This is embodied by Nyerere, which is the de facto central governing power of the Orion Nebula, and maintains a Defence Force to combat any attempted invasions from outside the nebula. Technologically, they have a tendency to focus on smaller combat vessels, and, in combat, they look to strike a balance between defensive maneuvering & finding opportunities to maneuver in and sustain high-DPS fire.
  
• Blue: The color of exploration, research, long-distance mercantilism, mystery, and trickery. This is embodied by researchers, explorers, and traders who do business along the old TUMAINI travel routes. Technologically, they lean towards non-combat vessels, and focus on ionization and similar nonlethal disruptive capabilities when they must act in self-defense.
  
• Black: The color of expansionist business, profiteering, and the ambitious pursuit of power. This is embodied by the galaxy's two corporate superpowers, Proxima Corp and Armstrong Ltd, ever in competition with each other, and each with its own robust "security force". Technologically, they lean towards armed transports and escort gunships, focusing on heavy weaponry.
  
• Red: The color of passion, resilience, and people who live lives of conflict in harsh areas. This is embodied by bandits, and by post-TUMAINI survivors living off of limited resources. Technologically, they lean towards small armed craft, creating opportunities for quick devastating strikes when combat is needed; the best defense is a good offense!
  
• Green: The color of agriculture, balance, and nature. This is embodied by villagers who live off the land, as well as by terraforming and eco-engineering projects. Technologically, these all lean towards transport craft. Their "weaponry" is often repurposed old equipment that was originally meant for non-combat purposes such as astromining, climate adjustments, or launching raw materials.
  
• Artifacts: Not actually a color! This entry represents technologies and equipment that are available for use to all five of the colors. Decades ago, TUMAINI was a major project aimed at exploring the nebula and terraforming habitable worlds; in the aftermath of its collapse, many of its old spacecraft, stations, bases, technologies, etc are still in use by myriad factions.
  

 

Overall Development Status

   The development work is broken up into several different projects that, in the end, will culminate in Orion Skies itself. Here's where this is all at:

🟢 Concept Design: Done! :)
🟢 Worldbuilding: Done! :)
🟢 Galaxy Generator: Version 1.0 is complete and released. At some point soon I’d like to add compatibility with ResForge and/or EVNEW’s auto-import functions.
🟡 Tech Generator: Mostly complete, getting very close to Version 1.0 release. Will probably want to make improvements down the road, including auto-import capability.
🟡 3D Skill Development: After the generator work, I hope to resume daily 3D practice. I'll probably focus first on landscapes, and then will work towards creating a system that will procedurally generate full graphics sets for the Galaxy Generator in one go; these can start out “basic” and be updated over time. After that, I'll get back into developing air- & space-craft.
⚪ The Expanded Suite: I have a plan for this, and will start building it once Cosmic Frontier is released. The Lua gameplay features I create here will be used in Orion Skies.
⚪ Ares Forever: This is mapped out. I'll start building this once I have access to Cosmic Frontier, probably after an initial version of The Expanded Suite. The bulk of this work will be creating Ares-inspired Lua gameplay features, which will be added to The Expanded Suite and used in Orion Skies.
⚪ Orion Skies: The first release will most likely be fairly small-scale; then there will be a long-term process of adding incremental updates & expansions, developing it from a small TC into a large TC. As this work progresses, any new Lua gameplay features I build for Orion Skies will also be added to The Expanded Suite.