Fully Designed!

TL;DR: Orion Skies's design is as complete as it can be without actually getting my hands on the CFO engine. Now I'll work on the procedural generators and 3D graphics systems, to lay the foundation for building Orion Skies.

    Life has continued to be quite busy this month. You may recall that my wife and I bought a home in April, and getting it all set up is taking up a lot of our time. We also have a puppy who needs a lot of attention, and meanwhile work has been particularly heavy. On top of that we've gone through a mix of home emergencies and family emergencies, so it's been an exhausting whirlwind.

   However, I've continued to think about Orion Skies's design during my commutes, and have actually made tremendous progress on that front. Work should ease off soon, at which point I'll resume regular progress on the foundational projects that will build into Orion Skies itself. I'll explain all of this below.

 

Full Design

   At last month's blog post, a series of paradigm breakthroughs had allowed the following pieces to fall into place:

• History of Orion Skies's universe.
• Worldbuilding & map of Orion Skies's setting.
• Full gameplay design, harmoniously aligned with the above.

   This month, those new pieces laid the groundwork for rapidly finishing the rest of the design:

• Story outlining & mission structure design.
• "Module 1" design, for the first-stage release of Orion Skies.
• Full aligned production plan for Orion Skies and subsidiary projects (e.g. The Expanded Suite, Galaxy Generator, etc).

   With that work done, Orion Skies is fully designed! I can't think of any other aspects of this TC that I'll need to plan out before construction begins. (Though I may, of course, think of something between now and then.)

   All of these pieces are outlines, rather than specific game items, thereby leaving room for adapting the design to CFO's game engine specifics and to allow for playtesting-based adjustments as I build.

   In this blog post, I wanted to talk briefly about each of these final design elements, as well as some next steps for this project:

Story

   When it comes to storytelling in the EV series, I am personally a huge fan of: 1) Override's open-ended, player-driven storytelling that allows for a unique story experience every time you play; and 2) Frozen Heart's highly developed characters, themes, and engaging story plots. In some ways, these two scenarios' stories are set up in polar opposite ways– quite unlike Override, Frozen Heart has only 1 storyline that plays out the same way every time you play, and it explicitly defines your character's thoughts, actions, and personality.

   With Orion Skies, my hope is to structure the story mission lines similarly to Override, to capture that open-endedness and let the player's own imagination control their character– while also, to the degree possible, bringing in some of Frozen Heart's writing prowess to make the individual stories as engaging and meaningful as possible. I have a system worked out to structure the stories/missions in a way that I believe will accomplish this goal pretty well, although we'll have to see it in action to find out how well it actually works!

Module 1

   Ages ago on this blog, I talked about how I want to release Orion Skies in modules. It'll have a small initial release, and then periodic expansion updates. The idea is it will begin life as a small TC, then grow over time to hopefully become a large one. The reasoning is that doing this will allow a quicker first release, without sacrificing quality and without losing the potential to reach a large scale.

   Each module will cover several systems, a few ships, 1-2 pilot types, a couple dozen outfits, and a handful of stories.

   With the worldbuilding, story, and gameplay fully designed, this month I was able to pick out what parts of the full TC design would be best for a "Module 1", and to design that module in a bit more detail. Now I know exactly what I'll start building first when I'm ready to begin the construction of Orion Skies itself.

Production Plan

   In the interest of getting releases to the community as quickly as possible, while simultaneously building towards my full vision for Orion Skies, I'm building several smaller, foundational projects that are helping me build Orion Skies but also can (I hope) be of benefit to others. These include:

• Galaxy Generator (v.1.0 already released)
• Tech Generator (very close to release-ready)
• Spob graphics pack, designed to work with the Galaxy Generator. (planned)
  
• TC map pack, created by the Galaxy Generator and intended be useful for other peoples' TC projects. (planned)
• The Expanded Suite, a collection of Lua game feature mods. (planned)
• Ares Forever, an adaptation of the Ambrosia game Ares on the CFO engine. (planned)

   These projects are all designed to have a small/simple initial release version, followed by expanded/improved followup versions. Now that Orion Skies is fully designed, I was able to plot out how the various versions/stages of these different projects can all fit together, and I have a well-charted pathway forward with it all. :)

Next Steps

   At this point, I believe I can set Orion Skies's design aside until it's time for construction to begin. Until then, I'll be working on some of the foundational projects described above:

1. Finishing & releasing the Tech Generator v.1.0.
2. Updating the Tech Generator and the Galaxy Generator to produce output compatible with the automated spreadsheet import functions in EVNEW and ResForge. (In the future, I hope to add KDL output also.)
3. Creating an automated, procedural 3D graphics generation system to spit out spob graphics sets to go along with the Galaxy Generator; this will start off quite rudimentary but, once the core automation is in place, can be updated over time to whatever level of sophistication is desired/feasible.

   I think that'll give me plenty to do until CFO comes out! I'm looking forward to this next phase. :)

   As always, thanks for reading, and happy modding!