JiCeyCraft wrote: ↑Thu Oct 29, 2020 10:51 pm
The Rock Hermit we would want to be the owner would not be necessarily active.
I've been thinking long and hard about the possibility of having a full shutdown switch somewhere for a Hermitage. Here's where I'm up to.
The first part relates to how close to the current observable operation of a Rock Hermit I'm trying to make this, and the assumption I'm making is that Rock Hermits are always open. Any time you find one in the game, you can always dock there. They are never "shut down" or "closed for holidays" (or, using today's experience, "closed for deep cleaning"). So, having a shutdown option negates that assumption. (Although, to be fair, you could handwave an explanation that says Rock Hermits do shut down occasionally, but the player is just never around to see it. But we'll leave this explanation aside for the moment).
The second part relates to the gameplay loops I'm trying to establish. In thinking about the operation of a station (any station), I decided that there would be operational parts of the station that would consume resources, which creates a nice interplay with the standard gameplay loops already available - buying and selling goods. But now, rather than just selling them for profit, your using those goods to facilitate the operation of your station. Station operations depend on those goods, and therefore it's imperative the player find them somewhere to keep feeding the beast.
The whole push to "keep the station functioning" is the whole point of the exercise. Without the threat of things failing or running out of resources, a huge part of the experience is missing. If you can just shut things down quickly and easily, beetle around the galactic map and do your own thing, with no pressure, it kind of defeats the purpose of having the station.
Now, having said that, I'm not against the idea of including a shutdown option. It's just that right now, at this stage of development, the thing I need most is feedback about the gameplay that exists right now. Is the experience I'm creating here fun? And if the response is, "it would only be fun if I can turn it off", then there's a much deeper problem to rectify.
If the required resources for station operations are set too high, making the process of gathering them too difficult or frustrating, it's probably better to tweak those settings (either fewer resources required per day, or the resources last longer than a single day), or I could make sure other system stations have a continuous trickle of the required resources (which can easily be explained by traders unloading goods, or new planetary resources arriving). This would mean you don't necessaily have to leave the system to collect them.
These are the things I'd like to play with first, before going with the "shut down" option.
