Oolite Bulletins

I made a very small 2D space game for Linux terminals that support Unicode: Asteroids. Originally, it was planned to be just an easteregg in my chess engine, however I like how it turned out, so now it has its own GitLab repo and standalone binary. It compiles for Windows, but while it is somewhat playable, unfortunately it doesn't make any fun
However, on Linux it is almost addicting. My high score is 188, I would be surprised if anyone comes even close to this. I played it that much that I got "hallucinations" from it.
It is especially fun to play with the cool-retro-term, but with disabled burn-in effect.
For anyone interested in programming languages: I wrote this in Nim, which is as fast as C/C++ and (often) as easy to use as python. Generally, I can fully recommend trying it out.

tsoj wrote: ↑Wed Aug 11, 2021 12:27 am

I made a very small 2D space game for Linux terminals that support Unicode

Bully for you!

Tell me, do you think that there might be some mileage in this:

Disembodied wrote: ↑Sat Aug 20, 2016 4:15 pm

This is a good point: there is a place for a game where the action is relatively rare, but exciting when it happens, and made all the sweeter by the pauses in between. As Cim has said before, maybe what we should be thinking about is not how to skip past "the boring bits" but instead to give the player something else to do rather than stare out of the window.

Are there things the player can do, during the longeurs? (Non-compulsory things, so if they want to stare out the window, they can.) Things like:
1. Peruse the news
2. Bid for cargoes and contracts, in advance - perhaps with time-dependent elements, so there would be pressure/reward in reaching the station by a certain time
3. Communicate with nearby ships
4. Enable further interaction with other ships - side-to-side docking, perhaps, and inter-ship trading
5. Run system checks and perform onboard repairs and tune-ups
6. Run long-range scans, and try to discover information about what other ships and stations are out there, and where
7. Look back over the ship's log

Redspear wrote:

Of the above, I think 3 and 4 have potential and I like the sound of #6 as it could be strategic. 5 could be... well, I'm really not sure about that one being fun.

5. Run system checks and perform onboard repairs and tune-ups
It would depend on how it's done. They would need to be gamified somewhat - essentially, take some minor timewaster games like Minesweeper, Hunt the Wumpus, Freecell, Pipe Mania etc. and repurpose them (simplifying/streamlining where necessary) into "purging the energy grid", "isolating a damaged interlink", "smoothing the plasma flow", "improving energy distribution", and so on. The advantage in doing these things would be to delay the next maintenance overhaul a bit - possibly important on a long, time-critical journey, but not compulsory by any means.

You might ask, why not just play a timewaster game? I would argue that - given an in-game purpose and context - these wouldn't feel like timewasters. There's lots of precedence for this sort of thing - a variant of Pipe Mania is used to simulate hacking in BioShock, for example.

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Wed Aug 11, 2021 9:26 pm

Tell me, do you think that there might be some mileage in this:

I thought a bit about this. Probably the simplest thing to do is to create some mini-game like asteroids, like maybe where you control "some part of the engine" manually where you have to stop something colliding with something else ("you need to steer the hydrogen suction valve such that it doesn't suck up impurities in the hydrogen fuel" maybe), and the longer you manage to "stay alive" in the mini-game, the faster your real Oolite ship becomes.

However, I don't really know how one would implement this technically. Maybe I could do something similar to the Asteroids game: have some ASCII "art" on an MFD as mini-game graphics and control movement with the two active equipment keys. However, the MFDs are sometimes small, maybe too small for such a game to make fun. Maybe I just need to try it.

Another idea that came to mind: If an NPC ship is near you, you can decide to "hack" it to get some credits extra. The "hacking" would be something similar to the "Embedded Security CTF" but smaller and simpler. The issue here would be that it is probably quite hard to generate these CTF problems or even manually creating them. Another issue would be that two possible keys is pretty limiting. But that is a general problem for any in-game-mini-games.

The other ideas that are listed in the post you mentioned I quite like as well, but they potentially require a lot of work (if you want to read news, someone has to write them, if you want to communicate with other ships, someone has to write an AI that is interesting enough to chat with (maybe a real chat could a funny, like connecting to Oolite IRC/Discord/something else), for the other stuff you would need to generate some kind of stories to make them interesting). Not that it is impossible, but I need a very long time to come up with a single good story, so it feels to feasible for me.
I read into computer generated stories some time ago specifically because I like games with good stories, but today either you have only few good stories or many very similar stories ("Missions") that are clearly made up of templated blocks. However, it seems like it is everything else but a simple problem.

tsoj wrote: ↑Thu Aug 12, 2021 5:28 pm

Another issue would be that two possible keys is pretty limiting. But that is a general problem for any in-game-mini-games.

There are action games that just need one key. Just think of flappy bird...

However hacking an enemy ship could more look like Paradroid. That hacking sequence looked quite interesting even for non-technically-affectionates.