Equipment design
So far, in VERZ development, your ship equipment has looked like this:
It’s just a list. It’s fixed based on what ship you have. And importantly for development, there’s not actually much there.
Each piece of equipment was (is, really – but hopefully not for too much longer) basically limited to providing you actions in combat, maybe increasing your ship’s stats (notably, shields), or occasionally something else. But critically, they’re all missing a lot of things that make it *feel* like equipment. The biggest issue is that you can’t switch equipment. However, we also want equipment to take damage, and there are other things we want equipment to do.
Inspirations
In designing equipment, we’re taking ideas from a lot of other games.
Given the entire game is directly inspired by Pardus, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Pardus is a major influence. One major takeaway from Pardus is the idea that equipment degrades: it doesn’t go from “working” to “not working” all at once, but instead slowly gets worse over time as equipment gets damaged, eventually becoming useless. And while Pardus limited that to weapons, we’re going to do that for all of our equipment. If your shield generator takes damage, it’s probably going to give less shields. A damaged drive might mean you go slower, or that you can’t dodge as well. If your sensors get damaged, you might not be able to see as far.
However, Pardus is far from the only game we’re taking inspiration from. I’ve played a lot of X3: Terran Conflict and X4: Foundations; played Freelancer back in the day; and have also interacted a bit with Elite: Dangerous, and less with EVE online. One thing many of these games have is more limitations – and therefore more options – on equipment slots. We are trying to avoid a tendency many of these games have to have some weapons strictly better than others. Freelancer was a notable offender in this regard: higher level weapons were almost always better, but it’s not alone. However, the idea that some ships might have significantly different equipment options is something we’re definitely interested in. So some ships might have room for an extra shield, or even two drives – or can’t carry railguns.
A lot of space-themed strategy games let you design your own ships: my Steam library includes Endless Space 1&2, Space Empires V, and a few others – and I have fond memories of playing one of the Master of Orion games when I was younger. However, the big thing we’re taking away from these games is the ability to modify the equipment on the ships. Many games had the option to make a weapons “point defense”, meaning it did less damage, but could hit fighters. Similarly, “Heavy mount” weapons let you do more damage at longer range, at the cost of them being larger. A “Multi-phase” shield might block less damage but recharge faster. “Deep space” scanners were better for finding enemies, but couldn’t target them. While that’s something that’s going to require a lot more work, it is something we want to do in the future.
And the last two ideas come together in an inspiration from No Man’s Sky. While No Man’s Sky definitely has the problem that many space RPGs do of having equipment that is clearly better than others; one of things I enjoyed about looking for equipment upgrades was being forced to decide which trade-offs were better. Did I want more damage per shot, or more firerate? Would I prefer to go faster, or recover my boost faster? Do I want a bigger shield, or one that recharges faster? While we’re going to be working to make sure that there isn’t one optimal set of endgame tech that players tend towards, we do want there to be the option for you to specialize your loadout for what you want. And maybe, there’s some specializations that are harder to get, or require a special adventure for you to get.
Onward to Equipment
Part of the reason it’s been a while since we’ve added anything major to VERZ is that we’re making sure that we do equipment right. Getting things wrong now will mean we might have to tear out the system and redo it from scratch later on – which I don’t think anyone wants. But taking the time to get it right (or at least right enough) is taking time.
AND, once we get equipment working, there’s going to be a lot more to playtest. Right now, for all the options you have in combat, you’re stuck with whatever options your ship has – and basically every ship has the same equipment. Being able to customize your equipment, and then see how that does in combat, is going to open up a lot of questions about balance, especially when ships have different options for equipment.
