The Last Boundary

[Deckhead]

I am beginning now to work on a game I never finished that I really wanted to. The Last Boundary.

I'll post updates here as I go.

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[Duck_Rice]

Looks really cool! Looking forward to it.

[Deckhead]

The idea behind the game is that it's a story-driven, event-based kind of a choose your own adventure deal. It never started off like that, but I found that it was the only way to accomplish the game ideas I had.

Those big ideas basically boiled down to:

Just about every Star Trek game is about pew-pew lasers and lots of action. There are no games where you need to use diplomacy on a derelict A.I. to convince it that it doesn't need to destroy a moon that will cause the destruction of a race of humanoids.

Typically, in The Next Generation, the Enterprise outgunned and outclassed nearly all their adversaries. The real difficult missions were against people that didn't want to listen, or against things they didn't yet understand. If I was to make that kind of game it would require a lot of text. And because there aren't pew-pew lasers, it becomes a game of choice.

So initially, I have various resources that the player needs to manage. But how are they managed? Well, I figured as it's an exploration-themed game, you have a limited supply, so you need to collect more and you use them in order to collect them. I.e., this star-system has fuel for you to collect, but not as much as it will cost you to fly there.

That's a very simple choice though isn't it? To put some meaning into these choices, I figured that the options you're choosing within the Events (that happen when you enter a star-system) should also impact these resources. Do you give vital supplies to this alien race suffering from a disease, or do you keep them to yourself?

The problem with that is now things become more about your ship, rather than the things you're uncovering. If your ship is typically the best ship and so your exploration and negotiation skills are really what matters, then I sort of think that having the ship's resources be something to manage goes against that. For the decisions to matter, whether to give those people your supplies or not, means that you must always be very close to the edge; and that doesn't feel right for this game.

I'm not sure how to handle this. I'm hesitant to remove the resources, because then I don't have a game any more, I've got a visual novel, and that's not something I want. But I can't figure out a way to gel the resource management with the adventure, and have it so that you get to make good choices, but that those choices aren't pre-determined by the amount of resources you have...

The reason for the latter is that it would not be great to not have options available half-way through this new quadrant of space because you simply don't have the resources available. Even if it was done on a percentage basis, i.e. those aliens want 10% of whatever the player has, the travel to the next system MUST have a finite amount of resources that are required. And no one wants to find themselves in a position where they have no resources because they just gave them away and now it's game over.

[Deckhead]

I've decided to sort of... put on pause the above, and just proceed with the introductory mission. If I polish this up I'm going to set it as a new demo, send it around, and see if people enjoy it.

For that introductory mission; I've planned it all out in Trello. There's a lot I now need to translate into my games data. I'm about... 1/8th of the way through doing that now.

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[Deckhead]

I'd been having some difficulty in determining how to make my game a little more interactive. I never intended to make a Visual Novel, but here I am.

So I've done a bit of research into various ways Visual Novels have made their product a little more interactive. Combat seems to be the big thing, which I was trying to avoid a little bit.

"Combat" doesn't need to mean "violence", I guess. But I can't really think of a unified, "combat like" system that I could apply to all the different scenarios you would be put up against. So for example, there's actual combat, diplomatic missions, exploration etc... There's not really a single way in which all of these can be resolved via mechanics. Not unified mechanics, and I don't want to make a bunch of different systems.

So, I thought about adding missions. Effectively, you're always on a mission. Go here, do this, do that. But these missions can be completed by the player, or not completed. This is determined via the events that take place.

An event about a diplomat who's actually a spy can only take place when you're on a diplomatic mission. You can complete the mission, but in doing so, you know you will be putting a spy in place. You can choose not to, but you will have failed the mission.

The player has a certain number of "lives", which is the number of times you can fail a mission. Some random encounter type missions could reward you with additional "lives".

Anyway, that's what I'm working on adding now. These "missions".

[Deckhead]

I was getting a bit bummed out on creating the missions and completing the first event so I worked on fixing a few annoying little things that have been hanging around for a while:

• The sound of a "click" when selecting buttons was always delayed until MOUSE_UP which made the UI feel sluggish. So I worked on playing the click sound within the MOUSE_DOWN event instead while keeping the actual action in the MOUSE_UP. It made a really big improvement.
• Fixed it so that you can look at the content of any star system, even if you can't travel there yet. Long-range scanners etc would be able to show you that information.
• When sounds are set to repeat in an event screen, and also repeat in the next event screen, they no longer restart from the beginning or fade. This required that I add some control around when and event-intro should play or not.
• Fixed the action music that plays during Red Alerts so that it continues playing in additional Red Alert screens.

I hope to have a second playable build soon that I can share to get feedback.

[Deckhead]

Here's a little gif of one a bit where you get too close to a sun.

[Deckhead]

Here's a video of the player approaching a moon when the power goes out in their ship.

[Deckhead]

God... this programmer art is getting worse and worse...

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[Deckhead]

Well; I've got a second demo build done!

Man; this took a long time. I'm mostly happy with the results, but it's an incomplete game. Right now, it's just one adventure, an adventure that leaves a lot of questions open.

Please download it and play. Let me know of any feedback you have, the harsher the feedback the better.

Download here: https://deckhead.itch.io/the-last-boundary