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.
