Galactica/TODO.md

Game & Story

• Landmarks to determine speed?
• How to keep player in system bounds, what to do if they fly far away
  • Max chase distance, physics-enforced area?
  • (Soft limits, you shouldn't go too far unless you decide to.)
• How to handle death -- save scum should not be the norm (hollow knight?)
• Jumping between systems -- how?
• Locks and keys -> variation?
• Active abilities
• Hard to get outfits you've lost (hollow knight's charms do this very well)
• Missions: hunt scary targets
• The world exists outside of the system you're in
  • (large-scale dynamics)
• How does information travel?
• Communication timer: destroy a ship fast, nobody needs to know
• Do we want to pay crew?
• How should ship capturing work?
• Enemy motivations
• Where does money come from?
• Changing map paths? How?

Features

• Music (user-configurable)
• Sound effects
• Debris (ship death, destructible, physics)
• Orbiting debris (asteroids)
• Collectibles (flotsam)
• UI
• Landable planets
• Back arrow: reverse thruster or reverse ship
• Loading screen, incremental texturearray loading
• Indicators (planet names, enemy ship stats)
• Multiplayer? (how does that fit into gameplay?)
• On-screen text
• Controller input & key bindings
• Save games
• Date system -> planet position
• AI fleets
• More ship behaviors
• Jump between systems
• Government color, ship tint
• Different kinds of ship behaviors:
  • who to target
  • how to target them
  • where to go
  • etc, extra flags

Faction interaction

• Targeting overrides hitscan rules (only for player)
• Static and dynamic faction relationships (change with player actions/game events?)
• Dynamic relationships only for player? Other governments may be hard-coded
• Opinion towards player -> how to handle well?
• Player faction is special
• Actions against one faction affect another

Internal

• Logging/warning system
• Frame timings (compute/render/physics/etc)
• Elegantly handle lost focus
• Pause game
• Better player controller? (only one shipbehavior needs inputs)
• Clear all // TODO: comments littered in the source
• CLI options (debug, save location, content location, check content)
• Config file

Content

• Angled engines
• Angled guns
• Turn engine flares
• Reverse engine & flares
• Better ship colliders (need a tool or an algorithm)
• Better projectile colliders (box/ball/etc -- shared syntax)
• Turrets
• Weapons with ammunition
• Enable/disable weapons
• Cargo space
• List of ES content--which to implement?
  • Ship stats
  • Weapon stats
• Display name != internal key
• Conversations
• Trade
• Missions

Camera

• Shake/wobble on heavy hits?
• Camera effects on low health?
• (or are ship particles better?)
• Lookahead -> position or direction?
• Damping?
• Important objects affect camera

Visuals

• Particles
• Dynamic lighting (planets & ships)
• Motion blur
• Zoom parallax (?)
• Background haze
• Nova dust parallax

Write and Document

• Parallax
• Starfield & tiling
• How the game is drawn
  • transforming game coordinates to screen
  • how angles work
• Computation flow
  • Physics pipeline
  • Outfit pipeline
  • Collision detection
  • Ship AI
  • Handles
• Content specification and pipeline

Ideas

• Improvements over ES
  • Better visuals
  • More interesting combat
  • More interesting missions
  • Big fleets shouldn't be broken (should the player even have a fleet?)
  • ES Enemies don't have a real motivation.
  • ES story is a bit basic
  • Death matters - save-scumming shouldn't be normal
  • More interesting trading?
• Death penalty
  • Find your wreckage when you die (dark souls/HK)
  • Lose some outfits, lose ship? Real risk for going out! (HK does this well)