Looking good, but a few questions... Thread - Void of Darkness

Hi guys,

Big fan of the old starflight, Star Control, and Escape Velocity games here...

looking good, was just wondering a few questions...

1) Will there be factions or groups to join, alliances, or any political machinations on offer in the final version?
2) How are crew gained and what kinds of crew will be available?
3) How will crime and Law be dealt with? and (if the anser to question 1 is yes) will you be able to join them as groups or factions.
4) How is diplomacy with the 10 alien races/ civilisations going to work?
5) What is the (albiet open to change) planned time-scale from Alpha product to finished product?
6) are there ways for non-coders/artists to help out?

Hope to hear from you

Hi gary, thanks for the questions.

In this first game, I had intended to stick very close to the original starflight model. While starflight was free and open ended, you never saw other ships flying around until you encountered them, and there was no interaction between factions among other things. In VOD while making it I decided to expand rather than just a simple recreation of the concept of starflight, but making a universe with more activity in it and interactions between alien races.

1) Thus far you will not be able to join any particular faction as the player is playing his role in the VOD universe, a member of the human race trying to rebuild after being driven from their homeworld. This does not mean that in future iterations that this cannot change based on feedback, as there are other chapters planned post release.

2) The design for crew is that you can recruit them from the beginning from a limited number of candidates. I had initially allowed the player to name them, but have decided that it fits better into the realm that they have established names, since they are being recruited from the fledgling human fleet.

3) There are civilian ships flying trade routes in the game. If you attack them within a specific race's territory, you will lose reputation and will be hunted from there on out.

4) Diplomacy really takes the exact form of the starflight model, you will interact with the alien races through a question and answer model, aliens can be queried on a range of subjects. They will give you clues to explore and investigate, some central to the plot, others not, following these various clues can lead to discovery of advanced technology and other things. It could literally take a team of people a year or more to write advanced dialogue trees, in the end at this point doing this myself, sticking to the starflight model is interesting enough and easy enough for one person with a multi developing role to do.

5) The planned time scale is a beta in November and a release in December. This isn't sent in stone. But I hope to have the full game in Desura users hands, fully enabled by late November, and work on bugs/polish before full release.

6) You can spread the word of the game via social media, try to find other groups of fans of these types of games and let them know about the game. Also hopefully one of the results of this chapter of the game will be to bring in enough people to give some good feedback for improving upon for the second and third chapters.

We also have official forums here: vodgameforum.proboards.com/

so long!
-Justin
Project Creator