Plans for the prototype

The best time to change plans is during the prototyping phase. So I changed plans.

I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with Godot now, and making a straight-up clone of Space Engineers isn’t an idea that excites me. It offered some great challenges while I was learning the engine, but now I need an idea with some meat on its bones. Fortunately, I’ve been working with Alana on a story for the game that we’re both proud of, and that has inspired some changes to the kind of game I want to make.

Going forward, my plan is now to make a factory game. In space. I will still take plenty of inspiration from Space Engineers, but this will no longer be a clone. It’s going to take elements of Satisfactory and Factorio as well, two other games that I love and have spent a ton of time playing, just like Space Engineers. Oh, and No Man’s Sky. Picasso said that great artists steal.

This means that building ships will no longer be the focus of the game. There will still be building, but they will be static structures. There will still be ships to fly, but you won’t be building them block-by-block. And I don’t have to code a complex simulation of thrust & torque to make thrusters and gyroscopes work as expected. Hooray!

This also means that you will get to explore the entire asteroid belt! I’ve cooked up a plan for how players can traverse the belt freely, but the distances involved make travel time prohibitive until you can unlock a means of faster-than-light travel. I have a spreadsheet full of space and time calculations and I’ve been tuning spaceship flight.

Oh, and since this is a factory game now, you know there are going to be trains. In space.