Continuation, game prototype: Iterative game design, Godot and the world of small planets
The name of the project is conditional and many points are not fundamental, how it will turn out in the end is already a matter of practice. The idea itself appeared as a kind of intersection point of several of my ideas at once, as a way to reveal some mechanics, an excuse to engage in a certain type of gameplay, and in general, a kind of suitable space where you can put your different characters, situations, and other developments. Space is in itself a rather fertile topic, and even more so with a bias in all kinds of fantastic and fantastic directions.
Heroes
Wanderer
Since the jrpg genre is assumed, it is assumed that the player controls a team of several heroes. The party can contain up to three ships. In travel mode, the main one flies, and during the battles the whole team appears on the field.
Spaceships have levels, but most likely there will be few (the maximum is the tenth, for example).
The type indicates the nature of the starship, there are four of them - evolutionary, divine, magical and technological.
The character of the hero and how he is used to dealing with energy depends on the class. There are also four classes - emitter, eater, battery and transformer.
A ship's abilities are based on a combination of type and class, but everything here depends on the specific implementation of these abilities themselves and the answer to the question of how unique the abilities of the ships will be and how they appear. That is, are they sewn up inside the carrier itself, and in what way. Either they can be obtained in whole or in part by any starship. Perhaps the abilities are completely and completely determined by the current composition of the crew.
Maiden Yaga. The concept of the "inventory" screen
On board the ship can be various characters, so to speak, "our little heroes." In fact, they act here as a kind of "weapon" for starships and can give the ship those very special abilities, having been on it in several battles.
As an option, there may be especially rare unique characters that need to be found once, and most of the time the starship may meet various non-unique, but still named personalities that are generated by the game according to some template.
Guest characters are capricious in their own way - they can get sick and temporarily weaken their effects, get tired and refuse to use abilities, not understand the structure of this type of ship, rush on business to any planet and refuse to transfer to another ship until then. Among such characters there may be organic or inorganic representatives (various breakdowns by type, even simple ones, always provide some food for game design, because some new elements appear around which you can build new mechanics or enrich existing ones), which will react differently on all kinds of enemy influences. It will probably be possible to awaken some latent forces among the guests, bringing them to certain planets, taking a certain cargo or collecting them on the same ship with other characters.
In the hold of the ship there are some cargo with useful effects, quest artifacts, consumable items, and so on. And in this moment an important difference from the classic representatives of jrpg suggests itself - a limited, "non-rubber" inventory. At least here you can think about both options and settle on a more suitable one.
Battles
The concept of the battle screen
In the local "space" there are various enemies, including, apparently, hostile starships. The fight with all these aggressors takes place according to the jrpg canons, with a scale of activity that accumulates over time. True, there were a lot of games that display the very queue of the fighting, but personally I am somehow nicer to the accumulating stripes (at least within the framework of this concept).
Each boat has strength (health, green bar), stamina (degree of fatigue, yellow bar), energy (analogue of mana, blue bar).
When the power reserve reaches zero, the boat enters a state of overload, which makes it possible to perform an especially powerful technique. After that, he can only make standard attacks until the yellow bar is restored, but it does not grow over time and is restored only by rare items. The reserve of strength can be spent on your own, on especially powerful abilities, and it is also reduced by certain enemy attacks.
I decided to take the basis of the combat system from my tactical tabletop RPG, for which I had previously come up with a separate version of computer adaptation. Only here battles will be even easier than tactical ones. That is, there will be no movement around the cells, so it will be necessary to rethink the structure of the battle, abilities and other principles. On the other hand, there is no need for a complete adaptation, rather I took some key elements from there to begin with, and in the future something will remain, something will change, something can be removed, focusing on other mechanics.
Planets
Here one would expect an approach, let's say, "a la Master of Orion" - we capture the planets, build everything on them, develop our interstellar empire and so on. Moreover, in this game I wanted to partially recreate the atmosphere of the world of small planets from my desktop-role-playing system "Small Cosmic Symphony", where the planets themselves were the heroes.
Nevertheless, instead of doing space imagery on behalf of the planet, we have more active heroes - a team of starships traveling through space. For a computer game, this is a more interesting perspective on what is happening, it seems to me. In addition, the ships do not own the planets, but simply participate in their life in various ways. That is, the construction itself on the planet will be present, but each planet has a personal development plan that can be helped or hindered.
Planets are classified into the same 4 types as ships.
There can be various buildings on the planet. The ships help to open the very possibility of building these new structures, looking for specific "spare parts" for them, various ways to speed up the construction.
In theory, the ships can focus on helping certain planets in order to develop them deeper and open their specific artifacts, quests, and other opportunities. At the same time, the global plot may even be absent and the story may consist of individual complex events that are tied to the level of development of specific planets. That is, more such a self-describing sandbox, in which, nevertheless, some piece of prescribed plot situations are hidden.
The tasks received from the planet can be different - to bring a certain "passenger" to it, deliver the cargo, find something, destroy the enemy, transmit a message, spy on other planets and commit sabotage. Textual, "intraplanetary" quests are also possible.
The type of interplanetary flights themselves is an open question. Maybe this is a full-fledged space with all degrees of freedom and the ability to additionally shoot at all sorts of small asteroids outside of battles. There may be some version of "flat", with its own characteristics.
Other
Well, he seems to have voiced all the main points. Some more concepts are suitable for the project, but these are either completely particulars and trifles, or completely optional features, or complex mechanics that I would like to pre-test and understand whether it is worth integrating them into a general outline.
For example, you can implement different types of damage and defenses, or add a switch for attack modes (aimed, not aimed). There is also a separate system of identifiers that I would like to bind to planets, but can be extended to the participants in the battle, then another interesting system of vulnerabilities will appear in the battle, which can become both main and additional (for example, only the abilities of the members can be based on it crew, but not the starship itself).
As a bonus, some more conceptual pictures: What else can you read in continuation of the topic:
Small space symphony
A tabletop role-playing game about the world of small planets, which gives a slightly more complete picture of the setting (but you need to understand that players are still filling it with specific details, that is this is not a cosmogony, but a kind of delineation of a general framework). The principles are described and you can read the rulebook itself.
Monstroboy
A short breakdown of the main points of a much more heavyweight tactical tabletop role-playing system, the principles of which can be partially used in jrpg.
Computed plot or tabletop role-playing contagion
Variants of the plot generation system through the interaction of identifiers of various objects in the world. I would like to partially use this method in the above concept.