Hello. I like game designing and now I am working on GDD of scifi open world game like GTA inspired by Star Wars mostly. But I am stuck. Is somebody here working on similar project or something else and would like to talk about it? Maybe we can help each other. I think it would be great. Now I am trying to design world where everything will be set and how player will travel, etc.
Youāre in the right forum section to discuss design. Have you refined your design into a short pitch document yet, something thatās 3 short paragraphs or less? (No oneās going to read more than 1/3 to 1/2 of a screenful of text on a forum.) If so, post it to get the conversation started.
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Should I write story? I do not think so or maybe later. It is about two playable and one more characters flying through space and doing jobs, but game should end with āsaving galaxyā. Not whole galaxy maybe, something smaller.
Main mechanics are buying properties, where will be side missions. Player can complete missions for space gangs and races to improve reputation. Missions are like in GTA.
I want in game side activities like collectibles or small ship assaults.
I agree. Write the story later. Start with something like this one page proposal template, but half the length. A full page is OK if youāre pitching to a publisher, but half a page is better for a forum discussion.
The game you describe is almost certainly going to be too big for you to write at this point in your career. But itās still good experience to work on design ideas.
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The first thing to do IMHo is once you firgure out the theme and goal of the concept, to start putting down the main progression system(s) and what the gameplay loops, this will inform your level design, game design and the fine details of your story, writing scripts level of story is useless but a synopsis that have the different phases of the story can be useful to ties into the overall progression.
A unifying way to think about all of that is to think what is the stakes of the story that affect the player. The stakes will create the motivation of the character, the objects of his quest, the events that have an impact and the resources needed. It create a sense of consequences by giving values to action taken as rewards (help solve the stakes) or punishment (work toward the demise of the character).
For example if your character is a failed experiment that escape from government facility, it doesnāt matter what it does, where it goes (aka player freedom), youāll know that some place that expose him will be a threat to him, because the agency can close down into recapturing him. If you stop at that you have a perpetual stake, ie one that does not resolve itself, if you want resolution, you need a mean to stop the stakes, maybe in this case, erasing his data footprints from the agency will prevent them from seeking him, because he officially no longer exist, either by faking his death or hacking into the system.
That goal need however multiple step that will ties to the progression structures, for example maybe he need to hire a hacker, but the only hacker that know the agency has been in prison so you need to bring him out, which mean you need to reach a boss mob to organize his evasion, which mean the boss will ask you tp help him corrupt an official, which mean ā¦ you get my drift, you can had as many events as possible. By giving the goal early to the player (erasing his data) you gave him long term direction.
But you can also extend the stakes by nesting bigger stakes, for example you discover the experiment was about creating a super serum that will rob everyone of free will, even if you erase the data you might now need to stop the serum from being fabricated, it turns out to make the serum they made a deal with an ancient race of sentient machine which are using them to prepare for a the big galactic harvest, now you need to save the whole galaxy. etc ā¦ Each step has itās own sub step toward the end, their own requirement chains.
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TonyLi: Thanks. I tried it.
Aurora
Genre: Action game
Platform: PC
Summary: Player is from start goad to adventure and action and continuing in story will help him and push him to adventure. Player after some progress will control two characters. Kes and Raldy. They must work together and do some work. After finishing it they working together. In later game story will change to something like saving galaxy or saving planet, destroying some corporation, idk.
Features
Ā· Angled top down graphic: mix of vector and pixel art, nice environment with hover vehicles in scifi world
Ā· Missions: Mission system inspired by grand theft auto series, start mission, do mission and get reward
Ā· Two playable characters
Ā· Buying properties: buy property and start your business
Ā· Space flying: Player will have space ship from start, but player will not be able to flying alone, only with person who owns ship, until player reach some point in story, Player will be able to customize his ship in hangar. For flying player needs fuel
Ā· Side activities: collectibles, mugging, races
Ā· Gangs and side missions: side activities are not missions, you can get side mission by space gangs and space races and improve your reputation with them. Get some interesting rewards like upgrades for ship or weapons. It can unlock planet too. Without big reputation you canāt travel on their planet.
Ā· Game inspired by: Grand Theft Auto, Valerian, Star Wars
neoshaman: Thank you. It is really good way how to make story. I forgot to think about it this way.
I hope it helped to focus your idea by putting it into an elevator pitch.
Here are some typical follow-up questions:
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What makes this combination of features different from other games?
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Why should someone care about playing this game?
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Whatās a āminimum viable productā version of this idea? In other words, what single activity is the core essence of the game?
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After what progress? I get that itās hard to nail down, Iām the same way with some stuff Iām working on, but eventually youāre going to need to get specific.
Do what work?
The reason Iām asking about these is because they sound like gameplay elements. What gameplay mechanics does this āworkā entail?
Please donāt think Iām being mean (I wouldnāt reply at all unless I was interested), but right now your main āarcā is basically ātwo characters get together and work, and then the story scope opens up to some big goal (saving galaxy, destroying corporation).ā This needs to be detailed and expanded. Edit: Iām a story-first guy so this is what I jump on, but in reality TonyLi is right, you should focus on nailing gameplay before you focus on this. Itās just what stuck out to me.
It sounds like youāre trying to have a moderate amount of gameplay (you talk about hover vehicles and buying property) on planets, and yet it sounds like you have extensive āspaceā gameplay as well. Thereās nothing inherently wrong with this, but Iāll point out that it sounds like a tremendous undertaking to create essentially two separate forms of gameplay which donāt really interact with each other (and thus must stand alone in quality). If you were to make one of these a very minor form of gameplay, almost like a minigame, it might seem more feasible, but as it is it seems like a lot.
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TonyLi: Yea it helped. It is important to realize what is important.
- I did not found any scifi game like this. It is not one of those from BioWare. It is not cyberpunk but scifi. Maybe Bethesda making scifi game, Starfield, but they did not show it for now. And main feature different from other games is gangs.
- I think that developer should care about playing this game. Lots of fun? Scifi open world and maybe good story I hope.
- Like prototype? Small part of the open world with some side activities and flying through space with ship. Story will make this game believable.
EternalAmbiguity: Thanks for asking. Ok I will write little bit more about story. Progress I mean story progress. I like story in games too.
Ships of new enemy attacked planet and destroyed almost whole planet, before federation fleet destroyed them. Some people survived. Between them was a girl, Kes. She stay on planet, steal food. One man find her and help her. Because he know she has a adventurous character. They become traders nad space pirates. One day man was shot and she runaway and take his ship.
The second main protagonist and playable character is son of general or someone else with high status. His father want for him to be ship commander, but he ended in a hangar and helping with repairing ships.
One day Kes is arrested and blackmailed by federation. She must do some work for them and her partner is Raldy. When doing some job they meet old friend. Man who saved Kes when she was young. They make a team and start some business.
About second part. I want in game space cities and stations. That means there must be space and space ship. I think it belongs to scifi game. I will try to combine space and planets as much as possible, but in reasonable way. Yea,I know it is lot of things.
So actually I already have some steaks xD (stakes).
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So gangs make this different from other games? How so?
(If it seems like Iām nitpicking, this is just the process of refining a game idea from something vague to something specific that can be implemented.)
(A few tips: Fun is an empty word. Make games for players, not developers. )
Choose one:
- What specifically makes the player care that itās a scifi open world?
- What about the story makes the player care? What about the story makes it better suited to interactive fiction rather than traditional fiction (e.g., book, movie)?
If an investor came to you and said, āIāll give you the money and development team to make exactly one feature, and nothing else, and Iāll fund your game based on how much I enjoy the feature,ā what would that feature be?
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A couple of generic questions.
Where is the gameplay set? Note this is different from where the game is set. Mass Effect is nominally in space, but the player plays on a series of planets and a space ship, but never in space. On the other hand Solar Winds is set entirely
What is the player actually doing moment to moment? Is the player engaging in dialogue? Are they shooting things? Are they traversing the environment? If you had to describe one minute of your game in a dry mechanical way, what would it sound like?
And importantly, how much of this can you actually build? You are only one person. I assume you donāt have a large team or money behind you. What you are proposing sounds like a big multi million dollar project. While designing big projects is fun as an academic exercise, its not overly useful if the project can never be done.
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@Weinercze do you have other game ideas/concepts that might be smaller - more acomplish-able?
Not to dissuade you from developing your āgrand game ideaā but this seems like a very HUGE concept that is very daunting and could take years to create - with 4-6 developers working full time to accomplish.
I have more than 10 grand game concepts I plan to make once I hit success with one of the 100s of smaller game ideas I have in mind to create. These grand game ideas have game design documents already created (one is over 10 years old) and several will require no less than 10 developers to work on the game along side me full time.
These games will never ever be created if I donāt first work on smaller game concept that are do-able in a reasonable time frame, and do-able by me working on solving problems I will eventually encounter. They are manageable and accomplish-able by me alone and the experience I gain working on these smaller ideas will eventually give me enough knowledge and experience - and gumption to take on one of the larger projects I already have designed (on paper).
Just a little anecdotal advice from a wanna be developer who also has grand game ideas. 
This is an interesting question that I havenāt seen asked in quite this way. Would this be describing the user experience āclick button, select weapon, click attack, read hit point deduction, watch death animationā, or would it be describing more action like events - what is happening on screen, including story arcās - or both?
Can you give an example using Pond Wars?
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Sure.
In Pond Wars players attempt to control the angle of their boat to provide a firing trajectory to hit their opponents boat. Players also attempt to keep their boat out of the firing trajectory of their opponent. Players achieve both of these goals by moving their boat forwards and backwards.
It doesnāt sound exciting, most games donāt when described this way. But it does give a clear indication of what the player is actually doing. It also strips away all of the peripherals that arenāt actually central to the game.
Some others for the practice
In Halo players are trying to locate enemies on the screen, center the camera on the enemy, and press the fire key. Players will also actively manage their shield resource by keeping out of enemies line of sight. Players will also manage their weapon and shield resources by locating collectible items.
In Minecraft players remove and add blocks to the world. Players can combine blocks they have collected to make different blocks with different functionality.
In Factorio players collect and combine resources to produce other resources. Players will automate this process. Players will continually monitor, optimize and reconfigure the automated process.
In Mass Effect players will alternate between two game modes. In one mode they will choose from a selection of dialogue options to produce a desired effect. In the other mode players will engage in combat with enemies. Players will also spend time managing an inventory of items.
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Thank you for posting 
TonyLi: About first question. It is hard to make something new and different from other games. I need to think more about your questions. Maybe if you can post some example.
Kiwasi: 1) Both, space and planets. More on planets and in space stations etc. Space is more empty, but in space should be lots of action. Like Assassins creed with ships when I thinking about it now.
2) I do not want mini map in game, because only thing what you doing is looking at it. It will add more simple interaction with people, of course not with strangers on the street. When walking through city. I want in game small simple shops. I think it is not big deal. So yes, traversing the environment and dialogues are common thing to make travelling more interesting. So travelling from A to B with scripted dialogues and enjoying environment.
But I do not want dialogues like in BioWare games or Witcher 3. And story will be like in GTA so no branching story or dialogues with lots of endings. About last question.
theANMATOR2b: I am working with friend on one android game. Space invaders for now and then we will start with another small game. Alone I am working on cosmic base tycoon game. I am trying to not connect this idea with cosmic base game.
Yes, it is hard to make something new and different. Thatās why game design is a profession, and not just a āmake gameā button.
What will be the gameās unique hook?
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