Musings on a tech tree for High Frontier

News & General Discussion
1

We are currently doing a lot of research and deep thinking about game design and High Frontier. At the same time, I’m currently at New Worlds 2015, hearing from a lot of incredibly smart people about how to open up the frontier for real.

For example, Jeff Greason (CTO of XCOR Aerospace) presented a very sensible plan for how to get where we want to go, much cheaper than the traditional NASA way of doing things, and in a much more sustainable manner too. Basically it goes like this:

  • Develop a lunar orbit shuttle that can go back and forth between the Moon’s surface, and lunar orbit or L1 (a balance point between the Earth and the Moon).
  • Land a small plant to extract water from the polar ice, and split this into hydrogen and oxygen (i.e. rocket fuel!). Use this to fuel the lunar orbit shuttle. It can now go back and forth between the Moon and L1 as much as you like, at essentially no cost.
  • Build a space station and fuel depot at L1. Fill it up with fuel using the lunar shuttle.
  • Build a shuttle that goes back and forth between LEO and L1. Have that refuel from L1. Now you can bring stuff back and forth between LEO and L1 or the lunar surface at essentially no cost.
  • Want to go somewhere else (say, Mars)? Use L1 as your staging area, fill up on lunar rocket fuel, and off you go.

I swear this is the most sensible thing I’ve heard in ages.

So! Getting back to High Frontier as a game. We’re thinking about changing the design a little as we start in on “career mode,” which is the larger game you will be playing unless you choose sandbox mode.

Achievements would be replaced with goals, which you usually select from a small list of opportunities (available goals). I say “usually” because, especially at the beginning of the game, we might automatically assign some simple goals to get you started. Many of the goals would along the lines of getting population X in orbit Y — gaining the experience of building a thriving settlement in that orbit.

Achieving those goals would give you experience points (XP). And then you would spend XP on a technology tree to build things like what Jeff Greason outlined above. These tech tree nodes would either reduce the cost of things, or make things (orbits, certain buildings, etc.) available that weren’t available at all before.

So, if you want to be laser-focused on Mars, you would achieve whatever goals are easiest to get the XP, and spend those on tech tree nodes that lead to development of Mars. These nodes might be something like (just making stuff up here):

  • L1 Station (cost: 5 XP)
  • Lunar Shuttle (5 XP)
  • LEO-L1 Shuttle (5 XP)
  • Phobos Station (15 XP)
  • Mars-Phobos Shuttle (15 XP)

…and then get busy building those Martian orbital colonies.

On the other hand if the inner solar system is your thing, then at step 4 you would instead spend your XP on something like a Venus atmosphere scoop or floating station, opening up that world for orbital settlement.

I think this serves the game design in several ways. It provides clear goals, while still giving the player a fair amount of control over what those goals are. But it also limits choices: at each step of the game, you have only a few nodes in the tech tree to choose from, and (especially at the beginning) only a few opportunities to choose from, too. The XP, and your progression through the tech tree, also provides clear feedback. Also we may have a goal display somewhere that shows your currently selected goals, with a progress bar, to give more instantaneous & continuous feedback on whatever those are (e.g. 384/500 residents in LEO).

What do y’all think? Sound like good game design? Most importantly, does it sound fun to play?

2

It could work. I would probably be more inclined toward resource trees, but those usually require more learning upfront and would probably need mechanics to bail new players out from bad management. A tech tree should make it simple up front, but if it isn’t laid out well, it could stifle the more creative by being too restrictive.

Experience might make too much unrelated work. Just dealing with resources could make it so the player is always working toward their own goal, even if their operations take into mind other tasks that might be available. It’s really a crux between being easy to learn and being fulfilling for experts.

1 Like
3

Thanks for your thoughts.

In this case, we need SOMETHING to change the availability and cost of things over time. It just doesn’t make sense to have the entire solar system open for settlement at the beginning (unless you’ve chosen sandbox mode). But in the original GDD, we had hese things sort of developing automatically behind the scenes. But I think it will be more visible and fun to have this in the player’s hands.

4

The thing I got from the example you gave was the feeling that the fuel from the moon sounded like it was limitless but obviously this isn’t the case.

It sounds almost like at the point of orbit you almost split into 2 play styles, slow population expansion with solid research trees for survival in space or rapid high risk/high reward exploration/expansion. The first would let you maintain & build your population but as it grows the pressure to expand will be met with the risk due to the lack of skills & research for further expansion. The second lets you find lots of stuff but your population expansion would be high risk as you neglected that branch of research.

5

Too bad the physics of this proposition is dodgy. :wink:

But back to your question. The point of a tech tree in simulation games is mainly as a tutorial. Players encounter ideas one concept at a time, and when they prove mastery of these concepts thy move into the next one. It’s not a RTS tech tree where investing in a new tech is a cost balance choice.

There are a bunch of was to achieve this effect.

  • SimCity (2000, I haven’t played recent releases) does this by time gating.
  • The Sims does this by resource (money) gating
  • Spore does it via exploration gating
  • KSP does it via unique task (science) gating

I’m sure someone more experienced with simulations can draw further examples.

Point is the specific gating method doesn’t matter so much. Just one that ensures new tech isn’t unlocked before the player grasps how to use the old tech.

To fit with the theme of High Frontier I would probably use population as the gate.

1 Like
6

Yeah, I don’t think you’re going to get an efficient Hohmann transfer from the moon to L1.

Part of why I was thinking of resources is that they are a hard and rational limit to what the player can do. You can’t colonize on Mars because you don’t have the resources for it (or the local cost of resources there is just too astronomical, pun). It’s just a matter of informing the player about what safe actions are (and/or hiding away the nonviable options).

7

One problem with resources is resources can be obtained from grinding. So there is nothing forcing the player to learn to properly use the existing tech.

1 Like
8

Couple resource with population means they can grind or invest in the tech tree for efficiency gains. Initial investment will use resources & slow/limit population as well as diverting workers/researchers from other areas which will have a further flow on limiting effect but longer term it should have a benefit.

If the tech lines intersect occasionally it prevents the player from having to grind multiple lines. An example is the tank tech tree in world of tanks. You may start researching a medium line & the heavy line runs below but at some point the tech will crossover & you can go from the medium to the heavy line, or vice versa if you started in the heavy line, part way along thereby circumventing the need to grind both lines from the start. You still need to grind the juncture tank to get the xp to upgrade to both the next tanks but that is easier than grinding two whole lines.

Edit: sample picture

2343669--158559--image.jpeg
2343669--158559--image.jpeg1718×876 276 KB

9

It depends whether it’s breadth versus depth, lot’s of a small pool versus few of a huge variety.

10

Thanks again guys, I really appreciate the discussion.

The reason I’m learning towards XP rather than resources is partly that it strikes me as realistic, based on what I’ve seen this weekend at the conference. There is a very real “you must walk before you can run” effect at work in space. Doing things you’ve never done before is hard, even if you have plenty of resources to do it; and much harder if you’re trying to skip ahead several steps past other things you haven’t done before (I’m looking at you, Mars advocates).

So, yeah, we have people here doubting we can make a shuttle go from lunar surface to L1. Of course we can do it — but it’s easier if we first have experience with a surface-LLO shuttle, and much easier if we are mining lunar ice for rocket fuel. But mining lunar ice (at the poles) is hard; it’ll be much easier if we first have experience mining regolith in the equatorial regions. And so on.

It really is about turning hand-wavy we-ought-to-be-able-to-do-this theory into cold hard experience. Building on the latter is much easier/cheaper/more possible than building on the former.

And yeah, as a game design element, it helps limit complexity until the user’s ready for it. But it also provides goals and something to work towards, and an obvious feedback mechanism.

I have thought about tracking resources too. There is a stuff actually used in serious scholarly articles nowadays called “demandite.” Demandite is the aggregate of all stuff needed to build the infrastructure needed to support human civilization: all the elements in the right proportions. One unit of it is enough to support one person. (And it turns out that the amount of demandite in the solar system is truly staggering — easily enough to support 10 quadrillion people, using just the asteroids and near-period comets — “so don’t come whining to me about resource limits,” says Dr. John Lewis.)

So, we could have you mining demandite from various asteroids, comets, and moons, and then spending it to build new colonies. But at the moment, I’m not convinced that actually adds fun to the game. It might be great in a different game, but it seems like a distraction for the sort of city-building game I’m trying to make here. I’m already tracking money, and with money, you can buy demandite from off-stage actors, or build infrastructure to mine as much as need locally (through the tech tree).

Best,

  • Joe
11

I suppose I should expand my thoughts a bit, because by resources, I was also including things like parts. So it wouldn’t be just raw resources, but take into account all of the infrastructure in place (unique ones in particular). It would make it so the player has to think ahead to what they want to build (or potentially blueprint their ideas first, so they can then see exactly what they need to produce).

I don’t know. It’s really going to depend on how much you want to guide a player to master the systems versus give them the freedom to do anything that’s possible (should it actually be possible).

12

I think this is a big thing to keep track of. The reality is that unless you have a competitive element, then there will almost always be a clear “optimal path”. With more competitive elements, then you can have dynamic time horizons and stuff - “we need something RIGHT NOW to help fight this war!”. The competitive elements keep the decision making dynamic since the context where you’re making decisions will depend very heavily on the other actors. Without that stuff - like @Kiwasi says, tech trees are really just for tutorials or as a sort of makeshift method for a player to feel like they’re making progress.

1 Like
13

Good points, though in a sim game, I think you can also look at a (well developed) tech tree as another way for each player to express their own creativity. In my case, one player could focus on the inner solar system where solar energy is abundant; another player could focus on the outer solar system, where you pretty much have to go nuclear but there is a lot more material.

To draw an analogy with an existing game, KSP has a tech tree, and (at least in my experience) it’s not “tutorial” in the sense that you quickly get through it as you learn to play the game. Quite the contrary: getting through it seems to me like a primary goal, and it takes freaking forever. Yeah, it’s unlocking parts as you go, but usually the new parts are not different in kind or usage than old parts — they just have different size/shape/stats. So it’s really not about teaching the player, but about pacing them and providing goals/feedback.

On the flip side, Civ has competition, but it pretty much has an optimal path through the tech tree anyway. Or at least, there’s a path that I always take; situations where I change my path based on what other players do are very rare. This doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of the game, though — it just reflects the way I like to play.

14

I like the concept of the path of exile skilltree:

(drag to scroll)

It is really big and has a lot of redundant or small upgrades in it. There is no way to unlock everything with a single character and depending on what character class you choose at the beginning you will have a different starting position in the tree. The 6 positions are aligned with the 3 primary attributes (strength, dexterity, intelligence) and the areas between two attributes. After finishing the game I believe a 7th character unlocks that starts in the middle of the tree. What I like about the system is that it gives you a lot of choice and freedom to specialize. There is also no longer a division between upgrading attributes or upgrading skills like there was in Diablo 2. Attribute upgrades are found in the tree. And there often are different ways to get to a node in the tree.

I can see how that concept is both hard to grasp for new players (too much choice etc.) and not well suited to strategy type games where it provides gating and pacing. But still, I enjoyed it very much and wanted to mention it as food for thought. Different starting factions (i.e. different countries) a player can choose, could slightly change parameters of the game to provide a slightly different experience.

1 Like
15

What about clout (or public support) and funding? A good safety record or string of successes might increase the rate of funding, disasters or failures decrease the rate, and flashy achievements might provide a short-lived burst of funding. You could also model the population’s risk tolerance, where bold successes might decrease the cost of risky new endeavors, slow and steady progress would decrease maintenance costs, and failures or delays might increase various costs.

4 Likes