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IDEAS.md

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This document is a place to jot down ideas that may not be fully fleshed out, or which have not been agreed to by the whole team.

(Once ideas are more complete and agreed upon, they should move into the DESIGNDOCUMENT file.)

Races

  • Humans: normal, boring. Good at improving skills with practice.

  • Robots: don't require life support, but also don't improve with practice.

  • Bugs: think Starship Troopers or Ender's Game. Come in different castes, each specialized for one job. Make most other races very nervous, even within the same crew; forbidden on some worlds. Most fun to play in a Bug ship, which is a living entity that can grow and produce new crewmen in its hatchery.

  • Betazoid: empaths that are weak on combat but both sensitive and persuasive, giving them an advantage in negotiation. (We'll probably need to think up a different name.)

Governments

  • Republic: democratic, reasonable laws, honest cops. Yawn.

  • Theocrat: an oppressive dictatorship; many commodities are illegal, but with widespread corruption, officials can frequently be bribed.

  • Anarchist: no laws, anything goes, foul hives of scum and villany.

Commodities

  • Robots: buy on high-tech worlds, sell on low-tech ones. But illegal on some (Luddite or machine-intelligence) worlds. Also, trading in these makes any robot crewmembers unhappy, and they may refuse to participate.

Ship Equipment/Features

  • Secret Compartments: there are (somewhat shady) places that can add small rooms to your ship behind a secret door which is ignored by boarders. You can use these to smuggle goods or hide crewmembers. However, such secret compartments reduce your ship's maximum hull points.

  • Jump Distance: it might be nice if there are different classes/qualities of hyperdrive engines, which control how far you can jump. A minimal hyperdrive lets you only jump between close systems; a better one lets you make bigger jumps. Bigger jumps could let you reach systems that are otherwise unreachable, or in a crowded part of the map, maybe skip some intermediate jumps and get where you're going in one step.

Character Communication

Characters (both your own, and NPCs) in the ship view could communicate via emoji, which (1) is cute, (2) is compact, and (3) doesn't require translation. Possible emoji to include:

  • 🍗 hungry
  • 😴 sleepy
  • 🙂 happy
  • 😟 worried
  • 😢 sad
  • ❓ question/confused
  • ⁉ surprised and confused️
  • 🌧️ small talk
  • 🎲 let's play (or maybe 🕹️)
  • ❤️ like/love
  • 💔 broken heart
  • 🥱 bored
  • 😑 not having fun
  • 👉 giving orders
  • 🫡 aye-aye
  • 🤔 thinking
  • 💡 idea
  • 🔎 search/searching
  • 💥 blow it up

Encounters/Mini-Stories

  • Hiding from Pirates: if your ship has secret compartments enough to hide your entire crew, you could try to "play dead" when pirates approach, and make your ship look like it's been abandoned. Maybe have one crew member use an escape pod (or eject it empty) to improve the illusion. Pirates will board, search your ship, find no survivors, exchange question-mark emoji, and then decide to either scuttle the ship (explosion emoji) or take it into their fleet. If they decide to scuttle it, they will plant a bomb, then clear off the ship. You will have 30 seconds or whatever to get someone out of the secret compartment and eject the bomb to save your ship. If they decide to take the ship, then they will move their own crew on, and start flying the ship, oblivious to you hiding in the secret compartments. Perhaps they fly it back to their secret pirate base, a node not previously marked on the galactic map; this might be the only way to discover such a base. Your crew can wait until the pirates are mostly gone before emerging and retaking the ship.