Welcome to the official Spaceship Idle devlog! As the spiritual successor to CivIdle, this game takes the incremental automation series to the galaxy! The game is still months away from a playable build, but I'd like to engage with the community early on. So instead of listing the current progress, I'll write down some high level design goals that I have for Spaceship Idle. When making a sequel, I'd like to follow Sid Meier's "rule of thirds": one-third traditional gameplay, one-third is improved from the last version, and one-third is brand new. And I will organize my design goals into these "thirds".
One-Third Traditional Gameplay
- Automation & Resource Management: the very core mechanism remains relatively unchanged: you collect raw materials, use them to produce higher-tier goods. And I will take all the learnings from CivIdle. For example, the CivIdle's "new priority system", which is more straightforward, will be there on day one. Some mechanism will be renamed, for example, workers will be replaced by power, but they work very similar.
- Tech Tree: as one of CivIdle's biggest new feature, I think it works quite well, and it will also be part of Spaceship Idle. Currently, I am experimenting with a more "skill tree" like design but nothing is set in stone yet.
- Wonders: This is another CivIdle's new feature that brings lots of gameplay variations. The mechanism will be in Spaceship Idle as well, but obviously will be called something else.
- Great People & Prestige: again a CivIdle feature that brings strategic depth. Spaceship Idle will roughly follow the same mechanism but will have multiple level of prestige designed from the start. Great People will be renamed to something else
- Player Chat & Trade: these two features originate from Industry Idle! I plan to make some improvement to anti-cheat to avoid the "48h probation period" in CivIdle.
One-Third Improved
- Streamlined Transportation & Storage: in Spaceship Idle, all resources are stored in a central pool and modules can consume them without transportation. Compared to Industry Idle, CivIdle actually added a more detailed simulation of transportation and storage. However, Spaceship Idle will simplify this area. The important reason is the introduction of weapons and battles, which brings new complexity to the gameplay. I feel CivIdle has already reached the upper bound of complexity, so I need to cut complexity from somewhere. In addition, because you are building a spaceship, there's much less flexibility to optimize for locality, so I've decided to get rid of it completely from the equation. I've done some testing myself, and it plays surprisingly similar, minus the need to fiddle with stockpile, buffer, etc.
- Resource Collectors Can Be Placed Anywhere: the rationale behind this change is very similar to above. Plus, when building a spaceship, optimizing the placement of weapon modules is very important and this will allow more opportunities.
- Modules Can Be Freely Moved and Recycled at Full Value: Because building the spaceship will have two stages. In the early stage, you will focus on production and accumulate as many resources as possible for building and upgrading weapon modules. Before entering a battle, you will gradually reduce the production capacity and make sure you produce just enough power and ammo for your weapon modules, or maybe a bit more as a redundancy. Therefore, to make this transition easy, and to encourage experiments, I feel it makes sense to eliminate the penalty of moving, downgrading and recycling modules.
- Quantum: In Industry Idle, building permits limit the expansion and you pay resources to unlock a building. In CivIdle, happiness limits the expansion and you pay science to unlock a building. In Spaceship Idle, both are streamlined to use "quantum", which is generated when you reach certain spaceship value thresholds. You can use quantum to either unlock a tech tree item, or add a new module to your spaceship. This simply the resource management but brings more strategy: you have to carefully balance between a large but low-tech ship and a small but high-tech ship.
- Multiple Select: This QoL feature has been requested a lot in Industry Idle and CivIdle. However, because buildings have very different settings in those two games, it's very hard to implement. Now with more streamlined resource management, this becomes possible and will ship on day one to encourage ship layout.
One-Third Brand New
Now let's address the elephant in the room: how battle works. Before I go into details, I will write down some high level design goals. Spaceship Idle at its core is still an incremental strategy game. It's not designed to be a space shooter, not an action game, not a PvP fighting game. The ultimate goal of CivIdle is to build the most efficient empire. Similarly, the ultimate goal of Spaceship Idle is to build the most efficient space warship - and battle is an important part of this.
- Your spaceship is matched against ships with similar spaceship value: the goal is to validate that, given the same spaceship value, which ship is better at space warfare. Of course, there might be some rock paper scissor factors when it comes to the build, but that's part of the strategy - choosing between a specialist design and a generalist design.
- Winning a battle will enter your design into the matchmaking pool: if your design is matched against another player, you might get a notification or even a replay (replay might not be feasible), but your current progress will not be affected regardless of the result.
- Winning a battle will award you resources equivalent to your opponent's spaceship value, which will allow you to build an even greater ship.
- Losing a battle will force you to prestige, and you will take all your prestige bonus. Of course, you can prestige anytime.
- Battles are automatic: each weapon has its own unique stats, targeting and abilities. Existing storage will not be carried into the battle (same for your opponent) so the spaceship needs to be self-sustaining in battle.
- A "friendly battle" mode will be available that allows entering battle with another player's design without matchmaking, this won't affect progress in any way but can be very useful to test out the design.
That's all for this very first devlog. If you have feedback, join the discussion on our Discord server (#spaceship-idle-general). If this game is something you are interested in playing, please wishlist on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3454630/Spaceship_Idle/
Until next time!