There is something easy about designing BIG games. I mean, it's not easy to make GOOD big games, but if you're designing Star Citizen, the answers at a very high level are often pretty simple. Building a giant life sim in space... do we allow players to buy new ships? Yes. Upgrade ships? Yes. Buy properties and start business? Yes. Visit bars and buy drinks? Yes. Change the colour of the fuzzy dice on your ship? Yes. Do insider trading in the functional in-universe global stock market? Of course!
I'm being hyperbolic here, but when what you're building is an everything-game, the problems you run into are worlds different from when you're a team of just one or two people making a pixel art space game. So much of the time, the answer of "should the player be able to do X?" ends up being "no", and you have to make sure that "no" is the correct answer for design reasons, rather than solely for resourcing/scope reasons. That can mean you're answering 'no' for production reasons, which is an easy thing to do when you're wearing multiple hats and know what your very strict budget and timeline is.
But sometimes, despite knowing it's, as my producer friends would say loudly and drunkenly on a Friday, 'scope creep'. It's a thing I've tried to avoid more and more as I continue to make indie games, but sometimes, when fresh eyes land on your game you learn something and need to add a feature that seems so obvious you can't believe you didn't think of it before.
In this case, what I'm talking about is Burst Transmissions. Until fairly late in the development of Deck & Conn, you could fly around in the dynamic campaign, take out enemy ships, protect merchant ships, and even fight along side other friendlies - all while the only communication was via the intentionally-vintage green-hued comms computer in the Captain's Cabin. At the time, to try and bring the world alive, messages would bounce around between ships and stations via this system. Testers probably noted that without fail about 2-3 days into a war campaign you might get a message from a station noting they had an excess of Quinoa, if anyone wanted it.
But it never really landed. it was easy to implement, but all it meant was that half your "priority action messages" were far from actually important, and it stopped players from wanting to check them when they got an incoming PAM alert.
That wasn't why it was removed, though. It was a note from a friend who played the game for the first time. "I wish friendly ships could say hi when I ran into them in deep space. You know, like in Das Boot when they run into Thomsen out in the Atlantic and flash beacons to each other."
I think at the time I just swore out loud, because it was such an obvious thing I was kicking myself for not adding it earlier. It's not like I didn't have communication to try and give the world a bit more life, but I'd put it in entirely the wrong place, where it couldn't update regularly and the friction for the player to check it meant they probably wouldn't want to. So I threw in the extra time, kicking myself the whole way, to add the Burst Transmissions you now see in the final tab on the multi function display on the top-left of the control room. It was, I think, the final piece that brought the game into being the thing I broadly had in my head for years when I first started to develop it. It took weekends of extra work and a lot of new content for all the random chatter from the ships (friendly or neutral) but it was absolutely worth it.
The simulated world of Deck & Conn in the dynamic campaign tracks friendly, enemy and neutral ships across the whole quadrant, determing where they're going, what they're doing and allowing them to make decisions as to how they react to what's around them. But without the ability to actually have them send and receive public messages within the same sector, it was never very obvious to anyone playing it just how much.
My long-lived desire to avoid scope creep meant that despite knowing I needed a certain kind of feature to bring the game world to life, it took someone else saying the obvious for me to realise how much it wasn't working. Sometimes, a little bit of scope creep is a good thing. It just may cost you a few more weekends than you'd like.
PS. I removed that Surplus Quinoa stuff, by the way. Nobody cares if Coyote Station has a surplus of Quinoa. What was I even thinking?