L-POINT FIVE, for short
Humanity has taken its first fleeting steps towards the stars, establishing Clarke Station, an outpost balanced between the Earth and the Moon as a jumping-off point for expeditions to the Moon, Asteroid Belt, Mars, and beyond. You are a fresh arrival aboard Clarke Station and must work your way up to captaining your own frigate and commanding a crew. Your fortune awaits you in the rare metals of the asteroid belt and glory beckons you on the path to Mars…
Lagrange Point Five is a Fallout-like sci-fi isometric RPG using responsive app design and dynamic narrative systems.
Okay, but what does that mean?
L.5 is designed so that you can play it on any supported device you own, with persistent saves between them. (We'll see if this is too complicated to set up!) There's also no "main plot" - the initial character generation and setup are handled with the assumption that you're on the station to make a buck and crew a ship, but other than that you're on your own. I've already designed endings for some of the edge cases, like the "kill everyone" playthrough, which ends with an Action NES-style cutscene that shows..
Kill everyone?
Oh, yes. You can kill anyone in this game. There's plenty of scripting, but we're designing the quests and gameplay from the start so that it doesn't rely on any specific NPC - or if it does, then you just can't do those things anymore. Worried about a quest log staying open after you killed the person you need to hand it to? Hand it in to their wife or son. If they'll talk to you. If they won't, maybe you shoulda thought of that before you killed them.
What about the dynamic narrative?
I've been really interested in the work of Aaron Reed, including what he calls "quantum authorship". What that means is instead of defining an exact event in response to some trigger, we define a range of events that might happen based on some other criteria. This means instead of saying "okay, X then Y," we say "if X happens, then that means that Y,Z,Q, or T might happen, because if X happens then the player is interested in C". It sounds complicated but I find it enormously freeing.
The system I'm building relies on dramatic tension. It tries to choose dramatically appropriate events based on what has already happened. I'm designing the system to avoid the pitfalls of games like Facade, keeping the emergent gameplay of CK2 while also having the consistency of Fallout.
That's a lot of work.
Yep.
Tell me more about Clarke Station.
It's the mid-21st century, and humanity has managed to set up shop on the Moon and in various stations in Earth orbit. Lagrange Point Five is one of the closest areas of gravitational equilibrium , so various venture capitalists and private spaceflight corporations have set up Clarke Station as a waypoint to the stars. There's a short three-month window to shoot for Mars every two years, so competition is fierce. Fortunes are made and lost here.
I love it! Tell me more!
Well, in a way, that's what this thread is for. I wanted to make a thread here before I set up my own website or even went to TIGSource. Mostly because y'all my bros and ladies, and also because I want to know what you think about the setting so far. I'll be posting excerpts and playable builds as they happen.
What are you using for this?
Unity3D, C#, and a whole shitload of plugins. Currently I'm testing whether 3D or 2.5D is easier to create and work with.
How can I contact you about this game?
PM me here or email me at karl "initials for no problem" @ mediumdifficulty.com.
Thanks for reading! I'm looking forward to seeing what you think of the idea so far.
Humanity has taken its first fleeting steps towards the stars, establishing Clarke Station, an outpost balanced between the Earth and the Moon as a jumping-off point for expeditions to the Moon, Asteroid Belt, Mars, and beyond. You are a fresh arrival aboard Clarke Station and must work your way up to captaining your own frigate and commanding a crew. Your fortune awaits you in the rare metals of the asteroid belt and glory beckons you on the path to Mars…
Lagrange Point Five is a Fallout-like sci-fi isometric RPG using responsive app design and dynamic narrative systems.
Okay, but what does that mean?
L.5 is designed so that you can play it on any supported device you own, with persistent saves between them. (We'll see if this is too complicated to set up!) There's also no "main plot" - the initial character generation and setup are handled with the assumption that you're on the station to make a buck and crew a ship, but other than that you're on your own. I've already designed endings for some of the edge cases, like the "kill everyone" playthrough, which ends with an Action NES-style cutscene that shows..
Spoiler:
you, as a blood-drenched silhouette waiting for the repair/rescue crews to arrive.
Kill everyone?
Oh, yes. You can kill anyone in this game. There's plenty of scripting, but we're designing the quests and gameplay from the start so that it doesn't rely on any specific NPC - or if it does, then you just can't do those things anymore. Worried about a quest log staying open after you killed the person you need to hand it to? Hand it in to their wife or son. If they'll talk to you. If they won't, maybe you shoulda thought of that before you killed them.
What about the dynamic narrative?
I've been really interested in the work of Aaron Reed, including what he calls "quantum authorship". What that means is instead of defining an exact event in response to some trigger, we define a range of events that might happen based on some other criteria. This means instead of saying "okay, X then Y," we say "if X happens, then that means that Y,Z,Q, or T might happen, because if X happens then the player is interested in C". It sounds complicated but I find it enormously freeing.
The system I'm building relies on dramatic tension. It tries to choose dramatically appropriate events based on what has already happened. I'm designing the system to avoid the pitfalls of games like Facade, keeping the emergent gameplay of CK2 while also having the consistency of Fallout.
That's a lot of work.
Yep.
Tell me more about Clarke Station.
It's the mid-21st century, and humanity has managed to set up shop on the Moon and in various stations in Earth orbit. Lagrange Point Five is one of the closest areas of gravitational equilibrium , so various venture capitalists and private spaceflight corporations have set up Clarke Station as a waypoint to the stars. There's a short three-month window to shoot for Mars every two years, so competition is fierce. Fortunes are made and lost here.
I love it! Tell me more!
Well, in a way, that's what this thread is for. I wanted to make a thread here before I set up my own website or even went to TIGSource. Mostly because y'all my bros and ladies, and also because I want to know what you think about the setting so far. I'll be posting excerpts and playable builds as they happen.
What are you using for this?
Unity3D, C#, and a whole shitload of plugins. Currently I'm testing whether 3D or 2.5D is easier to create and work with.
How can I contact you about this game?
PM me here or email me at karl "initials for no problem" @ mediumdifficulty.com.
Thanks for reading! I'm looking forward to seeing what you think of the idea so far.