Planet Devlog 0 - 8th Times a Charm

This is the first devlog for my new game, Planet. I have tried and failed to make games for years now and have made multiple iterations of Planet before this one. This Planet would be number 8 in the lineage. While I've given up tons of times I believe this one is the one. 8th times a charm.

I have already developed quite a bit of Planet before making this devlog series so this series will just cover what I have done. This devlog will cover my vision for what I want Planet to be once its done. 

WHAT I'VE ADDED

To begin, Planet will be a 2D space, adventure game where you pilot a ship and explore and fight in a solar system. The player would be able to upgrade their ship to give it better armor and more slots for improvement. They would do this at one of the many stations dotted around the map. This system of upgrading and buying parts for your ship would be the main focus of progression. Different parts would increase different stats on your ship like damage, fire rate, and armor health.

That is the menu that the space stations bring up where you can see the different upgrade slots for your ship and the different parts you can buy. On the left would be the bounties you can accept. Pirates would be all throughout the system and would be the antagonists of the game. They would be at varying levels of difficulty and could be found flying around alone, in groups, or at pirate stations and outposts. Currently only level 1, 2, and 3 pirates that travel alone have been added to the game.

Deliveries would also be a central aspect of the game. You can accept delivery parts that will trail behind you as you fly to the station or merchant outpost that requests the part. The farther the delivery the more it will pay you. The more deliveries you have at once would attract pirates to attack you for your deliveries. This would encourage the player to either play it safe by not taking too many deliveries if they want a more casual run or they could stock their ship with speed bosting parts and/or damage parts to either run past the pirates or fight back against them. 

There would be two other main ways to make money which would be mining and scavenging. These systems have not really been expanded upon but I have implemented mining already. It is currently very basic as the player can go to an asteroid field, buy a mining laser, and mine copper, iron, and gold asteroids. They can then sell their cargo back at stations. For scavenging, there are ship graveyards currently in the game but nothing can be done with them just yet. I plan to add scavenging later and expand on mining somehow later as well.

WHAT I PLAN TO ADD

There are 3 main features I want to add before I can say Planet is done. Fleet Management, Dangerous Pirates, and Lively Station Dynamics. I'm going to only give a basic explanation of these features since anything in them is subject to change and be tweaked.

 For Fleet Management, this would allow for you to recruit patrolling/policeman npcs to fight alongside you. You would pay them some photons (the money system in this game) and they would follow your orders as if they were a unit in an RTS game. You could buy them upgrade parts and slot these parts in them to improve them like you would with your own ship. They could act as bodyguards for deliveries or your own personal army. 

For Dangerous Pirates, this would add pirate groups, pirate stations, and pirate outposts that you could claim the bounties of. For outposts and especially stations, the player would probably need to have a fleet to take down. This update would also bring secondary weapons into the game to spice up combat like EMPS, missiles/torpedoes, and shields. 

Finally for Lively System Dynamics, this would add many different features to make the relationship between the stations, other stations, and pirates more dynamic. For one, pirates will begin to raid stations and stations will begin to send patrols to raid pirate stations. Stations would get damaged and deliveries would help restore health to stations. Stations could get destroyed and could be replaced with pirate stations, increasing the influence of pirates. If the player does not interact with bounty hunting at a higher level then the battle between stations and pirate stations could change the dynamics of the system with new stations popping up in place of destroyed pirate or regular stations. The player could also help eradicate pirates in the system which would entail killing all pirate stations and outposts. At this point, Planet would be fully done.

I have other miscellaneous ideas for different features in between those updates and I have ideas for after those updates but those 3 would be the meat and bones of Planet. 

For now, I am working on the Fleet Management update so I will probably make another devlog once that is done or a significant portion of it is done.

 Thanks for reading!