Player Starting Positions

[GrandpaTrout]

Hey Crew,

I need some feedback and ideas on player start positions.

I just added a new GUI screen that lets the player choose his/her starting position in the game. The screen pops up the first time the player enters the game and asks for a choice of starting position. Each start position has an HTML description file associated. (We needed the feature to give beta testers a way to jump forward to test specific feature sets.)

This start screen also gives us a way of creating customized starts for the player. For instance, the player could begin with a full complement of mining related ships and and enough cash to begin prospecting and mining.

Each setup can be very different. For instance, we can vary the faction standings of the player. So in one start you could begin in the Sultanate and be in conflict with the Leung Empire and in another you could be a Leung Empire privateer and be in conflict with the Sultanate. Each start also begins with inventory equipment, a player starting ship, a selection of wingmen (or none) and starting location. So almost everything could be customized.

One thing that is missing is a way of setting the player tone and expectations for each individual start. We don’t have the resources to build a start cutscene. But what we could do open the Library screen to a short story that sets the tone. The story could have some hyper links to help files describing the career that each start is meant to represent.

I don’t propose we do this for the USpace release. But I wanted to get you thinking about where in the cluster you would like to see some starting positions.

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