Updates from the Parsec team #2
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This week has been particularly eventful as we released our bounty campaign for the crowd sale. For those of you who want to help us spread the word about Parsec Frontiers while earning some PRSC tokens check this bitcointalk forum thread.
Our team spotlight featured Lead Designer Peter Rocchio, while CEO Jack Wulff was featured in this blockgamer.biz article. Morten Larssen is attending GDC2018 and the twitter reports we got so far it seems like he is enjoying himself.
As promised last week we will be going through some of the details the team agreed upon during their 3-day meeting a few weeks ago.
The game world
In the beginning of the game we will be using scientific data to add the nearby catalogued systems. As the game progresses and players travel further they will encounter countless more stars which will be added using algorithmic rules, creating an enormous game world not limited by our current astronomical knowledge.
A system will consist of one or more suns, planets and any number of resource deposits that can be exploited. Planets provide the highest value, granting opportunities for both resource extraction, colonies and various facilities, assuming they meet all the prerequisites to support human life. Initially, the entire galaxy will be untouched by human hands. It’s up to the players to explore and populate it.
Travel and Exploration
The game offers two forms of travel: In-system and interstellar, in addition to tactical combat speed. In-system travel is done by travelling between points of interest, mainly planets and resource deposits. The player chooses the target location from her cockpit and the autopilot flies there in real-time. In-system travel is done at light speed in full 3D, allowing the player to monitor surroundings while it happens. The travel between two points of interest within a system typically takes minutes.
To make interstellar travel more manageable, players can take on the project of constructing enormous jump gates. These are expensive and time consuming projects that generally require the cooperation of multiple players to complete. A gate will point towards a specific Stellar Zone, by allowing their gate networks carefully, corporations and trade alliances can set up efficient travel paths to link important star systems together. Finally, players can also construct single-use jump drives to fit onto their ship, allowing one jump at FTL speed as they were using a gate.
Resources
Resources in a system are generated based on algorithms, with some systems and areas being very rich in some- while mostly void of others. An important source of materials is asteroid mining. Players can scan resource deposits from afar to obtain some general estimates on how profitable they could be. Once closer, they can get more accurate scan results to determine the resource distribution, and to locate the best spots to mine
Once in a prime location, the player can drop one of her extractors. These will automatically collect resources until their storage is full or the resources in their proximity are depleted. Standard mining drones are however vulnerable and need to be protected. Or if it feels safe, the player is free to continue exploring the system or performing other tasks in the meantime.
Habitable planets also have a range of resources available. To extract these, the player first needs to own a section of the surface. She furthermore needs colonists on the ground, and has to develop the right type of infrastructure for resource extraction. Finally, extraction and transportation into orbit is costly, meaning the player has to calculate whether the efforts will be profitable given the expected yield, location and local market prices.
Resources are finite and will be gone forever once they are mined. Even if this timespan for depletion is very long, it means how profitable a system is will change over time until it reaches a point where extraction and refining is more expensive than the value of the yield.
We intend to share the detail designs on how the resource distribution works, as well as open source it’s implementation. This way the players don’t have to trust that the developers are exploiting valuable information that they don’t have access to.
Disclaimer
Parsec Frontiers has an open development, which means that we share much more information than what is typically viewed as standard in game development. For a blockchain game where the network owns the game, we feel this is the way it should be. We also think it is an exciting and more productive way to make games. But this also means that we will potentially share things which we later have to change, adjust or that are just plain silly. If we were not open for changing and iterate on ideas, then open development would just be a bluff.
For more information please join the conversation on our Discord or follow us on Twitter. Also remember to clap and share if you like this content.
