Avorionpulse

It shouldnt even be about whats better or worse - between mining and salvaging the goal does not have to be an equal balance of net-gain. Whats way more important is that both are activities that are supposed to be fun. "Mining" is one of the ancient tropes of gamedesign that are most often just plain bland and boring because Mining in real life supposedly is - and that holds as much true to Avorion as it does to Eve online, Skyrim or almost every other game you can think of. Look to Elite Dangerous and Star Citizens Ideas of mining. Ive got hopes that they will finally usher in a change of perspective of what used to be a required chore to allow the players to advance their ships or loadouts: Even Elite's old mining-procedure, which was pretty bland, had at least some kind of shallow mechanic that had you hunt for profitable rocks and then sift through your hoppers, jettisoning less valuable ores in hopes of finding more valuable stuff before you ran out of Limpet Drones. Recently they enhanced mining by adding two further ways of getting ores to drop: Surface Deposits and outright blasting the whole (huge) Asteroid in a big show of basey Explosions and Debris flying about. That isnt really much more captivating by complexity or challenge - but at least its fun to watch. Star Citizen finally adds complexity and will supposedly reward your skills with the mechanics of mining with higher rewards: First you need to find the rocks, blast them just with the right amount of energy and suck up the valuables. A while back I read about much bigger mining behemoths working altogether differently, even: Apparently you hunt for ores in roids in a game of mix and match: Combine the right amounts of powders to create more valuable alloys of metal - think of mining as a sort of minigame inside the game. In my opinion salvaging would be fine to remain the more lucrative way of aquiring high-value materials - but be more risky in actually extracting the sought materials from the wrecks. Either by the environment (Hostiles could still be around) or by the dangers of tormented Wrecks in itself: Reactors could be unstable, hazards could harm your scavenger-crews (Avorion is meant to implement boarding - so why not board Wrecks to hunt for modules?) Mining could be less profitable, but maybe run just fine with low risks in the background. Both could work nicely side by side: Mining rigs secure the players supply of low-level metals to ensure they always have something to work with while the more advanced materials are quicker to gain from salvage.

What I mean with the ships "feel" is that almost any ship we build is a capital ship. I think i read somewhere the Idea to Avorion was born from Koonschis wish to be able to blast Engines and sections off of ships. Yet that is what we almost have none of. Even the biggest Ships we build fly more like gocarts. I would expect slight camerashake, bassy, maybe rumbling sounds and impacts causing fires or smoke coming from the ruined sections. I cant watch my ships in peace either, because having to keep Control pressed keeps me from managing crew, looking through loot or assigning weapons. Most of the time I would be stuck looking at the bum of my creations. Avorion is a nice game as is that allows for a lot of freedom with building - and building is what i mostly do now - but I cant really engage very well with what I built - are there any plans for the future that would change that?

-Everybody- knows healthbars, thats why they are so persistent to survive even another decade. And while there are still cases where they are a good choice (The can work with only tiny amounts of screen space) - most times they are just out-dated. They are everything but immersive, they distract and make you look in places where the action where the action is not. Minimaps are a dying breed for that very reason - but healthbars resist to die. A notable exception that comes to my mind - dead space with the Healthbar being a physical thing on the back/spine of your character. Halo 1 displayed the amount of Ammo on the rifle itself - heck, the needler showed what was left in it from those spikes on top. Avorion is still missing particle effects and i would be a bit dissappointed if there wasnt at least any simple fire- or smoke-effects coming at some point. Those would suffice to at least make you check your health-meter. Add an alarmsound at maybe 10-15% health and you would not even need the healthbar at all. That being said ... Hi! :)

Makes sense to look at it that way. Every hit stresses your superstructure until you just break apart. What remains as a problem are asteroids killing you, even if they are as tiny as they could be. Another one I have is that you can easily overlook the comparadly tiny healthbar at the bottom of your screen. Feedback like erupting fires - maybe even a faint "red alert" sound would be nice to have.

Hey Fellas, I, too, got Avorion about two weeks ago and felt like sharing my feedback to anyone interested. I do User Experience Design which shares a lot with Gamedesign, I feel, and I love nerding about that stuff. I am also a Space, SciFi and Dirty-Labours-fan. The latter kind of stands for mining, refining, trading and manufacturing. I dont know, really, what Im getting from these things, but the most fun I ever had with Space Engineers was before even Welders and Grinders had been introduced: Me and my Group of Friends would just sit together in a big Junkyard on an Asteroid, grinding out valuable parts from pirated ships and tossing the emptied hulls into the sun. Of course I love the sight of Torpedoes and Lasers Slicing through enemy Ships just about as much, though. About Avorion I thoug it was funny how it felt to me like an altered "X"-game, without much of X's own buggyness and sometimes clunky feel. Avorion is much simpler in design and allows a more easy play - with its own limitations of course. Most notable the quite barebones AI, the very basic way ships find and attack you wherever you are and the way Zones unload when you leave. But still, the game is fun and I often had my thougts about the game mechanics that I felt I would like to share just for the sake of sharing. I know the Devs got their own processes and plans and they seem to be not of the worst. Especially when building I found some mechanics and details that showed that they really looked into things, how they are used and what people would expect. Maybe one single, tiny advice to start right there: Dont care too much about your release date compared to the quality of your game! If its not done yet but you got the resources to elevate the major parts of your game to a level you are confident with - do it. Like I said, I dont take myself too serious about this. Every now and then when I feel like it I will post another headline in green (Good things!) or red (Boo! Thats as bad as Broccoli!) and add something to it. Sometimes I might have an Idea (Blue!) Everyone is welcome to share their thougts on mine. Lets try a bit of everything to start off: Simplistic gridbased building! Ever since Minecraft got big we knew of games more simplistic in style, but in turn offering much more in gameplay. You can see that quite often: When a game is based on more complex technologies, like photorealistic models, its ever more difficult to add new things that would influence all the rest of the game. Avorions Ship building is a good example: Do you think you would be able to build new, awesome designs as easily if the game had polygonbased Models like - I dont know - Eve? Avorions Build-etior would have to be as complex as at least the most basic CAD-software, making things so hard for everyone only a couple of people would contribute to the workshop. But its not just that. The simpler building is, the quicker I can stomp out some at least basic-level-awesome ships. When I was a bit more of a Kid than I am now I liked to build weird shapes out of only a hand full of legos I found in some corner and pretend they were spaceships, breaking apart in fierce battles that only happened in my head. Just how I imagined the ships flight-decks, bridge and crew. Space Engineers kind of went in that direction but kind of managed to fall in-between, combining the bad parts of both ends: Building is not as easy and quick as it would have been if you had to combine ready made pieces like you do in Subnautica or KSP - but its also not as free-flowing as Avorion is, when you work on the really big pots. Space Engineers would have shined with the really big capitals colliding like in the earliest videos - but thats also where the engine starts to fail. Damages also are more of a "Ho!" or "No" ... rooms are either gone completely or fully intact. Kind of boring, sadly. Healthbar vs. destructible Blocks Conversely thats also where Avorion fails, funnily. I see not a single reason why ships have health-bars, when single blocks can be damaged and destroyed. "Health Bars" are kind of dead themselves. They are remnants of archaic days, when games couldnt be complex enough to emulate individual Damages to Entities. Characters were either present, fully functioning, or dead right the moment they accumulated enough "damage". Today you can find shooters where shooting someones leg makes them limp. Destryoing an Engine slows the opponent. Avorion has individual Blocks and destroying parts changes how the ship works or breaks - I had a huge Battleship explode once, because i rammed an aster... i mean "Giga Cannon" - I saw it coming, expected heavy damage on my bow as I turned my ship to face that metaphorical Iceberg with armor but never expected to die outright. There is no incentive for me to place Armor, device clever spaced Armorplating or other intelligent placement if damage can go by all of it, by just accumulating in an ominous health-pool. Surface-based Editing Maybe not the cleverest of Names. This one came up when looking at windows: I am probably not the first noting how big of a part building ships is. People are so captivated by it, the place rows of fake windows out of glowing blocks along recessed hulls - and they even shine some light on the model. It often enough reminds me of the Homeworld-ships. Relic certainly liked their warm glowing Bentusi ships and the brightly shining Bays on Hiigaran Carriers. Avorions own texture-based windows often get in the way with things though. They are often much bigger and/or clip on the edges. What if users could paint them, or generate them on blocks themselves, saving on Polygons a lot in the process, too? I could imagine more uses for this: Visible Energylines or miniscule "roads" with tiny moving lights, indicating traffic of crews working on maintenance or moving spares. That would all just be show, of course. But "show" matters. Theres a significant bit of roleplay in the experience of games like this - just like with the Ships we built with Legos. I know youve done it too - dont deny! Possible Topics to follow: - Multiplayer & Metagame - Breaking the Game - Competetive vs. Casual - Why is Mining and Fabrication fun - Roguelike Tidbits - Shared Progress - A sense of Size - Breathing Space (Yes I like to sound ominous)