I hope everybody else had a good year! I know I did, though it could have been better. Still, a pretty good year, the next one should be better! Hopefully for all of us!
The main thing I wanted to share in this post was the idea I had for ship design, which would be one of my favourite aspects of the game.
Inspired mainly by my first big space-empire MMO which I loved to death - SPACE: Glory Through Conquest - because I never came across another such game to do it: as stated in the previous post, players would design their own ships. There would be some 'basic' designs (blueprints) available so players could make ships without having to learn about designing ships, but you would have the option of creating your own designs through drop-down value selections and options, which would affect various attributes of the ship. For example, increasing the 'hit points' of a ship would generally make it larger and more durable, but also less quick and maneuverable, and you could add thruster power to somewhat counteract this (but it might never be as evasive as a smaller ship) and naturally the more you add to the ship, the more it will cost. Ship sizes/classes would probably have a limited number of slot-points to build a ship, to represent it being bound to a certain size class and the range of values within it.
I'm probably not describing it very well right now, but for fans of the genre, it's really satisfying and cool to design your own ships and then actually use them with and against other players!
An advanced option I'd want to add in the future would be to make another page in which you wouldn't even have drop-down menus for everything, just a few limited things (like weapon types for weapon systems) but otherwise you would manually design all of the main attributes and stats yourself (such as hit points and armour and speed and weapons) and the page would report the cost and results of what your design is.
I'm actually down with a cold right now which is making me reeeeally tired, and if I had any more thoughts of what to add to this babbling I've forgotten it! Hopefully there's something and hopefully I'll remember soon!
Have a nice day and a Happy new year =)
