It also gives your progress through the universe substance and weight - it feels a lot more meaningful to complete 10 of 20 sectors than 10 of infinity.
#Captain forever trilogy series
By making the universe finite I can easily add interesting one-off occurrences and be sure that they will be found while also knowing they won't appear in a glut, both of which have been problems with the 15 series infinite universe builds. My plan then is to turn the game into something like this:Ī finite, maze-like grid of interconnected sectors with multiple quest locations and an endgame location locked away in the middle and called out from the start, There'll be some amount of narrative and motivation tying it all together, but for now all I'm sure about is the shape. If I want players to check out the game beyond the first sector (and I do! There's so much design space left to explore!) then that needs to feel like part of the same quest.
I adore the first Zelda game and have finished it a bunch of times, but I've never bothered with New Game+, so I get it. To use the original Legend of Zelda as an analogy, it doesn't feel like moving to the next screen, it feels like New Game+. My theory is that playing through more than one sector doesn't currently feel like progression within the same game. On the other hand, it seems almost nobody is actually doing that - we're mostly playing through the first sector (a meaty 5+ hour experience for most first time players) and calling it a day.
The 15 series of builds are a lot of fun, and I love that the community are working together to explore and find all the kilo modules so they can build their behemoths. Right now I'm redesigning the universe topology. The first is what I'm actively working on right now, and I expect the second will happen some time after that. It's about a year since that first build snuck out, and after 18 releases, a name change, a graphical overhaul, some critical bugfixes, and multiple changes to the shape of the universe, it feels like Captain Forever Universe is really coming together. Soon two months became four, four months became more, and, well, now here we are. That's all it took to convince me - I should finish up this nearly-complete project over the next month or two and send it out into the world. And so, as a holiday treat for myself and the quiet little community on the Captain Forever discord, I wrapped up the buggy, incomplete pieces of that game into a standalone executable and snuck them into an unannounced beta branch of Captain Forever Trilogy. The removal of Flash from browsers really bugged me though - it made it very difficult for anyone to play the old builds of Captain Jameson (aka The Dawn Star, aka Captain Forever Universe). I'd done everything I thought there was to do and was busy working on other projects. Just one year ago I was sure that the Captain Forever series was finished.
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