Designing Upgrades, Research, and Artifacts
The Banished Vault Design Diary 09
Today's design diary is more design focused, going into the research/upgrade system of the game, expanding on the aspects that players encounter across solar systems.
Some artifacts you'll find, abandoned in the solar systems.
I've spent a lot of time in the diaries going into what players see and do within a solar system, but the structure of the game has players visit many in sequence. In between those solar systems, the player can get upgrades to start changing how they play in future solar systems --- abilities for their crew, engines, ships, and building blueprints.
Engines and ships are fairly straightforward --- purchasing them unlocks the ability to construct those ships and engines in future solar systems. These start expanding the player's options for moving around the solar system, but don't necessarily make the game immediately easier. They are expensive to produce, and still require fuel and crew to use. A broader set of tools allows the player to be more efficient or capable in achieving their goals, but the same challenges are still present.
Buildings are similar to ships and engines, but broadly do make things easier for the player. For example, the most appealing is one that increases the action restore value of a location. Once you construct it, any crew on that location gets more actions to use on future turns. Other buildings allow access to more resources on planets, special converters to change some resources into others, or assembling complex resources in orbit, and so on. As solar systems, get more sparse in their resources, you might end up relying on some of these advanced buildings to survive.
Crew abilities are the most unique and game altering effects. Each exile can have one ability at a time, with effects ranging from rolling extra hazard dice, starting solar systems with extra resources, improved engine thrust or efficiency, gathering resources faster, and so on. These are strong effects, but are limited to only one crew at a time. They add lots of little wrinkles to a player's calculations, and will provide many interesting combinations to overcome the game's challenges. While no exile can lose the ability to do anything in the game (although I like that idea and I'll keep it in my back pocket), the increasing specialization can start to affect how a player's plans.
All these effects are available to the player with a special currency, initially called research. How the player got that research evolved over time, and the rest of this blog will go into that process.
Research
Research is a broad area of the game that has gone through some iteration. Overall, the player does some kind of action in the solar system which is converted to points, which are used to purchase abilities and blueprints.
My goal is to encourage the player to continue exploring the solar system, beyond simply gathering what stasis they need for survival. Unlocking new things is expensive, and planets only have limited amounts of research to provide, so visiting more planets can greatly increase the amount a player has when they transition to the next solar system.
The first iteration of the research was definitely a scaffold design, a term I define in a previous design diary. Each location had a random amount of points given to it on generation. A player would then bring an exile to a location, and set them 'active'. Once active, each turn that exile would gather one point, but once active an exile cannot be removed from a slot without setting them 'inactive'. Setting an exile active and inactive each required an action to be spent. So ideally you set an exile active, let them gather all the available research at that location, then set them inactive. If you needed to use that exile and their actions for another purpose, you'd have to set them inactive early and lose action efficiency or the remaining research on that location.
This system worked ok, but is dull. It's not terribly exciting to simply leave an exile doing nothing for a while and trying to do the rest of the solar system with a handicap. Additionally, once the action design changed, you would only be spending that exile's actions and no one else's. It also lacked thematic heft, simply gathering abstract points from a location did not further add to the story or setting.
A much larger flaw being masked by this system was one of instant transmission. In a research as points model, the research points simply existed in an abstract way for the player. Most games do this because it's doesn't break the rules of the setting too badly: once you have money in Civilization, you simply have it, it's not actual bits of gold and treasure exiting somewhere on the map.
The Banished Vault is fundamentally different. The game and the setting is very strict about needing to have the items and materials wherever you want to use it. To construct outposts, all the building materials need to be brought with you, alongside the fuel and people. To have the fuel to come home, you'll have to bring it with you or make more. The instant transmission of research points violates that core idea, by not being represented as an actual object that takes up space.
Artifacts
Artifacts are the current research model, and function very differently. On a location, a player can spend an action to gather an artifact. Artifacts have a value that are still converted to points the player can unlock abilities and blueprints with.
However, an artifact is an item that takes up an inventory slot on a ship. So artifacts are relatively easy to get, but must require planning to actually return to the vault with and convert into points. They also don't stack, so bringing back a load of artifacts is at the trade off of quite a few other resources. Sometimes all you get are artifacts of low or middling value, but the ship you can return them on is mostly filled with resources that you've gathered and want to bring to the next solar system.
While still being relatively simple and abstract, artifacts being represented as actual items adds to and reinforces the setting of the game. Even if the research name was something more appropriate, it's abstractness breaks some of the other rules the game is following, and so lacks the impact. A design ethos of mine is trying to make every system, even a small one like this, follow the same rules and structure as everything else.