- Felix (@feba66), Joel (@space-admiral), James (@Green), and Jon (@jonchurch) in attendance
- What are goals of the Project?
- 2946 folks are in the discord
- Joel is the main dev lead
- Artokun is other dev and helping to manage the other devs
- 2 people have access to the codebase (artokun and Joel)
- Felix has already been using real concepts he has learned for Spacetraders in his CompSci studies
- The HTTP spec is a great compromise on technology because it is approachable for learners
- First time experience, FRE
- Project Goals
- Joel has some big goals, and practical goals
- Biggest constraint is time, Joel would love to work on this fulltime if possible
- Could possibly monetize it as a learning platform and possibly sell learning experiences as part of the monetization, non pay to win
- Building up the game to feel like a "complete enough" experience, so they can pause to focus on monetization to fuel building the game out
- Joel has a roadmap more or less
- Non-goals
- Pay to win monetization
- Goals
- Beginner friendly game
- Keep complexity low for core systems
- Provide opportunities for people to try new concepts they might have not interacted with in their programming
- At it's heart, it is a trading game, not a game about realtime combat
- Joel enjoys working on the market simulation aspects
- The economic side of the game is more important than a lot of space games, aka heavy combat PVP, PVE
- Cooperative aspects are interesting, although currently there is not much of that
- It would be interesting to encourage cooperation and collaboration between players
- Growth! Personal development
- You walk away with something tangible
- Progression in some way, building relationships, or trying something new, but you walk away with something more than you had before
- Beginner friendly game
- Why is it an MMO?
- Joel wants someone to use what he has made. If you tell a coworker "hey checkout this todo app I rewrote in rust", that coworker won't really care or get value out of that. Butwhen it's an MMO, it's a shared experience, then you can invite someone into the shared experience.
- To serve that wanting to learn and build mentality
- What is the new player experience?
- The current docs are the MVP version
- The issue right now is time, how does the team determine what is worth investing in? Features, bug fixes, working on the docs and improving the onboarding experience
- Joel is trying to make sure he works on the important things with the limited amount of time he has
- James is interested in seeing building out the core features so they are stable, it will help new player experience and also maintenance and maintaining SDKs
- Felix had talked to Artokun about the idea of open sourcing
- One of the points is that open sourcing removes the mystery and discovery part of the game. If folks can read the source, the community doesn't get the experience of figuring it out together.
- There is a lot of value and play experiences that come from reverse engineering and not quite knowing what the inner workings are. If it's open source it removes that mystery and "game-y-ness"
- There are benefits to the project, contributions from the community, extra hands, but it also creates the issues inherent in managing an open source project.
- There is a tight-rope walking act, of what is easy to find and what is hidden
- There are also people who might be turned off if there are hidden things that give impact their player experience. It is harder to build if you don't know everything. I.E. should we tell people "how to find a really good deal"
- There are different playstyles, and depending on what you are building your opinion on these challenges will be different
- james said that if we give good specs, then people can build good clients without some of the downside
- Felix wants to see the module system get fleshed out, so you can spec out ships.
- Joel wants to work on open sourcing the full docs site so people can contribute
- James would like to know if there is an easier way to surface a bugs list