More Updates

I've gone back to my original planet generator and with the help of $20 asset, come up with the following revised planet.  If you remember planets from last year, no way did they look this good.

In the large part the original generator was unchanged and this planet is just a more colorful version of the original generator.

The Story

I've been thinking a little bit about the story, and have decided that at least conceptually, the player home planet was attacked years ago and it's inhabitants spread throughout the galaxy.  The player wakes up on a planet and is able to access the technology to help the rest of the inhabitants who are here.  How and why I'm not sure yet.

The Game Play

As for the game play, the game contains 4 levels of abstraction, starting with the most drilled in:

1. Complex
2. Planet
3. Solar System
4. Galaxy

A COMPLEX is the lowest level area and consist of a small town/city of interconnected buildings.  Players simply plop down buildings of various types and the game auto interconnects them.  Player isn't required to build sewers, roads, train lines, etc.  If it's there it's auto-connected.

Buildings that produce things need to be consumed, or if not, they are available as outputs from the complex.  Buildings that input things have to be available on the complex, if they aren't they have to be imported from some place.

Therefore, each complex has an interior working arrangement with complex-level inputs and outputs.

At a PLANET level, the player can now manipulate the inputs and outputs of each complex, and the moment the play zooms out of the complex to see the planet, the aggregation of the inputs and outputs over a given time frame are the ins and outs of the complex.  There is no need to dive into the complex to re-simulate them at a planet level.

Complexes be interconnected, moving materials around, but a planet can also have orbital points, enabling interconnectivity at a solar system level.

The moment the player zooms out to the SOLAR SYSTEM level the game aggregates the planet, and simulation on a planet scale doesn't have to be resimulated within the system.

Same holds true for the GALAXY, and it aggregates detail for the solar system.

Each level, is about tuning a machine for the upper level to manage.