Worked on it some over the weekend, fixed a couple of bugs, reorganized a screen to reduce clutter, etc. Don't really have a lot of time these days to work on it, but I'll do what I can.
What I think I'll do is try to fix as many bugs as I can, then burn it on to a CD and take it over to Interplay's offices and show it to Rusty Buchart, who was the producer on the original game. He told me once that it was his favorite subject for a game that he had done, so he might be interested. It may be a few weeks before I can do this though, we'll see.
It doesn't look like I'll be able to put screen shots on here for several reasons.
One thing I would like to talk about is my approach to hardware safety and mission step safety, which is quite different from BARIS.
In BARIS (for those who have not played the game) each piece of hardware has a safety rating of 1 -100. When you start a program the hardware starts with a low value, then increases as a result of research die rolls by your scientists, and decreases as a result of failures during missions. There are some additional rules regarding research ceilings and such. The actual safety rating is known to the player, and can be quite volitile. There is also an effect whereby a failure of a piece of hardware during an unmanned mission has no effect on the hardware safety, but the exact same failure during a manned flight results in the hardware being reduced to a miniscule safety rating such as 5%. This can essentially end the game for the player because it takes a very long time to get a piece of hardwares safety up again, and time is something that is always short in the game.
I take a different approach in Blast Off. Each piece of hardware still has a safety rating of 1-100, but the actual number is never known by the player. The player only knows what his engineers' current estimate of safety (based on past performance) is. The engineers will also let the player know how many known defects, not yet resolved, there are in the hardware. The estimated safety can be way off. The really big difference in my game is that the real safety never decreases, just increases as your engineers fix defects, if your engineers are doing a good job. When the hardware fails (either during ground tests or flight) this results in more known defects for your engineers to fix. This means that unmanned flights become very important to help discover defects, and failures (unmanned or manned) will no longer destroy your chances in the game, as often happens in BARIS.
The other design feature that I have significantly changed is the way mission types affect safety. In BARIS there is a penalty applied to each step of a mission depending on whether you have successfully completed prerequisite missions or not. For example if you have completed no other mission types and attempt a manned lunar landing there is a 40% penalty applied to each step of the landing mission. Strangely the penalties only apply to manned missions. This results in some inconsistency. Suppose I have developed the Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft and LEM and have done many Earth Orbit missions with the equipment. I then see the Ruskie has completed a manned lunar orbit and lander test
. I decide to press ahead with a landing, skipping lunar flyby and lunar orbit LEM test. There is then something like a 6 or 7 point safety penalty applied (I don't have the game with me right now) to all steps of my Lunar landing mission. But does it really make sense that my launch is now suddenly more dangerous? After all I have done many many launches before, including several with these same set of equipment now on the pad?
In Blast Off I keep track of the current penalty for each type of step (countdown, launch, orbital insertion, etc), regardless of what mission is being attempted. For example one may start the game with a 10 point penalty for launches. After a time this penalty will be reduced, as a result of hard experience, and then any launch step, even if you skip several missions directly to a Lunar Landing mission, will have a lesser penalty. The only way to reduce a step penalty is by attempting the step. Thus the actual lunar landing step can be quite hazardous the first time it is attempted, so unmanned landings are a must (unless you don't mind dead 'nauts).
These changes are the real meat of my attempt to reduce the degree to which the game is ruled by blind luck, and to try to reward careful planning to a greater degree than the original game does.
