Ok, so this is my first time posting a project here. I'm hoping that this one has some legs and that the working title doesn't ironically doom it to abandonment.
The one line pitch is System Shock meets Starflight. I want to make a space sim with the grand scale of explorable possibility with the intimate scale of interacting as one person. The mechanism for achieving this is allowing the player to walk around inside ships and stations from a first person perspective and seamlessly transition to piloting a ship and back. If a ship is autopiloting, inertia is left to take over or an NPC is at the helm, the ship will continue moving while the player walks around inside.
The first pass of what I'll consider a complete game will involve the discovery of random stations and ships and the ability to dock with them and enter. There will eventually be crew members and equipment, zero-g maneuverability and customizable ships. The important thing for me is taking this one closed loop at a time so I can have a core experience that is fun and manageable to implement, then follow that with expansion into the more ambitious (landing on planets) systems.
The platform I'm working with currently is XNA, using BEPU as a physics middleware solution. It's been easy to work with thus far, and I still have a lot to learn with game programming. If I start to see limitations that outweigh the benefits, then I might change horses and suck up the lost work in the transition.
Thoughts and suggestions are appreciated. I have a doc around 10 pages long that's just a list of ideas I want to apply to the game, and I might spill some of that over the coming weeks. One of the biggest questions I'm tackling right now is how to approach a low-fi art style that empowers the simulation by keeping things simple.
I've also got a sizable list of games that have influenced the project that I might post as well at a later point, to sort of show where I'm coming from.
And here's a video of what I've got so far:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/IDOvCjkjPsc
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