FreeOrion

Hello everyone, I'm new here and I'd like to contribute to the game.

Right now, I've got a few questions about the game design in general, and the tech tree in particular.

1. Is there one user that is responsible for designing the tech tree? I see a lot of post on the subject by Bigjoe5. Is he still active? Does he actually decide on the content or just
collects everyone suggestions?

2. The tech tree, as is, is very bloated in my opinion. There are too many techs in general, and too many techs that are just "speedbumps" to other techs.
a. Is it there to serve some purpose?
b. Are the techs supposed to "do" something and just not implemented?

3. Is there a design document containing the techs and their intended bonuses?

Thanks!

There's no formal process to tech tree or other content creation. There were attempts at this, but the level of interest in actually writing content, as opposed to posting incomplete ideas, wasn't enough to make it useful to run things that way. Bigjoe5 is still posting regularly, though he hasn't made a content post in the last week or two. He's not officially "responsible" for content, but he's been posting about it the most recently, including updated content files, which is pretty much how one gets into a position of de facto responsibility for this sort of thing.

One thing Bigjoe5 hasn't been discussing much is a large-scale reorganization of the tech tree, which does need to be done.


The plan, from several years ago, was to have a few types of techs: theories, applications, and refinements. Theories don't do anything directly, but represent the background reserach that later allows practical research to be done. The idea was that you'd reserach theories, which would have a bit of a "tech tier" sense to them, and they'd unlock refinements which would actually give you stuff. Going up to the next theory level would be a significant investment. Refinements, conversely, would modify / improve the stuff unlocked by already-researched applications.

I've been pondering how wise this plan is overall, as in practice theories mainly seem to be extra delay in getting to useful techs and the things techs unlock. Theories do have some use in defining the overall structure of the tech tree, though.


No. The game engine and content (including techs) aren't stable enough to have this sort of thing documented yet.

As well, there hasn't been a useful discussion about the overall plan for game content (including techs), in terms of structure, progression through it, what "levels" of it there should be, what different paths through it there should be and how these are associated with possible strategies.

Part of the problem with doing that sort of planning is that the underlying game enging is still evolving. It's hard, and a bit of a waste of effort, to make a detailed overal plan for content when the underlying system isn't there yet, and in many cases hasn't even been designed yet.

Ok. Then who concentrates the effort of the "game rules" so to speak?

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Is it who decides what rules will be in the game, who's been posting most about "game rules", who coordinates what aspects of game rules are being discussed / designed, or...?

The first option.
Who takes all those nifty ideas and discussions and creates a coherent document for the content/code developers?

I've written most of the latest design document, though I haven't added much to it recently. eleazar has done some design summarization / illustration recently as well.

There haven't really been many relevant content design discussions, so there isn't anyone summarizing anything about them.

I'm a bit confused. Can someone please explain the design process of this project?

Based on the rough outline in the Roadmap, we have official design discussions about game systems to include or omit, game mechanics, and how things should work. These discussions are usually fairly limited in scope, and are intended to address a particular design question. It's not always obvious exactly what needs to be discussed from the start, so additional discussions can arise out of previous ones.

When those discussions are done and/or decisions get made about what the game design will be, the results get written into the design documents which, fittingly, document the design.

Content (like buildings, techs or ship parts that are available in-game) is a bit different... The original plan was to use a similar directed discussion for creating content, but in pratice that hasn't worked well. Instead, content isn't a focus of design discussions, and really only gets modified when someone is motivated to suggest additions or changes. These suggestions generally depend on the state of the content scripting system, and what underlying game mechanics are available for content to interact with at the present time.

There should be some higher level official "content design" discussions again at some point, but it may need to wait until more of the underyling mechanics of the game are designed to be done in a final / definitive way. That doesn't prevent such discussions from happening in brainstorming or content creation now, though, and those discussions could strongly influence how future discussions would turn out.

There are also brainstorming threads, which can discuss any remotely game design-related issue, including issues already decided on or issues not yet being officially discussed. Sometimes a directed discussion will happen on a topic that's previously or recently been discussed in detail in brainstorming, and references to previous discussions can be made.

There are also various discussions about minor issues that happen in forum threads or by email, particularly when an somewhat-design-related issue is largely about details of implementation and doesn't seem worth making a whole thread to discuss. Results of such discussions might be written into the design document without an official design thread if it seems reasonable to do so, or just implemented if it doesn't seem worth or appropriate for noting in the design document.

The whole design process isn't as bureaucratic as some of the above might make it seem. It also isn't intended to be exclusive or difficult for newcomers or occasional contributors to join into, although in practice it can be due to the volume of previously established design and discussion that is sometimes (but necessarily) assumed in current discussions.

There is a somewhat old and possibly a bit outdated, but still potentially useful, game design page on the wiki that might be worth reading as well.

That sounds too free-form to my taste. I thought there was a content director and design director I could to talk to figure out what needs to be done what which parts of the systems are "design locked".

Oh well. Guess I'll be back to that somewhere in the future, where more parts of the game has been decided on.

Freeform is exactly the beauty of these kind of projects! That being said I agree that it seems the project is a tad unfocussed. But that might just be because I haven't been around more than... a day