What shall I work on next?

[Murudai]

This game may be released, but I never intended to finish development on it! There is at least a few months more work I'd like to spend before making a new game. All will be available as free updates, no paid DLC or whatever.

Firstly, don't say online multiplayer! All those massive game studios make it look easy, but it's actually really, really hard to do. I'm the only person developing this game, I don't have much experience or money or resources, I just can't do online multiplayer!


I was thinking of putting in more missions, but what seems to be pretty apparent (from the global achievements at least) is that people are perfectly happy to play around in the sandbox and most don't finish the missions (which is a shame, because the final boss and ending are really quite epic).

So instead I'm going to work on the sandbox and make it more interesting and deeper. Mainly I'll focus on making life planets more complex (including new ships and possibly branched tech tree type systems), possibly introduce more types of special asteroids and maybe some special objects or scenarios to encounter.

But feel free to post your suggestions here and I'll read them all!

[Enemy]

I suppose a way to get your planets to dock their current ships would be asking too much. I wonder how far that goes into being able to control your planets. I understand you want to keep control of the planets seperate, but I get so frustrated when I get all these ships and I end up having leave them somewhere - or worse, end up hitting them and kill the majority of your fleet.

Otherwise, I really enjoy playing with my life planets, maybe have someway to interact with them.

[Xzalander]

I wouldn't mind a sandbox leaderboard mode, where once you undergo a Final Crush your statistics are submitted.

For example:

-Total Time from Bang to Crush
-Total Planets Destroyed/Lost
-Total Planets put into orbit
-Total Mass Accumulated (Basically this score ignores mass loss)
- Total Ships Annihilated
- Solar Systems Destroyed (Stars with atleast three planets in orbit)

Just the kind of thing I'd like to see in. For simpler stuff, I wouldn't mind seeing increasing tech for the AI to use from Starbases. Perhaps if a planet evolves enough it could turn into a comedic version of a Death Star?

I'd also love maybe a "Stat" Mode. Where you can pause the game, select a Life Planet and it could give us some pregenerated text about life on the planet and some figures about how long it takes to orbit and such?

[dragonuminator]

Some more anomaly's that you could find in the universe
just a few ideas:
Nebulas which spawn small stars
Weird gravity fields were all time and space is f'd up
Be able to hold more and more planets and stars, just to increase the size of things ;)
Different skins for the space ships or just more variety in them, just to give you the feel that different life forms are actually different
random visual stuff like small satellites orbiting planets and solar flares

ps.
As soon as i read the no paid DLC thing I decided to buy the game, now i'm waiting for paypal to fix its damn problems and I'll enjoy this awesome game, may the gods of indie development be favorable towards you good sir.

[Jack The Hat]

Perhaps a more non linear progression system interms of mass?
Instead of Astroid > Planet > Stars > Blackhole, maybe we could have something like

Planet 1 Star 1
Astroid > Planet 2 > Star 2
Planet 3 Star 3

Or something like this. Different planets and stars could have different properties.

Just an idea. Great game so far by the way :D

[WNxFusionGamerX]

I've started working on a complete achievement list for everything that might be possible in the universe (real or game related) some of which might break away and form other ideas.

I hope it will help with the depth, immersion and overall polish of the game :)

[CoMus]

I would like an option to have space look more like 80s cartoons. Rather than black have vivid blues, oranges and bursts of red.

Perhaps once you create a large black hole, you create a centre gravity point of a universe.

From there I would like to start positioning solar systems around this gravity point.

I would like to be able to create a solar system and then put it in a position, name it and then start on another system.

Challenge is to not make everything collide and make a working universe with multiple solar systems spinning around the centre gravity point.

You just keep building up and up from there.

[CoMus]

Also, I would like to see rare/special "starts" that can be created by deliberately colliding systems together.

[Exatrive]

What about few more or enhanced animation frames for the star and planets. Particle trails, planet derbies and other touch ups on the graphics.. What about being able to hear the sound of your sun..

The ability to control the evolution of your planets by making yourself as the sun shoot out solar flares, mass ejections, etc.. Or perhaps its. I don't think you should be able to control the exact direction. Attempting to do these require time and you obviously lose mass.

[Goro_san]

Add option to "eat" specific planet in star system mode.

[Mellar]

I don't know how hard this would be for you to do, but maybe you could include some sort of leaderboard system. For example:

- Fastest time gone from an asteroid to the Big Crunch.
- Fastest time at completing the missions.

I'm just throwing this out in the open. It would be nice for some sort of competitive play.

EDIT: Woops, I skimmed passed Xzalander's comment. I have to agree with him 100%!

[Stoned-Turtle]

Zoom needs to be adjustable, or it needs to zoom further out. Larger system's planets go off screen (specifically at the top and bottom).

[IdoNisso]

In physics, the mass of an object rises proportionally to it's speed.
Maybe a mode or mission where your mass grows the faster you move?
"E=MC" mode :P

[Nktalloth]

Some kind of interaction with the life on your planets might be nice. Maybe more kinds of life? Like, one that-- instead of attacking other planets-- uses diplomacy to make the life on other planets turn friendly towards you and hostile towards other planets.

I dunno, it just seems like the idea of having life spring from you could use some investigation.

[Excellius]

Before i start off: I realize this post is LONG - apologies for that. I equally realize that not every idea may be possible, fit for the idea behind the game or others unsuitable. Just see this post as me sprouting a lot of idea's where some might lead to inspiration for something. Game as great fun as is already, and i really, really doubt that integration everything i suggest here would be reasonable in the first place. :p

Color coded ships
One (I think) minor tweak i would really like is having some different colors for fighter craft of enemy planets, to allow somewhat easier distinction in large-scale multi system battle Right now they are color coded to display their relation to the player (green = player, red = enemy system, white = fighters who lost their home),

This makes it rather hard to determine who is who or who is winning in a 3 way or larger space battle. Right now my green craft always seem horribly outmatched, whereas its entirely possible that the other red craft are each others enemies. Perhaps different shades of red chosen dynamically when planets are near? Or perhaps a simple random color?

Special abilities for each lifecycle
Another idea that may be fun (Though its definitely more complex) is giving each "state of life" some depth and influence by adding mechanics that alter their stats in the next life cycle.

For example:

Asteroids may have the ability to influence planet looks by absorbing certain colored asteroids, allowing for some "Visual customization"
Lifeless planets could influence the evolving of a civilization by absorbing certain asteroids (Reasoning behind this: Different mineral structure allows different tech). A lot may be integrated this way. Perhaps a player could influence shield strength, production speed, amount of defensive arrays and ship type preference. Coupled with a slider system that factors in every roid absorbed, a player could "Customize" a perfect planet the way they want, with its own unique pro's and con's.
Civilized planets could have a technology tree where you can spend experience points based on kills. That would allow you to unlock new ships and upgrade excising ships and abilities. There is a boatload of possible options here of course.
Stars are a bit difficult in this matter, since they are a lot less controllable then single planets. Perhaps the ability to command all planets to target a specific enemy / planet? Or some other abilities that make managing them a tad easier? (Ability to send asteroid miners to sidestep the difficulty catching roids in large systems?)
I really have no suggestion for the black hole. Its great fun to smash systems, but since its rather destructive and effective already, i cannot really think of a way to improve it. :D

Well, so much for me waffling about. Hopefully there is something in there thats sounds fun or inspires a feature. Again, thanks for making this great game.

[JaimeRedwood]

A few things I'd love to see:

-More star types, such as dwarfs, supermassives, etc.

-Gas Giants

-Easier formation of binary/trinary/etc systems. (i.e. if you're a red star or over, you can force another star with less than 2 planets to enter into an orbit with you)

-Technology trees for life planets (with maybe several different branches that influence the weapons they use, the defences, etc.)

-More control over life planets. I'd like to be able to decide, to a degree, what kind of ships are made. Like, have a small screen that says "Produce only: X and Y" or maybe "Avoid producing Z"

[KayEs]

Maybe instead of a real tech tree you could add random "events/breakthroughs" to the living planets. Events like, colonizing another planet in your star system or creating a shield booster, or weapon booster for your planets and ships that lasts as long as the current civilization is "alive".

Planets with civilizations could develop mining ships, and those ships capture "wild" asteroids and feed/tow them to their homeworld.

You could add an option to deposit surplus suns and planets somewhere in space and they become independent allies/friends of yours.

And how about a supernova feature? Shortly before a big star becomes a black hole a supernova timer starts, and if the star fails to get enough mass to turn into a black hole it just explodes/goes nova.

And last but not least how about a choice dialogue when a planet grows so you can create moons, gas giants or just huge dead rocks? Oh, and what about asteroids hitting your planets leaving behind dustclouds? A planet gathering enough dustcloud dust could get rings... like saturn.

[JaimeRedwood]

I really like the idea of breakthroughs Kayes. It would go well with the EXP system that's already in place with planets and only seem to unlock new ships.

Some awesome things to see as breakthroughs (expanding on your list):


-Mining Vessels (Either bring asteroids to planetary orbit or bring mass to planets)

-New ships

-Stronger shields

-Planetary Cannons (In place of point defence cannons, they fire at asteroids/planets instead of ships)

-Interplanetary Missiles (In place of PDC or PCs, they fire missiles at life planets that kill off the entire planet's population but doesn't reduce the mass)

-Colonization fleets (Can colonize planets in your orbit, or even planets that aren't orbiting you. If the planet colonized doesn't orbit you, the ships produced will be your allies and if that planet is sucked into another solar system, that whole system will become your ally)

-Docking ports (allows Nomad ships to become your own)



I'd also like to see a way to 'release' a planet from your orbit rather than just slamming it into another planet or star. Sometimes I pick up planets when I really don't want to.


Some ideas for other ships:

-A ship that fires 4-6 low damage tracking missiles, similar to the current 2 missile firing ship

-A ship that fires a sustained laser at a target and keeps it at distance, rather than making strafing runs like other ships

-A ship that projects a shield around a specific area that prevents a certain amount of damage to planets, asteroids, and ships.

-A ship that flies into a life planet's atmosphere and drops off soldiers, turning the planet to your ally


I'd also really, really love to see some controls for life, such as:

-Destroy all asteroids
-Do not destroy asteroids
-Ignore barren planets
-Ignore enemy ships (Attack the planet itself)
-Ignore enemy planet (Focus on the ships)
-Land (So that while asteroid harvesting you don't accidentally kill ships)

[Steforian]

I would LOVE to have the UI be able to show the stats of every planet orbiting your sun at the same time, and not have to tab through them.

[Exatrive]

After thinking about everything that's being requested I have a feeling that some of this would change the Overall game-play mechanics which I think could kill some of the fun in your original idea.. So perhaps Make game modes that can be selected.

BTW it would be nice to see some interplanetary system wars in your own solar system. So if you have two life planets they may go to war with each other once in awhile. Would be a awesome game mode to watch how your system develops and stuff and how they go out and explorer.. send out satellites (that you could fry with your solar flairs. Some of these ideas tho sound like a completely different game.. so perhaps you could do this in your next version of this kind of game. Solar 3?

[InfyD]

A minor UI change suggestion - separate menu entries for both saving and respawning* systems, rather than a save/reload screen plus the standard respawns screen.

* the load menu should also have the standard respawns.

[Abskissa]

- Civilizations could mine asteroids orbiting their planet, giving more ships or faster spawns or whatever.

- Civilizations could put their own constructions in orbit, orbital defence stations or something.

- As has already been said, more stellar objects! Brown dwarfs, gas giants, nebulae, different kinds of everything.

Just my two cents.

[Arkadius_radar]

It would be awesome to expand further from the blackhole stage. If you could get large enough, and almost position yourself to get objects to orbit you, and zoom out and instead of asteroids and planets you are now colliding galaxies together and getting them to orbit, having similar stages of proto galaxies and life evolved/inhabited galaxies etc... just a thought.
You could then end when too many blackholes form in your universe and start absorbing eachother and crushing existence. Similar to how the big crush is now.

[CammoDude]

I think including black holes here and there would be a nice addition. It just seems like a shame when black holes are reserved for special missions and the black hole stage.

[JaimeRedwood]

I think including black holes here and there would be a nice addition. It just seems like a shame when black holes are reserved for special missions and the black hole stage.

Only if they didn't move ever.

Roaming black holes would be terrible.

"Oh sweet I finally got a five star system with 10 life plane- Oh it's a black hole."

[RomanTheEvil]

More game modes: right now there's 1 mode: sandbox with missions.
It would be interesting to see a campaign mode with significantly decreased growth rate (in sandbox mode going from asteroid to planet and from planet to star is way too quick and offers no challenge), possibly with non-linear growth progression (for example, adding different planet/asteroid kinds with special abilities).
Another possible mode would be to make an actual generated galaxy with set orbits and finite amount of stars, planets and a large black hole in the middle.
It may be a good idea to add a gas giant intermediate between large planet and a star.
More resources for increasing mass - nebulas, dust clouds, comets

[buckbundy]

Maybe an editor tool so you can spawn stuff and smash it together. I'm sure your imagination can dream up all sorts of stuff we could do with an editor tool.

[Lord_PorkSword]

Here's my two cents for this very fun and addictive game! :D

I haven't read everything in this thread but one thing I think would be kewl is to have some molecular clouds/nebulas that stars could very slowly absorb matter from. These would also add a nice extra touch to the gfx for your game!
Have the clouds shrink and dissapate over time as well!

In a similar vein, Gas giants could be used as sources of matter as well. Allow large stars to collect orbiting gas giants and then have the star slowly suck gas off the giant leaving a mass rich core behind that can also be absorbed.
It'd be kewl to see gas getting sucked from a gas giant and watch it swirl down onto a star!

Maybe have a different background for each main stage of evolution.(eg.. rock, planet, star and blackhole)

As someone mentioned, Supergiant and Hypergiant stars I think would be nice additions to extend the overall evolution in the game!

Also maybe have Stellar, Mid and supermassive black holes. Stellar and mid size black holes could also have orbiting star systems where a stellar can have 2 star systems and Mid have 4 star systems. (Imagine a massive battle between 2 sets mini 'galaxies'.)

Maybe have supermassive size act like the current black hole

[InfyD]

Another minor touch: the Entity really should comment the first time - or maybe even every time - you destroy the universe.

[MrJaegerMeister]

More everything. New asteroid designs. New planet and star types, designs, and progression. Backgrounds, music. New spaceships and new missions.

And multicolored spaceships.

That's what I'd like to see, more awesomeness.

[Core Xii]

It would be awesome to expand further from the blackhole stage. If you could get large enough, and almost position yourself to get objects to orbit you, and zoom out and instead of asteroids and planets you are now colliding galaxies together and getting them to orbit, having similar stages of proto galaxies and life evolved/inhabited galaxies etc... just a thought.

Seconded. I was kind of disappointed with the black hole finisher. Say you absorb enough mass, you become a supermassive black hole, at the center of the galaxy. The view zooms way out with stars orbiting you (planets wouldn't even be visible (or simulated) anymore). Now you fly around as a galaxy, colliding with other galaxies, absorbing their supermassive black holes, until finally you collapse enough galaxies for the big crunch.

[Murudai]

There won't be any galaxy stuff. The problem is that's an entire new game! Everything else fits nicely into the sandbox, where as galaxies would have to be totally separate. And as cool as it is, what can really happen? It'll work exactly like black holes, just with different graphics. I'd rather focus on refining the life and variety in the normal sandbox, not add something new that isn't really all that different to the rest.

[Lord_PorkSword]

Any chance you'd consider molecular clouds/nebulas and gas giants as aditional forms of mass resources?
I think they'd fit quite nicely into the sandbox and give some nice variety.

Also, it's great to see you on here responding M8!
I'm very impressed with this game and have done a plug for it on our forums! Unreal old Friends (http://unrealoldfriends.activeboard.com/t43460459/indie-games/)
Hopefully it'll bring some more fans your way! :D

[kavic86]

Tons of idea's I see mimic my own, but I would really like to see nebulas created from the destruction of stars and planets and coming into contact with these nebula could have a few different effects depending on the type of nebula some can kill of civilizations in the planets others could add rings and mass to the stars and planets, sorta like the roids at the start they can come together on there own to make stars or gas giants.

Edit: Also is it possible for you to add in the demo's description how far you can progress and what things you can do in the demo. Its probably in the messages but not many people read those all the time.

[Simian_]

Adding more depth to the life planets would really make the game a lot more interesting. I look forward to this.

Right now, I see two major flaws with the game.

1) Your life attacks lifeless, systemless planets, and often destroys them before you can assimilate them. If not, they have usually at least done enough damage to significantly reduce the mass of the planet. I think you should change the game so that life does not attack lifeless worlds that are not orbiting a star.

2) The collisions seem just a tad unforgiving and happen just a little bit too often, even after you get the hang of it. I think the game needs to be a little more forgiving when it comes to conditions for collision vs attracting something into orbit. Only a little. Not too much.

[Indrek]

Apologies in advance for a long post, or if any of the following has already been mentioned.

I'd like to see a non-linear evolution path for the celestial objects in the game. Something like this:

1. Gas clouds / nebulae to provide gaseous matter that can be absorbed directly (no collision and no orbiting like with asteroids). For stars, it provides mass, although at a slow rate. For planets, it can build up an atmosphere (see below).

2. Planets have three stages:
a) Dwarf planet / planetoid (equivalent to current planet). Too small to sustain an atmosphere, so must build up mass by absorbing asteroids.
b) Planet. Has enough mass to sustain an atmosphere, and must build up one before life can evolve. If that happens, the planet becomes a Life planet.
c) Superplanet. The next stage for a regular planet if enough mass is added before an atmosphere can develop. If a Superplanet subsequently builds up an atmosphere, it becomes a Gas giant instead and can't sustain life. However, a Gas giant's atmosphere is so thick it can absorb asteroids directly without fear of losing mass - they simply slow down and sink to the giant's core.

3. All three of the last stages (Life planet, Superplanet, Gas giant) evolve into a star if mass continues to be absorbed.

4. Stars may undergo star death at any point (triggered manually by the player, by a certain amount of time elapsing, or by a certain event like collision with another star; also, it can be a scripted event in some missions). What becomes of the star depends on its size:
a) Blue stars become White dwarfs - small, cold stars. They can still have a few planets orbiting them, but due to being cold, those planets cannot support life (unless there's another, active star in the system). White dwarfs can "refuel" themselves by absorbing enough gas from nebulae, or possibly also by siphoning material from another star if they're part of a multi-star system, eventually reigniting into a Blue star. If a White dwarf absorbs enough matter, though, it can also undergo a gravitational collapse and become a Neutron star.
b) Yellow stars go supernova, leaving behind a Neutron star. Like a White Dwarf, these can also have lifeless planets orbiting them. A Neutron star cannot reignite, it can only keep absorbing matter, eventually undergoing a final collapse and becoming a Black hole.
c) Red stars can theoretically keep expanding forever, they don't automatically evolve into a Black hole. However, the heavier a Red star becomes, the harder it'll be to avoid other celestial objects pulled in by the star's gravity. Asteroids and planets crashing into the star will rob it of mass (and can also destroy any orbiting planets or knock them off their orbits), while other stars can also trigger star death. This should place an effective cap on the mass of a Red star (and also provides an interesting option if leaderboards are added - see who can create and sustain the largest Red star). If a Red star undergoes star death, it explodes in a hypernova and becomes a Black hole.


Also, a few minor suggestions:

1. A hotkey to toggle off mission markers, without affecting the rest of the interface, for those who just want to play in a sandbox. The mission zones can remain, they are easily avoided, but the markers can be pretty distracting at times.
2. An option to disable life (specifically, space travel, planet/star shields etc). Sometimes I'd like to just create a solar system and watch it evolve and move through space, without rogue spaceships blowing up half of my planets, or my own spaceships destroying asteroids and rogue planets I was trying to absorb.
3. More space between planetary orbits, or better yet, dynamically adjusting orbits, so that planets could have at least 2-3 asteroids orbiting them before they collide with another planet or its satellites.

[TheOverWhelming]

I love this game.
So simple, so majestic
But honestly, the one thing I would add is the little "particle" stuff, or at least destructive things.
"Oh hey, I killed a planet" and then see rocks (even asteroids depending on the strength of the killing blow) fly out dynamically based off of where the killing blow was
Or like other people said, sand and dust that come off (even orbit), and an ability to disable it in the Options menu just in case some people's processors can't handle the added effects.
Mmm.. From what I've noticed each ring that is there only allows one planet, it'd be nice if you could have multiple per ring and with the added "effects" the planets could easily merge to become larger. Hell, make the AI kill the other planets on the same ring to save themselves xD
Lovin the game as it is though! I still need to do all the missions and get all the achievements

[Xzalander]

Only if they didn't move ever.

Roaming black holes would be terrible.

"Oh sweet I finally got a five star system with 10 life plane- Oh it's a black hole."

Last I knew there are roaming black holes?

Just last night I had my 6s5p system shredded by a black hole.. and I wasn't on a mission :/

[Xzalander]

c) Superplanet. The next stage for a regular planet if enough mass is added before an atmosphere can develop. If a Superplanet subsequently builds up an atmosphere, it becomes a Gas giant instead and can't sustain life. However, a Gas giant's atmosphere is so thick it can absorb asteroids directly without fear of losing mass - they simply slow down and sink to the giant's core.



God Tier M.Bison Yes! I was just thinking this game is missing gas giants.

I don't think gas giants should solarize though, or if they do they should require an awful lot of mass increase, otherwise it would be too easy to amass stars.

[tommo1975]

I've really enjoyed playing this game. Some of my ideas on how to improve it have already been mentioned, but this is what I'd like to see;

- Gas giants and rings around planets
- The ability to have moons orbiting your planets
- Ability to have an asteroid field in your system (i.e. multiple asteroids end up in orbit around your star(s))
- Nebulas, maybe different types having different effects on your system/planets
- Comets orbiting around your system, complete with "tails" that change size/direction as they come close to the sun and then end up going back out of your system
- Ability to issue orders/direct life on your planets to defend only, go forth an attack a specified target, grab asteroids instead of destroying them etc.
- Ability for life to build space stations in orbit of planets/stars
- Ability to have more planets than 8-10 in your system

[JackDownAHill]

Hello,
Love the game, bought it last night and it's awesome :D
Sorry in advance about the length.

1. I would like to see some development with life planets and how far they can progress.
For instance, each time the planet levels up you get a pop-up or mission that you can choose what type of technology they develop. So you could keep leveling up the shield for one planet or advance the rate at which it can produce ships.
I would also like to see planets develop beyond level 4.
An option to dock ships would also be nice.
Continuing with the life planet stuff, it would be nice if they could farm meteors instead of just killing them all, same goes for life-less planets.

2. I think that anything that is a mass-level below another object should be able to orbit it.
I.E. A large sun should be able to have a small sun orbit it, or asteroids should be able to orbit suns etc.
Then you could have planets orbiting a small sun, that is orbiting a large sun and so on.

3. I like the idea about the gas giants that others have stated.
You could add a feature that lifeless-planets start to generate atmospheres (like the evolution timer) and if a planet does not gain enough mass in time, its atmosphere will start to expand and it becomes a gas giant.

4. I love the fact that your a dev who is actively interacting with the community :D

5. A way to share and show off your systems would be cool.

6. Missions that have a pre-determined system that you have to complete it with. Adds to the chalenge

7. When you destroy planets they dont just turn to dust, they break up into asteroids.
So when you are partake in epic solar battles you can regain some mass that you lose/ gain mass from the planets you kill.

8. ???

9. Profit!

[Murudai]

Wow, okay, this thread is getting WAY more responses than I thought it would. Which is great! You're certainly passionate about the game and want to improve it.

A lot of these ideas are really great, but go against some of the gameplay and balancing that I've done. They would be nice, but could change the difficulties a lot and completely change how the game is played, which isn't fair on people who like it how it is now.


For example, I have no intention of ever letting players directly control life, nor having complicated tech trees. Why?

1) The game is not about the life and ships, it's more focused on the stars/planets you control.
2) The game is very chaotic, it is very easy to have things smashed up and lose them. If you invest too much time in a planet then that makes it super frustrating to lose it.
3) Controlling life would be too powerful. It would be a bit easy to destroy other systems!
4) Being able to control life and tech trees means I need to add a lot more controls. As it stands it's a very simple, easy game to pick up and play and I like that about it. Remember it's a "Casual" game. I don't want a dozen keys that could make it harder to play. I could do it through a menu, but pausing to edit on a menu breaks the flow, and I'm proud of the fact that you can 100% the game without hitting any menus or arbitrary pauses!


I can't change TOO much about the game. I can add things and tweak things, but I can't go TOO far. If I ever decide to make a Solar 3 though, well, as I'd be developing from scratch then I could really consider any of these ideas.

[Indrek]

1) The game is not about the life and ships, it's more focused on the stars/planets you control.
Agreed. Direct control over life would change the game from a universe sandbox to more of a space-themed strategy game. Part of the reason Solar 2 is so unique is that you play on a planetary level, with the ability to control, develop and destroy entire solar systems. Too much focus on insignificant little things like life and technology would only detract from the main focus of the game.

[JaimeRedwood]

Indrek, a few problems I have with your ideas:

1. Yellow stars (medium sized stars) don't ever go supernova. Some MIGHT go Nova, but never Super.

2. Red giants can't, in fact, theoretically keep expanding. They only expand until they run out of material to use in its' fusion reaction, then it collapses in on itself.

3. There should be two stages of red stars and red star death. Giant red stars, which go supernova, and Supergiant red stars, which go hypernova.

Last I knew there are roaming black holes?

Just last night I had my 6s5p system shredded by a black hole.. and I wasn't on a mission :/

The only time I've ever seen a black hole in this game outside of the black hole stage is on the mission where you have to slam an antimatter asteroid into a dinosaur system.

Maybe you slammed that asteroid into the wrong thing then forgot about it?



God Tier M.Bison Yes! I was just thinking this game is missing gas giants.

I don't think gas giants should solarize though, or if they do they should require an awful lot of mass increase, otherwise it would be too easy to amass stars.

Theoretically a gas giant of enough mass could ignite fusion, but it would never be a proper star. It would be something along the lines of a brown dwarf.

[JaimeRedwood]

Crap sorry about the double post. I'm used to forums that automatically merge posts.

[Driven233]

Heres an idea I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned yet (unless I'm blind)

-RADAR-

-Once you obtain a life planet that has evolved to space flight and shielding systems an at least rudimentary radar system seems probable.

-It would occupy a corner of the screen (probably top-right), be simple in keeping with the game, perhaps showing objects as large as or larger than you with dots color coded by size or type of object.

-For single planets it would scale (in range or in accuracy of size) according to kills or experience, then when in a system multiple life planets could "work together" to give you even more range and/or accuracy.

-It would, of course be dismissible along with the rest of the UI, or even in addition an option to dismiss it entirely in game options.

I don't think it would detract or stray from the meaning of the game, and it would definitely give players a simple tool to help guide and explore instead of inadvertently smashing into another system of your size and losing half your nice 100+ kill planets :eek:. And for missions maybe our favorite god figure can just decide to turn it off when it can prove too helpful.

Yes, as you said this game is about chaos, so maybe the radar can 'miss' things sometimes, depending also on distance and experience of the planet/planets.




Also, I like the idea that planets can grow to do different things (A civilization that favors more shields instead of fighters, one that has no weapons and/or shields but more spacecraft, and of course what we have now), but our influence should be limited.

If anything this will add to the game as you can either go collecting planets in order to create your idea of the perfect system, or cultivate ones and hope that they turn out like you want them, if not.... well, I'd hate to live on that planet.

[Indrek]

Indrek, a few problems I have with your ideas:

1. Yellow stars (medium sized stars) don't ever go supernova. Some MIGHT go Nova, but never Super.

2. Red giants can't, in fact, theoretically keep expanding. They only expand until they run out of material to use in its' fusion reaction, then it collapses in on itself.

3. There should be two stages of red stars and red star death. Giant red stars, which go supernova, and Supergiant red stars, which go hypernova.
Yeah, I'm aware that my suggestions deviate from reality a bit, but the game isn't about following reality to the letter. I don't think any of the problems you mentioned are more significant than, say, planets evolving into stars by absorbing asteroids. Ther goal of my suggestions was to add variety to the game.

[Kalcoholic]

Not a game idea but something that could help your funding:

I remember reading that Monday Night Combat had wanted a promotional TF2 Hat tie in with their game. They thought it may be hard to get, but when they asked Valve just said yes with no trouble at all.

It might be worth asking Valve for a hat promotion for Solar 2, rewarding existing owners and new buyers with.. i duno a hat that looks like a planet or maybe some planets orbiting engineers bald head, whatever :P

Many people will buy the game just for the hat (sad but true) and many be tempted by the hat to see what the game is like (demo) and fall in love with it as i did.

Maybe you already thought of it or tried it, just thought id mention it.

P.S maybe worm holes in space that transport you to a new random place or that you can ram planets into to kill them (less gravitational power than black holes) maybe a worm hole maze too.

also Rings like around saturn, even if there only aesthetic and randomly occuring.

[JaimeRedwood]

Yeah, I'm aware that my suggestions deviate from reality a bit, but the game isn't about following reality to the letter. I don't think any of the problems you mentioned are more significant than, say, planets evolving into stars by absorbing asteroids. Ther goal of my suggestions was to add variety to the game.

The game at least holds to reality a bit. The things I point out are things that should be followed by the game's standards

[Indrek]

The game at least holds to reality a bit. The things I point out are things that should be followed by the game's standards
Fair enough, though I don't see how the suggestions were any more unrealistic than the game already is. Perhaps to an astrophysicist the slight creative liberties would be glaring errors, but I doubt most players would care, as long as the game is fun and challenging.

[Mortimer]

A few ideas off the top of my head, after playing about 90 minutes of the game:

More amusing but less-challenging missions. The current set is interesting but they're starting to get frustrating.

More world development! I love my little spacefaring races, but my end goal is to devour them. I'd like to stick around this phase, build a huge multi-star system, and become a massive overlord!

A followup to the last idea, maybe the spacefaring race can create a dyson sphere around your star eventually! Not sure what it'd do, but it'd be impressive :D (Edit: Maybe it develops a 'Death Star'-like weapon!)

Missions in the black hole phase. This phase goes by pretty fast, so I'm not sure what you could actually add.

A clear "Restart game from big crunch" option.

Some reason to go out and conquer other sentient planets in the planet phase. Some reason to destroy star systems in the star phase. In sandbox mode, of course! Beyond the obvious "They're there, so I must kill them!"

(Edit) Also a way to steal asteroids/planets from opponents would be great. As it is I can try ramming a planet away, destroying my shields and hopefully not accidentally knocking away any of my own planets in the process.. at the moment it's a risky venture and just not worth it.

[Vendayn]

I think a way to advertise the game, is to have famous let's players do let's plays of it. Worked magically for Terraria. Total Biscuit (TotalHalibut is his youtube channel name) has also done Let's Plays of other indie games, and they do rather good from it. I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't do a WTF is Solar 2, as he usually WTF's of many new indie games. There are other famous Youtubers, but names escape me at moment and I'm leaving soon.

(edit)

That is not to say that will work 100% of the time...if the game sucks (which from what I saw in the demo, I had tons of fun and love the music/sound which I know would be mentioned by TB)...I just can't afford to buy it at moment, credit cards are maxed out. Maybe in 2 weeks when I get back from vacation...

but anyway...if the Let's Player doesn't like it for whatever reason, then it probably wouldn't do much to help...but it may be worth a try. Its free advertising and has helped quite a few indie games.

[TheOverWhelming]

A minimap
A minimap that's part of the interface and only visible when you're big, like a star. That or zoomed out a bit more ^_^
Would be nice for those 10-planet systems and all-- "Lalala, oh crap where'd that solar system come from"

[InfyD]

The nomad (white) fleets should behave differently to red in some way - perhaps by sometimes attempting to colonise non-life planets somehow? (perhaps sacrificing all their ships for extra planetary mass). a colonised planet shouldn't have to go through the initial evolution stage.

I often come across vast fleets of nomads, all heading in one direction like they have a goal in mind; it seems a shame that that goal is just to blow up some random planet.

[Kalcoholic]

I have a good one,

A gaem where you get endless wave of nomads and/or planets/systems attacking you. how long you survive or how many waves you survive could go on a leaderboard.

[Dachannien]

I'd love to see some "easter egg"-ish things happen, like one of your planets occasionally spawning an unusual ship with some special ability. No way to control this happening, it just happens once in a while - but if you try, you can keep that special ship alive and kicking butt.

I'd also like to see some benefit to having a larger number of stars in your system (I'm up to 9, but the only thing it gets me is a huge gravitational attraction of random objects to crash into my system), such as a way to steal planets from lesser star systems without having to collide with the planets or stars.

[Mortimer]

I'd also like a zoom function (zoom in, zoom waaay out) along with a button to reset to default zoom. Sometimes I'd just like to see a little father away, plus it'd give some perspective about how tiny my asteroid is when I start a new game.

Also, is there any way to hide/fade out the mission text when I'm in a mission? It just sits there and gets in the way.

[Wieke]

Steamcloud support, especially for syncing saved solar systems would be nice.

[Leak]

What I'm really missing is a button (hey, there's loads of them left on my XBox 360 controller) to absorb the selected planet instead of the smallest one - we already have the controls to choose one of the planets, so having to always absorb the smallest one (which might still be the one with the most XP) instead of, say, the biggest one (to prevent it from turning into another sun) is kinda irritating... :)

[Core Xii]

Speaking of keys, I want to hold down Ctrl to absorb asteroids. Right now if I want to continously absorb asteroids I have to repeatedly tap the key; It's exhausting. Also, you should make Ctrl exclusively absorb asteroids, and Space exclusively absorb planets. It's annoying when you want to absorb a planet but have asteroids, you have to press Ctrl first... and sometimes if you're not fast enough, another asteroid comes into orbit right before you press space, causing the desired planet not to absorb.

The markers are positioned distractingly at the same distance as planetary orbits. Wouldn't it be better if they were at the edge of the screen, out of the way?

The only time I've ever seen a black hole in this game outside of the black hole stage is on the mission where you have to slam an antimatter asteroid into a dinosaur system.

Maybe you slammed that asteroid into the wrong thing then forgot about it?

No, I can confirm. I've seen black holes two or three times now outside of missions - They're very rare, but they do exist.

[JaimeRedwood]

Speaking of keys, I want to hold down Ctrl to absorb asteroids. Right now if I want to continously absorb asteroids I have to repeatedly tap the key; It's exhausting. Also, you should make Ctrl exclusively absorb asteroids, and Space exclusively absorb planets. It's annoying when you want to absorb a planet but have asteroids, you have to press Ctrl first... and sometimes if you're not fast enough, another asteroid comes into orbit right before you press space, causing the desired planet not to absorb.

The markers are positioned distractingly at the same distance as planetary orbits. Wouldn't it be better if they were at the edge of the screen, out of the way?



No, I can confirm. I've seen black holes two or three times now outside of missions - They're very rare, but they do exist.

Uh dude you know you can absorb exclusively asteroids right?

If you press 'l' you'll absorb every single asteroid around your planet(s).

If you press 'k' you'll absorb one object at a time starting with the smallest.


Pretty sure the alternate version for 'l' is alt.

[Core Xii]

Uh dude you know you can absorb exclusively asteroids right?

The two statements were intended to be read as a unit. I know you can exclusively absorb asteroids, but you can't exclusively absorb planets.

And the key is Ctrl. You didn't really read my post at all, did you.

[Wieke]

Uh dude you know you can absorb exclusively asteroids right?

If you press 'l' you'll absorb every single asteroid around your planet(s).

If you press 'k' you'll absorb one object at a time starting with the smallest.


Pretty sure the alternate version for 'l' is alt.

He knows that you can exclusively absorb asteroids. What he wants is to also be able to exclusively absorb planets.

[Prio]

Suggestions:

* In Star mode, it would be nice to have a teeny tiny "latest planet" info display next to the main info display that shows, in abbreviated form, how large your latest acquisition is. Often I found myself picking up a planet and having to cycle over to it just to see if it was close to becoming a life planet (keep and buff with asteroids!) or if it wasn't (bah, absorb this junk!)

* When I was doing the Hobo Star achievement (which naturally took many, many tries), it was a royal pain in the butt not being able to drop/destroy planets I'd picked up on the way to starting the mission. Absorbing the planets would often turn me into a black hole, which forced me to respawn all over again, and destroying the planets manually was a chore. Then, I had to check my remaining time manually during the fight, lest I kill the champ too late and be forced to replay the whole set of Duel missions over again. Hobo Star is a fun and challenging achievement overall, but these elements were mostly just obnoxious. Maybe display a "three minutes are up!" notice during (not just after) the fight, if the player takes too long?

* Every time you absorb an evolved Life planet into your star, have the game play a sound like billions of voices crying out in terror and then suddenly being silenced. I'm not actually serious about this one

Responses and thoughts and stuff (derpy):

Solar 2 life is nasty, short-sighted, and xenophobic, and I find that to be all kinds of charming. Once something's in orbit around something, they get all stupidly sentimental about it, but before that it's "OH EM GEE IT'S NOT OF OUR WORLD OBLITERATE IT." If your life is blowing up stuff before you can grab it, zip around the universe quickly and snag things before the ships can catch up--it's not like the universe is finite or anything.

Re black holes showing up unexpectedly: if you turn into a black hole and then respawn as something else, your old black hole self will still be out there, so that's one possible cause.

[JaimeRedwood]

The two statements were intended to be read as a unit. I know you can exclusively absorb asteroids, but you can't exclusively absorb planets.

And the key is Ctrl. You didn't really read my post at all, did you.

Control absorbs individuals, alt absorbs all of them.

I read your post through and through you're just complaining about something that isn't an issue.

[kprof]

Great game. I played the demo and instantly realised that this is my kind of "Zen Game"! Not entirely sure what that says about my personality!

I've got a few requests of my own, some of which have already be mentioned earlier in this thread.
So at the risk of overloading Murudai with even more information (after all, 5 pages of responses is hardly enough), here goes:


- Leaderboard idea and stats summary would be great.

- date the save games! Or allow naming!

I quite like the idea of having more of a "connection" with my planets. It would be nice to be able to:

- Have a "toggle mode" that flags certain planets to not be consumed.

- Ability to name the planets.

- Examine planets. Possibly an extension of the summary info. Shows name, age, when first "obtained", when "life evolved", number of "extinction events" (Muh ha haaa!).

- Could planets population have a personality? If you've flagged one planet as never to be consumed and insist on periodically gobbling up other populated planets then it's going to cause friction.
I'm visualizing a little planet with happy, smiley things dancing around a flag labelled "Special!".
Flip side, another little planet with a flag marked "Disposable Minions #2", and happy, smiley things building big missiles to "make the Special planet of gloating overlords go bye bye".




It should be noted that anything above that seems slightly on the bizzare side "could" be attributed to the effect that this game has had on my sleep patterns.

Many thanks in advance to Murudai and good luck with any new features.
K

[Indrek]

Control absorbs individuals, alt absorbs all of them.

I read your post through and through you're just complaining about something that isn't an issue.
Ctrl absorbs all asteroids, Space absorbs individual objects. Alt does nothing, as far as I can see.

Also, there's currently no way to absorb a planet while you have asteroids in your system, nor to continuously absorb asteroids without having to press a key repeatedly, which is what Core Xii is asking for. While the former might be intentional (what should happen to the asteroids orbiting a planet that you're about to absorb?), I can see how the latter could come in handy if you wanted to absorb a planet while, say, moving through an asteroid field. Perhaps this isn't an issue for you, but misinterpreting a suggestion as a complaint and attacking it as such seems a bit counterproductive to the purpose of this thread.

[mriguy]

...
As soon as i read the no paid DLC thing I decided to buy the game, now I'm waiting for paypal to fix its damn problems and I'll enjoy this awesome game, may the gods of indie development be favorable towards you good sir.

Same here. Played the demo, had fun, but when I see an indie stand by a product and offering free DLC as a thank you, I feel obligated to support this by paying full retail.

Indies like you represent what game development use to be all about back when there was a relationship between the developer and gamer. Thanks.

[Disocverer]

I have a good idea: The player should can control a bit in what distance a planet go into the sun´s orbit and there are "zones" (example: red zone: there can´t grow any life on planets, Orange zone: no life can grow but the planets here can be colonize from other planets, yellow zone: life can grow here but slow, and last: green zone: Life grow here fast and have a higher tech

So it would possible to have a passiv control to the civilizations.

[Murudai]

I think a way to advertise the game, is to have famous let's players do let's plays of it. Worked magically for Terraria. Total Biscuit (TotalHalibut is his youtube channel name) has also done Let's Plays of other indie games, and they do rather good from it. I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't do a WTF is Solar 2, as he usually WTF's of many new indie games. There are other famous Youtubers, but names escape me at moment and I'm leaving soon.

While I was waiting for Solar 2 to come live a week ago, I randomly stumbled on his channel. During the 4 days before Solar 2's released, I watched about two thirds of all his "WTF is..." videos, I think they're great! I've already sent him a review code :D

[Leak]

While I was waiting for Solar 2 to come live a week ago, I randomly stumbled on his channel. During the 4 days before Solar 2's released, I watched about two thirds of all his "WTF is..." videos, I think they're great! I've already sent him a review code :D
True, but watching him review a puzzle game ("Hector" or "Portal 2" come to mind) is cringe-inducing... :D

[Murudai]

Right, I've read through all the suggestions here. Many are a bit too far for what I'd want to take the game, they'd change too much, especially since this game has already been fully released! Let me list out what I'm thinking of doing:


- Special asteroids that are either orbiting a planet, or found inside planets or stars when destroyed. These asteroids can be absorbed or somehow gained by a planet and this can upgrade the life. I'll add in an extra page in the menu both explaining what all the special asteroids you've found do and providing help on how this system works.

The problem is how to deliver the special asteroids into the planet without adding any new controls (I want to keep it simple, and just controlling the planets) but still giving the player a choice. This will take all my design powers to work out, and if I can't, then this system probably won't go in.

My current thoughts is to have a mining ship that gathers the special asteroids and brings them to the planet. Then the ships starts "processing" the asteroid. Once it finishes processing, the planet gains the asteroids power and the ship is destroyed. The processing can be interrupted by killing the ship or moving away, and the ship is destroyed either way. A new mining ship spawns after it is destroyed for any of those reasons. Lots of visual cues to indicate that absorbing is taking place, including a link to the planet. The ship can be destroyed without destroying the asteroid, which could be picked up by another ship.

A little complex, but should be fairly clear what's going on with graphics, and easy to decide which specials to upgrade the planet with without adding heaps of controls and other complexities to the game. I'll have a play around, see what happens.


- If the special asteroids goes in they could do things like: create special ships, make life more aggressive or passive and focus on building certain types of ships. Think about it, a really aggressive planet with only anti-planet ships. A really defensive planet with lots of missile ships. You could make some defensive planets to protect your system, then make a few planets who are aggressive to go out and kill enemy systems. Sounds good doesn't it? I'll get right on it once all the bugs have been patched. I think I've hit on a really great idea here, thanks for your help!


- I may add more environmental things too. Neutron stars might be interesting, essentially a very high-gravity star. Nebulas are possible, although I'll need to think about how to do the graphics and what they'd actually "do". Space stations would be really cool, but might be a bit of work as there is nothing like that in the game currently, so I'd need to make a whole new object (which wouldn't of been so bad at the start of development, but adding something later on means rebalancing a lot of things so is a bit of work). I guess it would function a little like a planet that can't be captured but with AI that moves around and can't be so easily smashed up. Actually, that sounds really awesome, I'll sure give that a shot!


- Selective absorbing is also something I'll toy with. So essentially using the interface to select a planet then pressing a special key to absorb that planet (but only while the interface selector is visible). Could be very handy to deal with specific planets.



So feel free to discuss what I've just suggested here. I don't know how long this will take me to make, depends how far I want to take it, but shouldn't take more than a month (I want to have a week or so break from dev, all I've done for 10 months is work on this game and I want a little holiday!). That's a long time, but hey, I think it'll be worth the wait :) If I think of some new missions that work really well with these changes, I might add them in as well. And naturally, this will all be completely free.

[Indrek]

- Selective absorbing is also something I'll toy with. So essentially using the interface to select a planet then pressing a special key to absorb that planet (but only while the interface selector is visible). Could be very handy to deal with specific planets.
I was thinking you could just modify the behaviour of the Space key, so that if the selected object is a planet, it'd be absorbed. Otherwise it'd behave as it does now.

Though perhaps a separate key would be better, so people don't absorb the wrong planet by accident.

[Core Xii]

(what should happen to the asteroids orbiting a planet that you're about to absorb?)

They should probably absorb into the planet.

Space stations would be really cool, but might be a bit of work as there is nothing like that in the game currently, so I'd need to make a whole new object (which wouldn't of been so bad at the start of development, but adding something later on means rebalancing a lot of things so is a bit of work). I guess it would function a little like a planet that can't be captured but with AI that moves around and can't be so easily smashed up.

I see a space station as an asteroid rather than a planet. This way, it's appropriately smaller than a planet and can orbit one.



What about using the number keys to absorb planets? They occupy specific slots around your star, and so are effectively ordered. Of course, this number would need to be displayed somewhere.

[-blackdimmu-]

maybe a little bit more "physics"

planet and star growing with impact of asteroids.

just massive impact can destroy the player's one.

the next is caching a star, with to heavy contact is disrupt the 2 stars.



than a star losing mass over the time, not so much, like the light that emitted to the space.

next

more types of black holes.

and a black holes losing mass over the time. and can be expand if that losing his event horizon.

and if 2 black holes orbit together, than can the gravity expand both over the time, and losing mass

and maybe you can using LaGrange points, for better getting object in to a orbit

[Disocverer]

What about alien artifacts? they can be collected with the miningship and have a passiv effect like faster movement(5% or something like this).

[dRed_Devilb]

Well, I think no one said this, but... How about being able to build multistar systems from orphan stars? After you destroy one system's planets, and if your star is bigger in mass than the other one... Make it a little tricky to catch the orphan star in orbit with you, but still achievable. It's a risk-reward thing, you might lose a planet or two in the ordeal, you might not lose none, the other star might crash onto you and blow you up, decreasing your mass and making you lose some planets... Wouldn't be "overpowered", IMHO.

[Acidictadpole]

One or two things I think would be interesting:

If a mechanic is introduced to create life tendencies (more aggressive, or passive), and particular minerals from asteroids. I suggest something where your life goes and "raids" other systems on its own will, maybe via some hyperspace or warp (that way they can find you again). One of the things I found awkward when becoming a solar system was that in order to battle other systems I had to maneuver my entire solar system around, instead of just let my life take the initiative.

Another thing I would suggest is that no mass is lost in any interaction ( spawning rates may need to be tuned ), but right now if two planets "bump" then it appears as though mass is just lost into /dev/null. Instead split it off into some asteroids (or depending on the size of the two bodies colliding, a new planet).

[sebbie10]

Missions for Multi star systems.*

Also, more amazing tracks from Ogg, my ears require more pleasure. The inclusion of the first game's theme would be nice.

*Keeping with the theme of the ending, how about a mission where you have to take at Evil Multi Universal Corporations star systems. Keeping the humour of the game you could claim they set up Dinosaur/Kitty/Stoned-Turtle sweatshops or something. ;)

One of my favourite missions was (SPOILERS) the One when you detonate the Dark Matter asteroid to take out the Dinosaurs. I think the inclusion of using the environment as a weapon rather than yourself was very fun. More missions of this type would be awesome.

[Core Xii]

Also, more amazing tracks from Ogg, my ears require more pleasure.

Speaking of, how about releasing the soundtrack?

[Brilhasti]

Murudai: Thanks for an interesting game and thanks for the community involvement.

There have been plenty of great ideas proposed already. I'm going to recommend finding a way to include some more astronomical features in your game like quasars, pulsars, neutron stars, and supernovae. Wormholes perhaps. Don't know what any of these things would do yet, just throwing out some ideas to brainstorm around.

One negative thing I'll mention is that, in the demo, I had no idea that my progress was capped at small star. I kept wondering if I needed to do something different to get to a medium star. If I was given some kind of message letting my know my progress was stopped there, I missed it.

Cheers!

[wyrdfate]

i woudl like to see two types of planet.

the gas giant that feeds off gases, or the curent planet type.

also at the black hole stage, i would like to see you go intp a galaxy mode, wher you cna nurture many, many stars systems.

or different types of stars. that sporen if you kill a star, depending on it's mass.
?

all the other suggestion have been said

other then more music please.

thanks for a great game.

[lordcrekit]

Don't know if this is covered, but once you start to kill a system it usually starts to run away. Ships move relative to some central point in the universe, so they get left behind in high speed chases.

[Leak]

Don't know if this is covered, but once you start to kill a system it usually starts to run away. Ships move relative to some central point in the universe, so they get left behind in high speed chases.
That's because your own system attracts and thus accelerates it.

Try circling the other star system to balance out that acceleration...

[VOR]

I feel stupid for suggesting this and I am vaguely aware of how difficult it would be to implement but multiplayer/coop seems to be a logical evolution for the game. the only thing would be the size of the game world, and the infrastructure required.
Just a thought.
EDIT : now that I think of it a mp3 version of the music would be nice, it really helps me chill.

[Murudai]

Since the game is selling so well, the soundtrack will be released free in about a weeks time! If you want to support the composer for his fantastic work then there will be a PayPal donation link.



One negative thing I'll mention is that, in the demo, I had no idea that my progress was capped at small star. I kept wondering if I needed to do something different to get to a medium star. If I was given some kind of message letting my know my progress was stopped there, I missed it.

You did miss it, because there is a message.

[Core Xii]

You did miss it, because there is a message.

Perhaps because the entity keeps harassing you about how awesome the full version is, so you stop reading his messages. ;)

[Mortimer]

I'd also like a button to launch orbiting bodies. It'd be a fun way to attack other planets/systems, by orbital bombardment :D

I think I saw an option like that in the cheats section.

[Murudai]

I'd also like a button to launch orbiting bodies. It'd be a fun way to attack other planets/systems, by orbital bombardment :D

I think I saw an option like that in the cheats section.

That's because there IS an option like that in the cheats section :D In the God Options, under 'Action Mode' set 'Fire Outwards'. This means instead of absorbing things, you shoot them!

It isn't in the normal game because 1) it would be really unbalanced and 2) lining up shots is very hard because it's hard to tell which planet is going to be shot off next.

[Mortimer]

That's because there IS an option like that in the cheats section :D In the God Options, under 'Action Mode' set 'Fire Outwards'. This means instead of absorbing things, you shoot them!

It isn't in the normal game because 1) it would be really unbalanced and 2) lining up shots is very hard because it's hard to tell which planet is going to be shot off next.

Awesome! I'll have to play around with it.

I have no solutions for balance -- maybe make it release the planet, so you'd have to be good at figuring out the tangential motion (and get a planet circling really fast for best effect)? All I know is, I want to be more powerful, more destructive! That's why you're the dev and I'm the player :D

For which planet, I'd tie it to whichever one you have selected, and possibly not trigger at all if you have none/your star selected.

[Core Xii]

in the cheats section

Where does one find this cheats section you speak of? Let me guess, it unlocks after completing all the missions.

[Murudai]

Where does one find this cheats section you speak of? Let me guess, it unlocks after completing all the missions.

Yup. Shame the missions are so hard, but at least it's an awesome reward.

[Lord_PorkSword]

The ideas of special asteriods, space stations and neutron stars sound pretty good Murudai!

I like the idea of a gravity heavy neutron star. I could imagine the heavier gravity could reverse orbits of opponents planets or maybe if given enough time it could pull the planet out of orbit from an opposing star.

Having special asteriods as a possibility after destroying a star is a good idea as well! If you were able to implement gas giants this could be another use for asteriod cores.

I hope you can figure out how to get nebulas in the game as I think they'd make a great addition. Maybe come up with 10 different shapes and then give them a random hue, size and rotation(when placed)to give some variety that may not feel repative.
I you could use nebulas to slowly absorb matter before they run out of matter to absorb. Maybe have the nebulas colour as a representation of how much matter it has. Have a different colour for different stages like full, medium, low and no mass to extract.

[frizzank]

option to eat stars in multi-star systems

galactic mode- Stars can orbit black holes

Nebula- mass adds to asteroids and small planets when flying through

Gas giants- Planet evolution is too short

More star types- Again evolution is too short

Comets- Just an ice asteroid with a trail effect when close to stars.

super nova creates objects
- Collision of two large stars creates a black hole
-small stars creates nebula
-med stars neutron stars

[Ulti2k]

Hey, first of all thank your for that greate... humm well... Sandbox :-)

A few Ideas how i think the game could be improved

Graphically:

1) The Suns (especialy the big ones) look more like an amobea so might a slight change there would be nice, including solar flares (witch could also roast planets :-)

2) Supernovae -> If 2 Stars collide or a Star dies there is an explosion but i feel a Supernova should have... well more "bang", maybe even generating a nebulae witch creates random suns.

3) Black hole, an event horizon / attriction disk would be nice arround it, well we still dont know how this disk looks like but i think its not compleately black as there is Gas and other things suck'd in.


Gameplay:

1) More Hints and Explenations, as i dont know how to solve most missions, just describe a bit more what to do or what is ment.

2) More stars, im especially interested in Red Supergiants

3) Regarding Point 1, i never managed to create a binary system but i think you need 2 Suns on the same State (e.g. medium Star) but one needs a higher mass... just some hint you know :-)

4) More Random events, maybe with a low chance to spawn.
-A few ideas here: Pulsar witch could send out GMB (Gamma Ray Bursts) that kill your Population if they get too close.

- Dead Stars, Stars that didnt managed to end in a Black hole or Supernova after they burn'd out and end in a.. i think white dwarf. So just a Planetoid with a huge mass, like a Trap if you arent enough careful in trying to catch it.

- Wormholes ? Just for fun you know.

5) Maybe a tweak to make it more easy to get a real solar system would be increasing the orbit radius of your planets and your Planet's Mass so they would more easily attract asteroids to orbit and create "moons"

6) As a lot of Players mentioned: Its sad if your ships get crush'd in your own Planets or are left behind. The First thing could be passed by some kind of bumpy-collision-detection where the ships got bumped arround your own planets. Or the Shipspawn is always opposite to the direction where the planet is moving (so they wont get crushed instantly).

Second. hmm dont know, a warping system would make it easy but i dont know if thats in your mind.



General:

What i like most about the game is that you have some kind of "sense" developement as you increase your mass, so it would be awesome if there is a way to create some kind of "galaxy" witch you can explore.. hmm or be a galaxy-core yourself... heh that would be awesome :D but i think its not possible to do it in a usefull time :-(

Looking forward to any improvements you are implementing, greate game witch was definately worth my 10 Euros ^^

[JackDownAHill]

I like the 'special' asteroid idea.
What i think could be a cool idea, is if the 'special' asteroids were green or something and when absorbed by a life-planet, the asteroid could either contain special alien tech that could help advance the planet, or it could have a alien disease that could kill or set-back the planet. So its not just a collect the green asteroids fest. :)

[dRed_Devilb]

I can't remember if someone also suggested it, but, how about the possibility of planets really having moons? Or an asteroid belt you can build little by little around your sun(s) when you reach that stage?
And I still stand by my sugestion of stars attracting smaller stars to create multiple star systems. x)

[RomanTheEvil]

As I've been playing the game I've noticed that there are a lot of mass conservation issues. Whenever something is destroyed, be it a planet star or anything, the mass just disappears.

This problem can be solved by making breaking planets turn into a bunch of asteroids and dust clouds (plus some mass lost in explosion), exploding stars turn into gas and dust clouds (nebulas), and destroyed asteroids turn into dust clouds.

Dust clouds should be then absorbable by asteroids, gas clouds should be absorbable by stars and planets with atmosphere or gas giants.

[prof1990]

dear Murudai,

i know you said you won't/can't, however multiplayer would be totally awesome.
perhaps you could get some third party to help you? if i could i would but i still have to start my studie gametechnology and currently know squat about net-coding.
perhaps there are other more skilled fans out there that could asist you? i have some ideas of how one would sync an infinite universe without killing the network so if you find volunteers but run out of ideas i would love to show you my mind.

also some kind of mod-support might be appreciated, but then again, its probably a pain to code.

sorry to bring this up again, please don't hate me your an awsome dev.

[Murudai]

I did at one stage have asteroids created when planets were destroyed, however there was a problem. Asteroids are "lower density" than planets, they take up more area per mass than planets (which is mainly just so you can see asteroids). So if an 100 mass planet is destroyed, even 10x 10 mass asteroids that's taking up WAY more space than the planet did, so would look bizarre (and it did when I tested it, which is why I removed it).

Another issue with that is that there is no way to really be punished. Something is destroyed, doesn't matter, you can just re-collect the mass right away on something else and your system keeps increasing. It would make the game too easy. The mass is lost as light and heat energy.


Just general dust clouds that you can hover over and gain mass though is a possibility. Although making it work nicely means a fluid simulation with gravity, and that's a LOT of work and a LOT of processing.

[SnakeChomp]

I would love if there was an option somewhere (maybe in god options) to select what music you would like to play in the background. I am sad that you cannot listen to the concert music except when doing that mission. Same for the final boss battle.

[RomanTheEvil]

Thanks for input, Murudai. Balance/aesthetics/realism issue is understandable.
As for dust clouds, you could just make an object (dust cloud) which would have simple shape and objects would be able to go through it without collision. Then some objects would be able to gain mass from it, while decreasing the mass and size of the cloud. Although it would not be too pretty, but would add additional mechanic to the game.

[Brilhasti]

Last I knew there are roaming black holes?

Just last night I had my 6s5p system shredded by a black hole.. and I wasn't on a mission :/

Scientist do believe there are roaming black holes. Things have a tendency to get slung around in space and black holes are no exception.

Also, all galaxies are moving away from one another anyway, so even the super massive ones at the center of most galaxies are moving. Nothing in the universe is stationary.

[Brilhasti]

I did at one stage have asteroids created when planets were destroyed, however there was a problem. Asteroids are "lower density" than planets, they take up more area per mass than planets (which is mainly just so you can see asteroids). So if an 100 mass planet is destroyed, even 10x 10 mass asteroids that's taking up WAY more space than the planet did, so would look bizarre (and it did when I tested it, which is why I removed it).

Another issue with that is that there is no way to really be punished. Something is destroyed, doesn't matter, you can just re-collect the mass right away on something else and your system keeps increasing. It would make the game too easy. The mass is lost as light and heat energy.


Just general dust clouds that you can hover over and gain mass though is a possibility. Although making it work nicely means a fluid simulation with gravity, and that's a LOT of work and a LOT of processing.

A planet need not explode into parts that equal its mass. Unless you've got that equal mass rule buried deep in code I don't think anyone would mind 5 asteroids instead of 10. I think, game play wise, that would work too. You'd experience a decline in gravity and that's fine after turning a planet into 'roids.

[Lord_PorkSword]

Regarding the dust clouds and how much work it'd take I can agree that it may be too much work for the effort and that a simpler elegant solution is needed.

Using my idea of colour variance, depending on how rich in matter the cloud is, maybe purely just have the cloud(in some animated 'floating' state) that visually doesn't change itself, except the colour of it.
As an alternative, maybe make the cloud dense and it just gets more transparent/faded as mass is extracted. Eventually leaving a cloud that is only partially visible.
For extra visual appeal maybe also have the center of clouds denser than the outer edges and have a few different colours for the clouds.

For gameplay depth, maybe some clouds can only be absorbed by certain stages of evolution.
Brown dust clouds can be absorbed by asteriods and planets.
Red hydrogen clouds can only be absorbed by stars+.
Blue helium clouds can only be absorbed by mid+ stars.
'Some other colour' heavy element clouds can only be absorbed by large+ stars.

With the addition of dense clouds you could then hide pirate bases/planets in these dense clouds so when your system draws near all the ships start launching from the cloud to attack. :D Maybe base a new mission around this? Find the hidden pirate base! (without arrows to point you to it)

[Blue_Whistle]

There won't be any galaxy stuff. The problem is that's an entire new game! Everything else fits nicely into the sandbox, where as galaxies would have to be totally separate. And as cool as it is, what can really happen? It'll work exactly like black holes, just with different graphics. I'd rather focus on refining the life and variety in the normal sandbox, not add something new that isn't really all that different to the rest.

Wow, okay, this thread is getting WAY more responses than I thought it would. Which is great! You're certainly passionate about the game and want to improve it.

A lot of these ideas are really great, but go against some of the gameplay and balancing that I've done. They would be nice, but could change the difficulties a lot and completely change how the game is played, which isn't fair on people who like it how it is now.


For example, I have no intention of ever letting players directly control life, nor having complicated tech trees. Why?

1) The game is not about the life and ships, it's more focused on the stars/planets you control.
2) The game is very chaotic, it is very easy to have things smashed up and lose them. If you invest too much time in a planet then that makes it super frustrating to lose it.
3) Controlling life would be too powerful. It would be a bit easy to destroy other systems!
4) Being able to control life and tech trees means I need to add a lot more controls. As it stands it's a very simple, easy game to pick up and play and I like that about it. Remember it's a "Casual" game. I don't want a dozen keys that could make it harder to play. I could do it through a menu, but pausing to edit on a menu breaks the flow, and I'm proud of the fact that you can 100% the game without hitting any menus or arbitrary pauses!


I can't change TOO much about the game. I can add things and tweak things, but I can't go TOO far. If I ever decide to make a Solar 3 though, well, as I'd be developing from scratch then I could really consider any of these ideas.

I agree with pretty much all of this.

My suggestions:

- Allow life to evolve so that it can colonise other lifeless planets in their system (but only given a sizable amount of time to prevent stars developing fully-manned solar systems too quickly, this isn't Battlestar Galatica after all)

- Add gas giants, in between planets and small stars, and make them inhospitable for life (that way life wouldn't be able to spread throughout an entire solar system so easily, and it makes plants more interesting).
You could also make it that gas giants have more gravity than planets and can thus attract asteroids more readily, making multi-stellar systems still possible without having to compromise on life on the smaller plants (as the gas giants will tend to "steal" the asteroids away from the smaller plants, preventing you from having to clear plants' asteroids all the time and thus turn them all into lifeless plants, while still allowing for planetary development).

- Add neutron stars. They could bridge the gap between large stars and black holes, being large, very dense stars that can suck in other stars to orbit around them, thus creating small systems resembling galaxies without actually having to have all the hundreds (or even thousands) of stars that would normally be (impractically) necessary. White dwarfs would probably not be worth it because their mass is not much more than that of normal suns, but neutron stars are very massive and could be a good lead-in to black holes.

[marcelo88boy]

There have been many great suggestion and I like the direction to the developer is heading in. More feelings of discovery and greater diversity would be excellent.

Definitely more astronomical objects such as comets, space stations, nebula, planetary rings, etc. I was also thinking of artifacts from classic sci-fi movies and space exploration vehicles such as Voyager or the Shuttle for inspiration. Some of these should be interactive but others there just to add more diversity. Some of these objects should be rare with some even being very rare and even exceptionally rare. This would create a mild surprise when discovered.

Diversity is key in this game because it is an large open sandbox. Therefore more colours in the background, not just green and more variation in the sounds from the life weapons. Not new sounds, just tweaks so that the sound varies.

Currently the orbits are all circular. Elliptical orbits where some planets may collide with each other is a possibility. Allowing the player to somehow manage the orbits to avoid collisions would be neat.

[Murudai]

Credit to a friend of mine for coming up with this idea, but it was way better than I was thinking!

So the idea is that life will have set "behaviors " and "tendencies" and other stats that are set and fixed once it is evolved. This might make the life more aggressive, more defensive, more likely to make certain ships, etc. Pretty much what I was saying before. The difference is you can't change it, no messy systems with special asteroids or whatever to modify it, it's just fixed. So the idea is to find and collect the planets with the life on it you want, then keep it and grow it. If the life is killed, the new life on the planet will have different behaviors.

Even better, this fits really well into the game as it is now, as it merely makes life more complex without having to change gameplay or other things, and it isn't hard for me to do because much of this system is already in the game :D

So after I do my latest patch to fix missions, this is what I will work on. Expect it in the coming weeks.

[Blue_Whistle]

Credit to a friend of mine for coming up with this idea, but it was way better than I was thinking!

So the idea is that life will have set "behaviors " and "tendencies" and other stats that are set and fixed once it is evolved. This might make the life more aggressive, more defensive, more likely to make certain ships, etc. Pretty much what I was saying before. The difference is you can't change it, no messy systems with special asteroids or whatever to modify it, it's just fixed. So the idea is to find and collect the planets with the life on it you want, then keep it and grow it. If the life is killed, the new life on the planet will have different behaviors.

Even better, this fits really well into the game as it is now, as it merely makes life more complex without having to change gameplay or other things, and it isn't hard for me to do because much of this system is already in the game :D

So after I do my latest patch to fix missions, this is what I will work on. Expect it in the coming weeks.

If I may, I think that's a good idea but just be careful how you implement it IMO. The luck system of doing it is good, in keeping with the game's existing style of forming and executing life, but make sure the same system that is used to create certain "styles" of life on existing planets also takes place when constructing planets, or else the gameplay will become biased for/against making planets as oppose to finding them or vice versa. I also think that you should expand on the different stellar stages if possible because the game would benefit from a healthy balance of emphasis on life AND stellar evolution.

EDIT: I don't want to sound too critical though, I think that's a cool idea and definitely a good way to develop the life system. Just to be nosey, any chance of you adding more stages to the stellar life cycle? Or gas giants?

[Murudai]

The problem with stellar evolution is there isn't any depth to it. Stars have mass/density, brightness, slight compositional differences and that's about it. What's so good about a gas giant, what would it do in the game that's different from the existing system? Same with dwarfs, what would it to? And neutron stars, and what do they add to the gameplay?

As much as the 'real' universe is a nice inspiration, a lot of it is just the same, there isn't a huge amount of variation.

[Blue_Whistle]

I can see your point, but what I mean is take those elements of reality and apply them to the game in a way that allows for more stellar evolution, while actually adding to the gameplay already in place. For example, a neutron star would be a good bridge between the large star and the black hole because the stars simply allow for solar systems, while black holes eventuate the beginning of a new universe within the game. A neutron star could be a good way to have people create clusters of solar systems, like a galaxy (which, admit it, would be really cool at least just to see) but without needing to have tons of stars making things excessively complicated.

Similarly, a gas giants allow for the gap between small planets and stars to be filled, allowing for planets to have TONS of moons and possibly have their own affect on other plants' orbits without having them ACTUALLY orbit them. Being a gas giant might not be a big deal, but it could be another stage in the evolution of a solar system and allow people to construct more interesting solar systems, and have plants that serve a purpose beyond having life on them.

Again, those are just suggestions, but I guess I'm trying to say that I really like the stellar evolution in the game as well as the life aspect, and I would love to see it developed. But as always Murudai, no pressure, because the game is already awesome :)

[Indrek]

What's so good about a gas giant, what would it do in the game that's different from the existing system?
Well, like I suggested a few pages back, it could be an alternative stage in a planet's evolution. It would require the concept of atmosphere, and getting life to evolve on a planet would take the right combination of mass and timing for building an atmosphere. Do it too late (ie. with too large a planet), and the atmosphere will be so thick the planet evolves into a gas giant, which cannot support life. However, the thick atmosphere gives it protection from asteroids, allowing them to be absorbed even if they're not orbiting. They could then be used as a sort of cushion or buffer on outer orbits, to protect life planets on inner orbits from asteroid clouds.

Also, it'd enable people to create more realistic copies of our own solar system. Of course we'd also need ice giants, asteroid belts and so on, but let's take it one step at a time :)

Speaking of gas giants, another possible evolutionary step between planets (specifically gas giants) and stars would be brown dwarfs, which could act like small protostars, with perhaps only one planet orbiting them. I'm not sure how much gameplay value that would add, though. Probably not much.

Same with dwarfs, what would it to? And neutron stars, and what do they add to the gameplay?
White dwarfs and neutron stars could be the result of small and medium stars, respectively, dying.

If white dwarfs are limited to only a few lifeless planets, they could be used to make some star missions more challenging, as you can't go in with fully developed solar system. Or if they're allowed to siphon stellar material from companion stars, they could be a stealthy way of taking over solar systems - fly in, become an existing star's stellar companion, siphon away most of its material until just the core is left, at which point the white dwarf is reignited as a blue star and takes over the solar system.

Neutron stars could be the step between regular stars and black holes. They could be able to absorb small amounts of matter (asteroids, possibly also smaller planets) directly. Their intense radiation might attract life from large distances away, though, which would of course behave just as aggressively as it usually does.

Some of this again repeats what I suggested a few pages back, so apologies in advance if you've already rejected those ideas in your mind. Still, I think with some work the current stellar evolution could be made less linear, with more variety between the first and last stages.

[Pelik]

As you become a star, it becomes quite impossible to have planets with more than 3-4 moons.

So having scalazable orbit for planet when they host moons would be nice.

Another thing that would be nice is to get a temporary ring around planets (like saturn or Jupiter) when a moon or something is destroyed around it (just fashion)

In the same idea having an asteroid belt when a planet explod in proximity of a star but at a constant distance from it (like 5th orbit) and that can turn back into a planet if something mess with it...


Having 2 types of planet (gaz and solid), gaz planet couldn't host life but can become bigger than life hosting planet and that can crush it, would be nice too. And in the same Idea gaz planet would orbit only after the Asteroid belt.

For the background, Gaz planet would become star by absorbing other gaz planets or asteroids, And Life planet would be victim of its own technology (war or overproduction) creating a huge explosion that transforms it to a star...
So it could become a star by killing like 100 + enemies (war) or by absorbing moons or asteroid (overproduction).

Size of stars should be more realistic, big stars should be twice as big as medium one and medium one twice as small one.

First orbit planet shouldn't be able to host life cause they are too close from the star.

Stars should have an ability like eruption that could burn a life planet and reset it to small planet (with friendly fire on our planet), or transform first planet to a projectil or something (you can imagin infinit type of weapon for each type of star)

Planet should be able to have real moon, not just some asteroid, once an asteroid is big enough it should first transform to a moon an then to a planet.

REAL moons would stay at the farest orbit and would be a spaceship base, like this you wont destroy your own ships everytime they bail out from you planet when having a lot of asteroid orbiting.


In fact resizing everything to larger scale could give the same feeling that you have when you play spore(tm) at the begining when you can see very big big things passing next to you... And camera could zoom out and in depending of what type of celestial object you are.

An asteroid life is hard !

[Leak]

I would love if there was an option somewhere (maybe in god options) to select what music you would like to play in the background. I am sad that you cannot listen to the concert music except when doing that mission. Same for the final boss battle.
Well, there is this little post (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=23014483&postcount=86) where Mr. Solar 2 himself announced that the soundtrack will be released for free in a week or so - that should give you ample opportunity to listen to all tracks whenever you want... :)

np: Burial - Near Dark (Untrue)

[(GwF)haveallama]

I dont know whats been said but i thought its pointless to type it out so i'll give you the link :)

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1935436

It has some ideas from a few people. I don't know how much of it has been answered or not. Just thought it would help.

Edit: After reading your post about no multiplay, just ignore the first suggestion haha :)

[Murudai]

I just thought of a brilliant idea. Currently when you level up your multi star, the stars in the sandbox around you stay the same.

But... instead I'm going to make it so the stars around you are roughly as big as you. So you're a 20 star mutli-star system? Expect to see a bunch of massive 20 multi-star systems like you around to fight. This should really keep the challenge on the game, even as you grow super large.

[alco64]

Maybe make the percentage of same sized systems as you roughly 25%-50%? So you still get those easier to destroy systems out there to level up your planets to take on the same sized systems as you once you meet them.

Edit: Also, not sure if this has been suggested yet either, but how do you feel about adding the ability to hold more planets when you begin to have bigger multi-star systems?

Say, 1 large star you hold 10 planets total.
2-3 large stars and you can hold 11 planets. 4-6 large stars and you can hold 12. Sort of a way to encourage people to build up their multi-star systems!
Let me know what you think :)

[matthewfarmery]

that sounds like good ideas to me

[bmate]

Here's one. Don't make homing missiles follow you infinitely, cuz they probably do and sucks that you can't evade them. Or I may just suck and can't do it.

[Kilgoria]

Sometimes it's the little things that have a big impact on a game. I like how in this game you can accelerate your system through space and hear a roaring sound that one might expect from a spaceship. Granted, it's not realistic, as there's no sound in space, but it is fun. One little tweak to this I'd like to see is to have the larger objects or systems be able to travel faster than smaller ones. So for example, a large star could travel at extremely fast speeds, whereas an asteroid is much slower. Again, it's probably not realistic, but it is a neat little tweak and I bet it's rather trivial to code as well. :)

[Gruber]

My suggestion:
-Better Life/Planet Interaction
-Choose Targets and stuff to Atack
-Galaxys and Nebulosas
-And another kind of bizarre stars!

I really apreciate ur work, keep the good job man!
Thanks.

[TBird]

I can confirm that I think the sandbox aspect is superior and I don't like the missions a lot.

The part I had the most fun with so far was getting my life planets to level and watching them build more bases and spaceships. It would be really cool if you could add more of that.

[MikeHoncho42]

If you make the game more sand-boxy (which I really like the sound of), I would like a few unique things placed in the world, but only one of them, in one place. Like say you find the Voyager probes, just floating there. I could care less if there is a reward for finding these things, but achievements for finding, say, 5 "pretty cool things" would be neat.

[Panimu]

One thing I keep missing is a mini map showing what's around you. I understand it wouldn't cover 'everything' as you randomise what is around the player, but just showing a few screens wide might be nice.

But then this keyed into another idea, don't just give players mini maps have life bearing planets have a random chance to develop a bonus technology.

So the first possible one would be Deep Space Scanners that provide you with a mini map. Maybe a 2nd or 3rd scanner enabled planet would increase the range of it.

Death Ray - the planet loses its point defences and instead has a death-star style mega ray that shoots only at planets. Ships or other objects caught in the beam by mistake should take damage.

Deflector - the planet has a special shield around (lets say) 33% of it's circumference. Anything hitting this is absorbed completly without damage to mass or shields. Could vary this idea by a) having the area shielded rotated, either randomly or to face enemy ships (either way, rotation should be slow) or b)having it bounce incoming projectiles back instead of absorbing them.

Solar Tech - this planet is more heavily focused on solar technology. By looking at the number of stars in the system and their brightness (i.e. use both to calculate a total 'lumen') the planet shield and point defence power would be scaled up (or down). I'd suggest that for a single-brightest-star the PD/shield power be no more than 100% of current.

Agrarians - a sort of booby prize. These guys never develop high tech to build shields and space ships.

Colonisers - launches a colony ship that lands on a non-life planet and immediatly upgrades it to life bearing. This may be too powerful so maybe make it spawn very slowly or only once? The ship could travel in an ititially random direction, looking to settle the first empty planet in its path, not necessarily one in the system it launched from. The player could manouvere to put itself in the way of course.

Escapists - For some reason these guys don't feel safe in your system, they launch a colony ship like the Colonisers (or maybe 2 or 3?) but in doing so the planet they leave behind is down graded to a non-life planet (or maybe it blows up, so they're escaping a natural disaster?)

I don't think a planet should be guaranteed to develop one of these. Maybe a 30% chance to develop an addon, and not all of the addons beings of equal chance after that?

Anyway, just some thoughts..

[Mr_Sam_]

Difficulties:
i think about two:

Normal: the standart gameplay, the way that are you playing now.

Advanced:

Maybe in a cycle off 3-10 minutes,a few crowds of asteroids rain at planet or system but you are able to collect them if you are able to.

IF you are unlucky you will meet a dark matter asteroit every 5 minutes.

You have to collect more mass to grow bigger and bigger that means you have to play longer to become a planet --> living planet --> star --> and going on...


Edit:

I did at one stage have asteroids created when planets were destroyed, however there was a problem. Asteroids are "lower density" than planets, they take up more area per mass than planets (which is mainly just so you can see asteroids). So if an 100 mass planet is destroyed, even 10x 10 mass asteroids that's taking up WAY more space than the planet did, so would look bizarre (and it did when I tested it, which is why I removed it).


maybe you can spawn 2-4 asteroids with a mass of 2-4 when a planet is destroyed. i think it doesnt matter but i depends on how does it look like then :p

[Panimu]

Nebulas? Slows down all entities travelling through it but bodies within slowly acrete mass. Could be a lot of work to do this well.. possibly it should disperse if a fast moving body hits it for example, or split into two etc.

It felt distinctly wrong that the universe had no centre to it either, or should I say galaxy..


(Before any smart alecs reply, I know which I should say, I'm trying to make a point)

[JConfide]

When I discovered the following...
Playing as an antimatter asteroid and made it to a black hole
...I hoped for a white hole :D but got a black one instead. ;)

[Strich]

I have justed played the demo at the moment and I will tell you the reason why I didn't bought the full version yet:
The idea of the game is good and it makes fun to see you growing. But this games isn't a real sandbox game. Just because you can choose where to fly, doesn't make it "sandbox" (I hope I am not wrong with the assumption, that this should be a sandbox game? On steam it is advertised as one).

I miss the part of creation.
You can't create something. To collect asteroids -> (life) -> planets -> stars is no creation, it is more as leveling.

You can check very easily that what i said is true: If there would be a multiplayer (which I strongly suggest if your game should be still be played after a year) what could you create with others? Nothing, it would be more like a solo player just with another real person.

So what I strongly suggest is:
Implement the "create something" factor
Implement a multiplayer

Without those two things, your game, even if it's awesome at the beginning, will be boring after a short time, because everything is discovered (which is hardly reachable in a game where you can create things). Sure in your game you can collect stars and Planets and more stars and more planets and ... you see what I mean?

[Pelik]

Be able to release solar eruption sometime (with a timer)and use it as weapon against life planets !!!

http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/2006/04/16/solar-eruption/

[iLegacy]

- Bring back the rings of the demo (the rings where the planets travel), looked soo cool when to grow/shrink but then i bougth the full version: gone (activate/deactive option would be nice)

- Controllable via Controller

- More possibilities to grow a planet to a star - e.g. by fighting (collecting asteroids with a 10-planet system is very hard and not that funny)

[Indrek]

- Bring back the rings of the demo (the rings where the planets travel), looked soo cool when to grow/shrink but then i bougth the full version: gone (activate/deactive option would be nice)
If you mean the planets' orbits, you can toggle them with the "O" key.

[Murudai]

- Bring back the rings of the demo (the rings where the planets travel), looked soo cool when to grow/shrink but then i bougth the full version: gone (activate/deactive option would be nice)

- Controllable via Controller

- More possibilities to grow a planet to a star - e.g. by fighting (collecting asteroids with a 10-planet system is very hard and not that funny)

What rings? You can press 'O' to turn on orbits circles, if that's what you mean.

It works with Xbox 360 controller, but no other controllers are supported at this time.

If you want to grow planets, then getting a full 10 planets is not a good idea! You should just have a few planets and focus on the one, otherwise you'll spread yourself too thin and trying to juggle such a massive system isn't easy.

[Borodin]

I was thinking of putting in more missions, but what seems to be pretty apparent (from the global achievements at least) is that people are perfectly happy to play around in the sandbox and most don't finish the missions (which is a shame, because the final boss and ending are really quite epic).


For me, the main reasons I don't play the missions are:

The ones I've tried seem to be tough, and usually fatal to my star system. I don't really want to save before starting every mission
It isn't obvious what I have to do, or when or why I have succeeded
I often feel there is something I should know to succeed. (For instance, one mission suggests that I get rid of any life to stand a chance, but how?) So I keep playing sandbox to understand enough to play a mission
The missions seem to apply to a particular level of system, and become irrelevant if I have no life or too many planets


Having said that, I was really looking forward to the quests that the demo described - they just seem to be a little inaccessible.

[Borodin]

But feel free to post your suggestions here and I'll read them all!

I think the HUD needs some work - it is difficult to track individual planets and stars whose mass you want to increase, and there's no reason not to allow the status of all the system bodies to be displayed at once (or perhaps all stars / life planets / no life planets). Perhaps also incorporate (toggleable) mass (health) bars on the main screen, or give some indication of how close a body is to changing status.

Perhaps some better clues about how things are influenced? Sandbox games can become so completely experimental that it is possible to entirely miss something that makes the game playable. Of course these things are hard to spot when you have coded them yourself!

[Murudai]

If you die in a mission your system is respawned to the state when you started the mission.

You need to read the text carefully. There some eccentric dialogue, but at the end it should explain quite clearly exactly what you need to do. Make sure to play smart, if you need a bigger system to complete a mission then go out and make a bigger system! Most of the missions are far easier when you tackle them with a huge system, rather than a tiny one. I'm surprised how few users manage to figure that out.

How else would you get rid of life, you smash your planet into things and destroy it! I have actually changed the mission you're talking about though, so it isn't as frustrating. It'll come in with a patch.

As above, that was just that one mission that required no life, and I have fixed that mission. Any of the other missions in the game can be completed with any level of system (although it's far easier with a bigger system) and the occasional mission that does require a certain setup will tell you to do that before starting the mission.


Thanks for the good feedback!

[iLegacy]

What rings? You can press 'O' to turn on orbits circles, if that's what you mean.

It works with Xbox 360 controller, but no other controllers are supported at this time.

If you want to grow planets, then getting a full 10 planets is not a good idea! You should just have a few planets and focus on the one, otherwise you'll spread yourself too thin and trying to juggle such a massive system isn't easy.

Thanks! The rings are back - wohoo :D With controller it feels way better. Cool!

Hm, for what does my ships get XP?

[Dethstar]

I like this concept more than any idea I have seen for years. I think this is the concept that could really be the next Civilization of the next 15 years with the right funding and development behind it. I hope someone buys you out for a fortune as its a fantastic idea.

1. I would like to see this concept fully realise its potential. I see a modular universe builder. Built expansion by expansion (People could just buy the ones for the features they want to add to their universe. To create a really living breathing Universe.

I have masses and masses of ideas for this but just to explain some of the things I would like to see.

A. Holy grail. A great new engine that really shows off the beauty of the Universe.

- Planetary spin.
- Planetary types. Lava/Volcanic - Gas giants, Ringed planets. etc
- Bigger range of scale so you can show features such as moons etc.
- Alien races that look more identifiable etc.
- All the usual modern game eye candy.

B.Expansion - Alien races. I am think it would be nice to be able to use a "nurture or hurtya" system encouraging some "human" interest. Are you beneficient or a bit of a git, do you throw the odd planet at some cheeky upstarts or do you provide the odd boon to them or stop a war etc.

- Varied races which learn and (if left unsmashed can develop over time.
- They develop planets and you can see this, ie orbitals etc.
- Maybe they progress technologies to the point of being a real force themselves. Planets move, suns are harnessed for energy and maybe one day they have the rare potential to ascend to the point where they could even begin to challenge the players god like perspective.

C: Call it the Quantum pack or something. Adds more physics and depth to the Universe.

- Increases the type of stellar bodies - Pulsars, Quasars, Gamma ray bursters, Neutron star, darkmatter etc etc etc.
- Progression of God like power for players can tinker with the physics parametres of a local object to see what it does or use the physics to create a desired reaction.
- More immersive universe. Supernovas, implosions and scale.


Basically if I could have anything or spare the funding for you to build this to reach its potential as a product I would want to see the Universe builder concept developed. As a product its emminently marketable in my opinion and I can see it generating extremely good recurring revenue if put together right, in a way that restores some gamer faith in a market full or formula written clones that lack the innovation of titles like powermonger, populous, magic carpet, Elite etc etc etc.

Great job. Someone buy this idea or give this chap the funding it deserves!.

[Borodin]

If you die in a mission your system is respawned to the state when you started the mission.

Aha! That helps a lot. Does the save appear in the list of save games? Perhaps this helps you understand why I was playing sandbox to understand the game mechanics, but it wouldn't have taught me that point.

You need to read the text carefully. There some eccentric dialogue, but at the end it should explain quite clearly exactly what you need to do. Make sure to play smart, if you need a bigger system to complete a mission then go out and make a bigger system!


But the interplay between stars, planets, and spaceships isn't at all obvious. It is genuinely tough to know whether I want more or fewer of any of them. Especially at the start of the game, where all I have is a single uninhabited planet and have never seen anything beyond it, I assume that any quest I am offered is playable with my current might.

Also, consider the 'Aliens' quest, which seems to simply spawn more than usual of the fleets of white ships. I could tell that there were several waves, but when I got the 'quest complete' message (a sound effect for that too, please?!) I came across yet another couple of fleets that were randomly generated.


Most of the missions are far easier when you tackle them with a huge system, rather than a tiny one. I'm surprised how few users manage to figure that out.


As I posted before, I think you need to be careful about what seems obvious to you, having written the code, and what the average gamer understands in the context of his experience of gaming and knows at the beginning of the game. Yes, traditionally bigger with more guns is better, but that idea is blown out of the water almost straight away by (as the tutorial text says) life being a nuisance as well as a benefit.

In particular, once my first asteroid reaches critical mass and gains life, the spaceships' only function seems to be to frustrate me when I try to get more asteroids in orbit. It is only later on that there is any hint of them being of any use at all. I think I was also unlucky with my choice of quests, in that any vessels are a hindrance rather than a help.


How else would you get rid of life, you smash your planet into things and destroy it! I have actually changed the mission you're talking about though, so it isn't as frustrating. It'll come in with a patch.


It isn't apparent at first that you can destroy your spaceships by moving into them, if only because, if your system is moving fairly slowly, they dodge the bodies quite nicely. I know now that each ship's death has an explosion sound effect, but the same sound plays when anything hits anything else and very often there is a cacophany of explosions that just tells you 'stuff is colliding'. In comparison, the 'tweet' effect when a body goes into orbit is very useful, at least as an encouragement that you have done something right and perhaps you should hit CTRL pretty soon!

Also, I really hoped I didn't have to play a game of 'stellar conkers', which reduces the game to endlessly accumulating asteroids and then losing them in an offensive collision.


As above, that was just that one mission that required no life, and I have fixed that mission. Any of the other missions in the game can be completed with any level of system (although it's far easier with a bigger system) and the occasional mission that does require a certain setup will tell you to do that before starting the mission.


The essence of a sandbox game is that you can explore the game mechanics, and the puzzle of exploring how things work is part of the fun. But you should be clear what aspects of the game are wonders to be discovered, and what are basic functions that you want to tell the player before he playes or during the tutorial.

I have a three-star ten-planet system, and these a few examples of what I am unclear on


How do stars gain mass? I know that I can get a planet into orbit and absorb it, but my stars seem to grow even when I haven't done that.
My stars are small, medium and large. Can I control which one grows?
How do I increase the upper limit of my planets' XP?
What dictates the number of a planet's surface guns?
Is there any advantage to having more stars in my system, apart from increasing the maximum number of orbiting planets?


While it is a legitimate decision to make me work all of these things out for myself, I wonder if that is your intention.

One final thought. I believe would be nice if the quests started out really easy and part of the tutorial. For instance, "Add one asteroid to your mass", "Create a planet that will sustain life" and so on. The same applies to achievements - many more of them and some much simpler ones.

Thank you for reading.


Thanks for the good feedback!

Thank you for a great game, that sounds like it will be getting even better!

[Borodin]

It is nice to know that the game is saved at the start of a quest, but having experimented I believe there are two things missing:


If I succeed the quest without dying, I could still be left with very little remaining of my system (perhaps just a lifeless planet) with no means to try again
Completing a quest gives me no reward at all. In fact I will certainly have lost mass, and possibly a planet or two or even a star. It is like driving through a tornado - your reward is your survival - except that it is better to die than to limp home.


You have an extraordinary game that is attractive and addictive to play. But the visual and play rewards of simply understanding and controlling the physics and building a large system outweigh what your missions offer at present.

I stongly believe you are onto a winner!

[iLegacy]

I wish that there will be more interactions with other systems. Currently i just can kick out planets and collect them. I would like absorb smaller stars than mine or collect a whole system if it's small enough :)

[Excellius]

If I fail the quest without dying, I could be left with very little remaining of my system (perhaps just a lifeless planet) with no means to try again
Completing a quest gives me no reward at all. In fact I will certainly have lost mass, and possibly a planet or two or even a star. It is like driving through a tornado - your reward is your survival - except that it is better to die than to limp home.


I stongly believe you are onto a winner!
Well, i see two points i should really react to:

If you plan to do the missions, it is wise to save your favorite systems before starting them. That way you can re-spawn your old system once you are done - and yes, the missions will still remain completed that way. With this method you can do missions without having to worry about attrition or a lot of buildup time. (And it is equally fun to be able to hurl your system right into another one without fearing the damage)

Twelve hours ago i hadn't really bother with missions, since the sandbox was fun enough, and i didn't see a real reward for them either (Except achievements and the fun while doing them). Yet this evening i decided to do a few for funs sake and actually spend this entire evening finishing them all. And yes, it was REALLY worth every second.

You get the fun missions themselves, a very nice final mission, and a (in my eyes) very worthwhile reward to boot once you are entirely done (I am being vague on this since it would really spoil the fun if i told you what happens, and what you get).

In other words, save some good systems for doing the missions, then try, try, try and complete them all. You will not be disappointed with the final outcome. :D

[uberphreek]

I was kinda on the fence about this game until I saw the dev actually posts in here, and everyone seems to really like the game. awesome!

Looks like I'll pick it up tomorrow.

[Disocverer]

Hey Hey Hey just one question...
What about a real story :D?
I would have some nice idears...

[Insano-Man]

So I had some simple ideas while I was playing a night or two ago. Basic things to give the game depth without overcomplicating it (at least, so far as I think).

Edit: Re-reading what I posted, maybe not so basic.

Let's start with basic interactions, beginning with orbit.

My first idea in this regard was decaying and collision course orbits.
Falling orbits would be marked with a yellow line. If the planet is a life planet without a shield or a lifeless entity, the object will eventually spiral downwards into its parent and be absorbed as mass. Shielded life planets will incur shield loss. Falling orbits can be corrected by moving your system or planet away from the object. These would occur rarely and would usually be the result of the orbiting body being knocked inwards towards its parent without being knocked out of orbit entirely. To take in a body on a falling orbit to begin with would require some really bungled capture efforts.

Drifting orbits would be marked by an orange line. Opposite to falling orbits, these would simply be objects that are slowly, but surely drifting away from their parent body, moving further away with each rotation. These can be corrected by moving towards the drifting object - although, this may further upset falling objects in your system and increase their rate of descent - or simply let it fly away, then recapture it.

Collision courses would be marked with a red line, possibly flashing if the two objects are moving at high speed. The name is what the feature would be; two objects sharing a common orbit path with opposing directions or varying speeds. Like falling and drifting orbits, these would be difficult to achieve by chance and primarily happen when a player goofs up a capture attempt majorly or intends to make it happen. I figure this would help with frustration; after all, who wants to lose a fully-experienced life planet just because you were trying to get some buffer mass for your star?

Others have mentioned stars joining together into multi-star systems rather than simply through a planet's spontaneous combustion. This is something I support. I would imagine it would be fairly simple to reuse the existing orbit code and put it to work adding stars to the center object group when a star achieves orbit over another star. Obviously, it would be best if this only applied to lone stars encountering other lone stars, which, as I've seen, is usually a very rare thing in the game. Knocking planets from a star without any life in your system and achieving orbit with your intended partner would be a difficult feat indeed, as you'd undoubtedly lose mass knocking planets away and may even be destroyed outright if you foul up your pairing attempt. I feel the risk justifies the reward.

Life is my other focus. There are many ways to improve it and many ways to absolutely ruin it. I agree that control over life should be indirect and never approach turning the game into a pseudo-RTS - that's not what it was meant to be.
Technology and behavior patterns have been suggested a number of times. I know I'm throwing sand in the desert here, but keeping my mouth shut isn't one of my strong suits, so I'll go ahead and say how I feel things should be done.
I know you don't want life to be overly complex, but want it to definitely be a fleshed-out part of the game. Here, I favor the minimalist approach with my first subject: technology.

The way I see technology working is a bar similar to evolution. As time goes on and a planet with life hasn't been bombed or beaten into barren wastes or pulverized dust, the creatures on that planet progress technologically and make the bar move further. The higher the technology level, the better everything of theirs is; ship health, shields, firepower, and so on. Certain points in the tech level might unlock interesting abilities for their planet or ships, like capital ships being able to warp small distances to close with enemies or fighters being able to avoid half of all missile salvoes fired at them. New ship types might also be unlocked, like capital ships with beam weapons or fighters that fire small missiles.
Technology would also be a requirement for life to develop space travel, where it'd occupy half of the progress bar that is currently dictated by evolution and need to complete before the planet could attain spacefaring status. When it does, the bar expands and the experience bar appears underneath it.
Technology would also help beaten civilizations return more effectively. When a world is devastated, but not beaten down into a lifeless planet, the civilization there will only need to rebuild their technology to get back into space instead of dying out and needing to begin the cycle of evolution again. Additionally, the higher the technology on the planet, the less experience lost for being defeated; 100% technology might mean the planet will start with half of its experience when it returns, while 10% would mean nothing. When a society rises from the ashes, however, it'd only regain a fraction of the technology it had before - maybe 10-30% of its previous amount added to what it has to research to get back into space.
Experience would also factor into what technology does. Remember when I mentioned that fighters could dodge missiles? Well, not if your pilots are a bunch of greenhorn nobodies who've been doing nothing but shooting asteroids in their military history. Inexperienced civilizations might only be able to dodge 25% of all missiles fired at them or make very short warps. The better prepared a society is for war, the better it'll be able to make use of all of its fancy technology.
The player would, obviously, have no control over planets growing more technologically sophisticated and be unable to do anything short of grinding whoever he doesn't like down into dust. Life does what it wants and doesn't take orders from sun-cults or dirt-huggers.

- Maybe they progress technologies to the point of being a real force themselves. Planets move, suns are harnessed for energy and maybe one day they have the rare potential to ascend to the point where they could even begin to challenge the players god like perspective.

This is something I really like. It would be interesting to see the kinds of dynamics this sort of thing would introduce, where life begins to see the player not as a stroke of good or bad luck, but an actual entity guiding events in the Universe. This could be a good thing - such as a loyal race furthering your powers or trying their best to predict your movements and keep themselves from disrupting them - or a bad thing - such as a society you'd previously abused or tried to destroy making a threat of itself.
I'm not quite sure how to make friendly "god-life" work properly without them directly communicating with or taking orders from the player, but I would nevertheless like to see an implementation of this in some way or another.

My other thoughts on life were about the previously mentioned "focused development" of specific planets; red planet only builds fighters, green planet only builds missile cruisers, etc.
My thoughts on planet strategies were a little less set in stone. The way I see it, military tactics are an ever-changing, ever-evolving concept, much like life itself. You use what works, not what looks or feels good. So if your fighters are constantly dying, you stop focusing on them and start focusing on capital ships or missile cruisers. If your fighters are succeeding and achieving the most, you focus on them. If all of your vessels end up sucking equally, you work on improving your defenses in one way or another.
So, that's how I feel it should work. If one planet sees certain strategies failing to succeed, it begins to adopt new methods or construction patterns. These methods could also be affected by how the planet develops as its military history becomes more storied and it gains experience; let's say a planet earned most of its experience with fighters. Then that planet will be biased towards building more fighters and less concerned when that plan begins to fail, but not entirely resistant to change. These biases could be indicated by the color of the planet's UI elements; blue might indicate a bias towards defense, purple might indicate a bias towards fighters, yellow towards missile cruisers, etc.

In the end, I feel every new feature makes the game more complicated, but I also feel that impact isn't as much when the player doesn't have a lot of say in it. And since life is one of those things, I'd like to think my suggestions don't go against any sort of design direction too harshly.

"TL;DR, stop making these huge walls of text" - no

[Ghosticle]

I'd just like to be able to choose different modes of gameplay for sandbox.

Such as missions, or ship wars, experimental, building etc.

Missions obviously would be the normal game where you do the missions (I finished all of them, but I can't get the hobo star acheivement sadly)

Ship wars could be non-moving systems (the planets and stuff would still orbit but you don't control the stars) and you direct ships in a sort of tactical game against other systems, and maybe you take over ones you deafeat to gain more ships, or just destroy the enemy planets while distracting their fleet so they can't produce more ships.

Experimental would be what is already in the game as just the regular sandbox to play around in.

And building would be where you can spawn objects and choose where the go and what they are a part of to make a sort of realistic universe... (and then launch things into each other)

I'm sure people can think of other game modes they'd like.

[Cybermoose]

Great game.

I'd like to see the more stars you've got = immune to systems with less.

You can smash into them and steal planets easier and have some great destruction.

Or maybe you get this option when you complete it. What's the god mode I've read about?

cheers

[Cybermoose]

Asteroids that hit your star(s) get absorbed and help your weakest planet grow. (provding you have max planets in orbit?)

[Farlong]

I was thinking of putting in more missions, but what seems to be pretty apparent (from the global achievements at least) is that people are perfectly happy to play around in the sandbox and most don't finish the missions (which is a shame, because the final boss and ending are really quite epic).

Let me just say that I understand why people don't finish missions.

Its been a long time since I raged this hard from a game. And there are a few reasons why:
Life on your planets are sometimes needed, but without control they will often lose you the mission. Like destroying life on a planet, but not the planet itself. Without control of the fighters, they will just continue to shoot at it. They don't prioritize at all, just attack everything until it is no more.

Missions with asteroids are very frustrating since they can get stuck in orbit around random planets, get shot by nomad ships or hit a big object and disintergrate.

When failing a mission, you have to travel to a location. After arriving, you need to travel to another random location for the mission itself. If you fail, you need to travel both distances again.
Missions should come with some sort of retry-button. Having to travel 2x10 seconds to try a mission for the 17th time takes the fun out of it.

Random stellar objects in missions ruin them. Your success is based on luck rather then control/skill most of the time.
Like dodging stars/asteriods and getting to 1 second when a nomad ship shoots you down.

Evolving in mid-mission ruins all progress. Very irritating as an asteriod. Not as big an issue with the others.

These are my issues with missions as it stands now. I can try my best and do good work until some random nomad army or some solar system ruins all my progress instantly.

I wish missions were just me and my objectives.

Still a fun game, but missions are just hair-pullingly frustrating. That is at least the reason I only play sandbox mode.

[TBird]

I really like the idea with different planet types people have brought up (i.e. red planets building fighters, blue ones missile cruisers, etc).

Another thing that would be awesome is if there were rare but more powerful planets. So let's say a certain planet (earth like) produces a special kind of powerful spaceship but you will only encounter them once every 30 minutes or so. That would enrourage spending time on collecting your personal planet setup.

Oh, and I would like some sort of reward for fighting huge enemy systems. Maybe drop some sort of token and when you get 50 you can add an additional planet to your system ?

[luke_xd]

I'd love to see new missions and achievements relating to them. I'm still working on mission related achievements, they can last a long time. I found them the most challenging and entertaining parts of the game. The sandbox side of it is great but it's nice to have some variety to switch between.

[Rosen_rot_stein]

what id love to see

simple RPG elements.. like a tech tree bring in more types of universe life. (ill give examples)

We could introduce gas clouds... no not a fart lol. This gas cloud would be classed in different colours for different elements.

---Planets----
Small planet
Live Planet - space ships
Large Planet -space ships

---You can choose to stop----
Then to progress onwards to have a gas planet by having gas into the orbit and slowly will grow. (same as asteroids)

Small Gas planet
Large Gas planet

Then what type of gas u have consumed most of will determine the tree u will follow in the star life.

------STARS----
--------------------------------------------------------
Blue = Blue/white sun this tree would need alot of gas as these suns burn brightly and fast
-100 blue gas

Small Blue Star - 5 planets - might remove?

Medium Blue Star - 7 Planets

Giant Blue Star - 8 Planets

Super Giant Star - 10 Planet

*nova*

White dwarf - 3 Planets

Black Dwarf - 0 Planets (find a black hole and be eaten and cause the crunch)

-----------------------------------------------------------
Yellow = Bright/medium Yellow sun these stars burn slower and live a medium length life
- 60 yellow gas

Small Yellow Star - 4 Planets

Medium Yellow Star - 5 Planets

Large Yellow Star - 6 Planets

Red Giant - 8 Planets

*supernova*

Neutron star - 4 Planets

Black hole - Crunch
---------------------------------------------------------

Red = Dark/medium star these suns burn so and steady and have a very long life (they think up to 1 trillion years)
- 40 Red gas

Very Small Red Star - 3 Planets

Small Red Star - 4 Planets

Medium Red Stars - 5 Planets

Red Giant - 8 Planets

*nova*

Magnetar Star - 8 Planets

Black hole - Crunch

---------------------------------------------------------------
Anyways thats the brain storm ive had.
Please let me know what you think or correct me were im wrong!
this was just a basic overview so u can see what it would be like.

+Adds gas Planets
+Adds More solar system types

- Can be a nightmare to work out for the dev (im expecting most of it impossible to do)
- Can make a hour game turn into 3 hrs (maybe a good thing?)

Well thats my 2 cents also if anyone is interested in discussing this yes Murudai ima inviting u too lol for a chat if u have a microphone on this teamspeak 3: 202.62.137.195:9989 or add me on steam: neumann229

Thanks :D

[linkman214]

You should do a challange mode again.

And if you could, you should have a scenario where you play as a lone fighter ship, trying desperately to reach some sort of sanctuary while dodging a super massive blackhole

[ivankio]

No rocket science, I missed the possibility to customize the keys. I wanted to try Q and E or mouse scroll to cycle interface. I think the cycle could really be usefull on fast combat with stars where a planet is in route of inevitable collision.

Another idea could be to use the 0 to 9 keys to absorb a corresponding planet, but having the numbers displayed on top of the planets would be ugly. I don't know if I would want it (maybe switchable), but it's an idea.

[jimmirock]

I've only played for 15 minutes and I've already posted a thread on this.

But could you please make the stars/nebulas parallax? That would improve the feel of this game so much (for me).

[Nepene]

Solar 2 is an open world universe.

So is GTA.

GTA is an awesome game, and the developers are now rich enough to swim in baths of money.

Therefore Solar 2 should be more like Grand theft auto.

1. It should be made easier to jack other solar system's planets. It's fun stealing planets and cars but it's quite awkward doing so now.

2. There should be factions of solar systems fighting, such as kittens and dinosaurs. And the ability to ally with said factions.

3. Randomly generated missions, such as capture that planet, collide with that stellar object, flee x enemy, protect x planet.

4. The ability to fling planets out should be there from the start so you have more control in warfare.

5. Hot Coffee scene.

Also, unrelated, autosave would be cool.

[gt24]

First off, thanks for making a great game!

Here are a few ideas I had which were not mentioned before (I think).



Life takes over asteroids in orbit around planet

Life was described as annoying and they should continue to be. If you have an asteroid orbiting around an inhabited planet then occasionally a spaceship, rather than being created and launching away, will just go to the asteroid. When it hits the asteroid the ship will go away and be absorbed into the asteroid to make one of the following...

It could make a small orbiting space station with 1 turret and very limited shields. When this is done, you cannot absorb the asteroid anymore. Oh well, that might be annoying if you are gaining mass but the life really wanted that asteroid. (there might have to be an upper limit on how many stations they make, maybe the limit is the same as the number of turrets life can have at that moment)

... or it could make an asteroid ship. The ship will still be the same (a fighter will be a fighter, another type of ship will still be that type), it will look different (it will look like that ship rammed an asteroid), and it will have shields. This way, it is a bit beefier when it goes out to fight.

The key here is that it adds no controls at all and you are encouraged to have asteroids on hand orbiting for life to use for those purposes. Maybe each asteroid is another roll chance for life to do something with an asteroid. Anyways, it will certainly change the whole "eat every asteroid ASAP" mentality.



The Entity still wants to play, will play the sandbox

The Entity goes away when you complete all the missions. It was mentioned how it is likely no more missions would be made. The humor and charm was from The Entity and he should stick around. Additionally, when seeing an internet review on Youtube, the reviewer wanted to "go to war" with another system. So, why not introduce some competition...

The Entity will be what you are (an asteroid if you are an asteroid, a star if you are a star, and so on) and will have an AI that makes it act more like you as opposed to a solar system just drifting along (in other words, it will eat stuff to grow bigger or it will try to be a really large solar system or whatever). Oh, and with its' humor it might bother or annoy you from time to time or gloat about how it is being successful or whatever.

This idea can be taken two ways. The Entity can race you to the big crunch... but somehow I think that would destroy the ambiance of the game. Still, it is an option.

I think The Entity should do whatever and respawn whenever it leaves the phase you are at (Entity asteroid becomes planet, respawn as asteroid). That way, you always have somebody buzzing around just like you. Additionally, The Entity might declare war on you or you can attack The Entity as you so please for more interesting dialog.

The Entity could also do its' own missions so you might see missions you went through being undertaken by The Entity giving you a good surprise.



Black Holes should be able to lose mass. Maybe build a mission or two out of this?

Black Holes have X-ray bursts. I know, not exactly solid science, but maybe you can hit the absorb keys (that would be B and A on the Xbox controller) to lose mass as an X-ray burst (which is visible as some sort of neat light show for no reason). This way you can regulate your mass and avoid hitting the big crunch.

As such, more mass means a stronger gravity pull and less mass means less pull. Right now, no matter how much pull you have it is far too much to do many useful things. Still, if you can change your pull of gravity (and if you can lose mass then you can), then missions could be made based on the larger gravity pull. This might relate to The Entity playing along (prior tip).

The only thought I have at the moment is that you...... carried out a mission where you fed a black hole when you were a planet. What if you were the black hole this time around? It wouldn't be easy to not eat the star, now would it?

Another possible mission, maybe, is to try to see how many planets and/or stars you can slingshot around you without having any be absorbed.



Pirate bases?

Final thought. In relation to the "Life takes over asteroids" idea, if that idea goes through then nomad ships could take over random drifting asteroids in the same manner. Now, imagine you as the asteroid flirting with a nomad ship hoping it doesn't blow you up randomly and instead makes you either a small moving starbase or a small moving asteroid ship. You can see how that might be somewhat amusing.




Thanks for listening to my suggestions!

[Nepene]

I know that life is not the focus of the game but it is one of the most fun parts of the game, as the above post notes. The life aspect should not be neglected. Sometimes the best part of an idea was an afterthought you didn't think was important.

[TehJumpingJawa]

A few idea (ranging from simple tweaks, to major feature additions, to fundamental game changes)

- Mouse for selecting orbitting bodies; the '[' & ']' cycling gets tedious when you have many stars & planets in your system.

-wormholes?

-overlay showing the curvature of space.

-proper space-time model?!

-small planet rename to protoplanet?

-more stages between life planet and small star? i.e. gas giants

-instead of abstracting the bodies as simply mass, model them as proportions of elements. Different proportions of elements (obtained from what you 'eat') lead down different evolutionary paths.
The challenge would then be hunting down things to eat containing the elements you want in order to achieve the end state that you are playing for.
You could then increase the diversity of celestial bodies represented in the game to hundreds; some of which will be mainstream, others will be exceedingly hard to achieve.

[allmhuran]

Galaxies.

I'm sure this would require a heck of a lot of work tweaking the physics, but it would be super cool if, instead of becoming a black hole and eating everything, you could also become a black hole (or something else) and start to build a galaxy, having whole solar systems orbiting you, not just the way everything orbits now, but in actual spiral arms. I leave it to you to figure out how to do that 0_o

[Kerrigan666]

Galaxies.

I'm sure this would require a heck of a lot of work tweaking the physics, but it would be super cool if, instead of becoming a black hole and eating everything, you could also become a black hole (or something else) and start to build a galaxy, having whole solar systems orbiting you, not just the way everything orbits now, but in actual spiral arms. I leave it to you to figure out how to do that 0_o

How the hell would all that fit on a screen?

[Cybermoose]

- Mouse for selecting orbitting bodies; the '[' & ']' cycling gets tedious when you have many stars & planets in your system.




+1 signed

[allmhuran]

How the hell would all that fit on a screen?

In a similar way to how the game works now. Solar systems clearly aren't to scale. Galaxies need not be either. Stylize the thing, you don't actually need to have all of the individual bodies working the same way as they do at the planet or star level. I'm thinking a galaxy would be, say, five times as big as a current solar system, with the screen zoomed out just as it does now the bigger your system gets.

[Cybermoose]

Physics options for extra turrets and ships for player only.

I'd like to play games where I just overwhelm other systems and work on my evil laugh.

[allmhuran]

Accretion disks for large stars. Goes along with the "dust" idea, although you could possibly tweak asteroids to form disk-like swirls. Find a nebula of dust, position your star in the middle, wobble it around a bit to create gravity fluctuations and form asteroids, planets and even other small stars.

More massive stars would have bigger, more violent accretion disks allowing you to form larger objects more easily.

Have the size of the accretion disk affect the zoom level.

Be able to steal mass from other stars with accretion disks. If you use dust, allow planets to gain mass this way by pathing through the disk (maybe leaving a nice trail). Include a risk element (getting stuck in the swirl) so it doesn't make the game too easy. For stars you could sit near the edge of the disk and watch dust get sucked from their disk to yours.

[wheeledgoat]

I just thought of a brilliant idea. Currently when you level up your multi star, the stars in the sandbox around you stay the same.

But... instead I'm going to make it so the stars around you are roughly as big as you. So you're a 20 star mutli-star system? Expect to see a bunch of massive 20 multi-star systems like you around to fight. This should really keep the challenge on the game, even as you grow super large.

I've come across this as I tooled around the universe w/ my 25 star system, and I love it!

I also like how life "does it's own thing". I don't think we should have any control over it. Moreover, I think it should be a little more reckless!
-Let's see a planet start fighting itself and explode via a self-inflicted nuclear holocaust!
-How about some ships just take off into the deep - are they going to explore? Colonize? Who knows! Maybe they'll return with some wicked alien technology! Laser beams for home planet defense?

Also, I vote for;
-more black holes, quasars, stars, etc!!! (I know it's redundant without functionality, but it looks pretty. The way accumulated mass always feeds the smallest leads to monotonous systems)
-gas giants fed by nebulae gas
-comets!
-asteroid impacts planet -> % chance of dust -> rings
-asteroids collide w/ already orbiting asteroid -> moon

Lastly,
PLEASE give us zoom! My 25-star system is very cumbersome at this point. I can't see what I'm doing. A black hole outta nowhere ate me the other day. I was bummed. Thank the maker for the save function. No sympathy for those that don't use it.

Thanks for an awesome game!!!

tl;dr: ZOOM, PLEASE!!!

[Krasnur]

i only want steam cloud support, if it is up to you to decide it. the game is great for me already :)

[Murudai]

Yeah... I think what I've done is managed to create an awesome concept with potential well beyond what I can do as a sole developer...

A lot of these drastically change the sandbox and are far too much for an already released games that already works so well. The most I might do for the sandbox is add more depth for life, but that's about it.


Assuming no one has made a clone with these ideas implemented, it's likely I will do a Solar 3. Although not for a while, I have other game ideas I've been itching to make and I'd like a break from Solar games. But I'll list what I'd have with it:

- PC exclusive, so I can make full use of the mouse for selecting things without worrying about how it'll work on Xbox.
- 3D graphics, which will allow much better zooming and camera control.
- Far greater focus on the sandbox, with far more depth and complexity in all aspects.
- Proper life tech trees and possibly races.
- Fully moddable physics and graphics (if I work out how to do graphics)
- Editor for making missions

Sounds pretty great doesn't it. Essentially a focus more on allowing the players to really get in there and build things, rather than trying to create mission structures and storylines like I did in Solar 2 (and the consequent restrictions to make these structures work).

Don't hold your breath though, with other projects to do and all the work needed for this project, it'll be at least 2 years before this happens.

[maxxori]

I also made a suggestion for how dark matter could be made more fun here (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1972726).

[Nepene]

A lot of these drastically change the sandbox and are far too much for an already released games that already works so well. The most I might do for the sandbox is add more depth for life, but that's about it.

http://www.dealspwn.com/solar-2-review-universe-66397

The civilizations that cling to life on your planets are also fairly generic and grow in much the same way regardless of the mass and size of their planet.

That would address one issue successfully.

- 3D graphics, which will allow much better zooming and camera control.

I have no special desire for 3D graphics. Improved graphics, yes. The game has a lot of charm in its simple but beautiful universe.

- Far greater focus on the sandbox, with far more depth and complexity in all aspects.

Not sure what this would entail, so I can't review it.

- Proper life tech trees and possibly races.

I would like this. It would increase variety.

- Fully moddable physics and graphics (if I work out how to do graphics)
- Editor for making missions

Could be fun. User content. That requires creation though.

Sounds pretty great doesn't it. Essentially a focus more on allowing the players to really get in there and build things, rather than trying to create mission structures and storylines like I did in Solar 2 (and the consequent restrictions to make these structures work).

Lack of focus may annoy some players

Only 1% or so of people are creators. Most people are followers. If you focus on enhancing users ability to make content rather than on drawing more people in there won't be enough super creative people coming in to make really good user content. You need a lot of creative people.

I'd prefer you develop some tool to make mission building easy and make a good single player campaign to draw as many people in as possible. Keep the focus tight. A common problem with sandboxes is that you have no idea what to do.

Also.

From the reviewInteractions between stars is deceptively limited

It would also be good if you put more focus on empowering the player with control of gravity and orbits, so that the player can feel more like a god of the stars.

[wheeledgoat]

Yeah... I think what I've done is managed to create an awesome concept with potential well beyond what I can do as a sole developer...

A lot of these drastically change the sandbox and are far too much for an already released games that already works so well. The most I might do for the sandbox is add more depth for life, but that's about it.

...

Don't hold your breath though, with other projects to do and all the work needed for this project, it'll be at least 2 years before this happens.


Awww! That's it, then? Bummer.

While I can totally sympathize with getting overwhelmed with suggestions on something you've already spent gobs of time on (and are likely getting sick of working on), I gotta express my disappointment that not even 2 weeks after release you're already hanging up the hat.

You might want to edit your original post in this thread where you promise "at least a few months" of updates before moving on to a new game, just so others don't get the wrong idea and get disappointed, too.

Your thoughts for "Solar 3" are indeed enticing, though. I'm cautiously letting myself look forward to it.

I wish you well, and good luck on your other projects. Thanks for Solar 2!

[Rosen_rot_stein]

make it three years mate and charge 20 bucks for it, as long as it is as good as solar 2 i dont mind, ill willing to wait for the epic galaxy battles maybe ;)

[Murudai]

You might want to edit your original post in this thread where you promise "at least a few months" of updates before moving on to a new game, just so others don't get the wrong idea and get disappointed, too.

You seemed to of missed where I said:

The most I might do for the sandbox is add more depth for life, but that's about it.

I do intend to add more depth to life (which is a big update and will take a month minimum) and I may also add a bunch of seriously tough "Challenge Missions" that don't really have any goal to do (apart from achievements) but will really challenge the more hardcore players. Other various things too, as I think of them, but mainly that change to life.

I'll be working on this game at least until winter is over (I'm in Australia, so it's winter here) as I do not want to start a new project in the winter, it's too damn cold :D

[Cybermoose]

(I'm in Australia, so it's winter here) as I do not want to start a new project in the winter, it's too damn cold :D


Pfft, bet Aussie winters are still hotter than our best summers! (uk) ;)

[Khaanah]

Thanks for Solar 2, Murudai!It's great, relaxing fun.
I'm actually quite surprised by the amount of people who are struggling with the missions. I found them quite manageable with the exception of Heist 3, which was infuriating and took several attempts to complete. :p

My suggestions are just slight tweaks rather than new elements:

1) The ability for your system to maintain its momentum rather than eventually stopping. Sometimes it's nice to just let your system or black hole float around by itself and see what it encounters without needing to interfere with it. It could go in the physics options so that it could be switched off if it's getting in the way or making missions too hard.

2) The ability for you to become a larger black hole. This could probably go in the god options. Being able to become at least twice as big as the current maximum would be cool. Then you'd have more time to hang around and destroy the place before the big crunch comes along and ruins the fun.


Other suggestions I agree with are the option to dock your ships in the planets, zoom options and the ability for nomads to colonise uninhabited planets.

[Niphty]

Murudai: First off, great game. You're right - simple, fun, relaxing. Adding tons more depth to it would be a detraction! I think I've already convinced a couple friends to buy this game =D

For things to add.. I love your suggestion of the planetary life having some visible stats. Want a peaceful, defensive system? Gobble up those nasty haters! But along with this, I'd like to ask for some visual cues. Red planets are angry, killing whatever they see. Blue planets are peaceful, and the spectrum in between. You already have used a lot of color for representation, so I'd like to see that continued. Thus the users who like to play interface-free are able to see what type of life they've got. Overall, I like this suggestion (both in terms of complexity for you and the users, and its expansion of the game world) very very much! Hoping I can add to that!

Personally I'd like to request the ability to limit your system: Grow only X stars big, essentially. The reason is I'm often playing away and then suddenly I've made another star without realizing the planet was even close! ESPECIALLY if you're going to be generating ZOMFG systems my size... then I don't want to sit around as a 6-star system when all I really wanted was a 3-star!
Along with this option, I'd like the ability to have my weaker stars siphon mass from my bigger stars, to even them out quicker. Definitely want to keep this as an option as my current 6-star is alternating Yellows and Blues, which is just neat =D
And, lastly on this thread: the ability to absorb that star I just created. While I'd honestly expect WAY diminished returns on this (given star creation bumps mass up a lot) I think it'd compliment the fact that I can devour everything else. In the mean time, I just ram those stars into other system's cores to blow them up... hehehe..

This also kind of hands its way into smashing planets into asteroids. I honestly think it should happen, but only create 1/10th the size of the planet in 2-3 asteroids. You can immediately declare all the magma to be dead weight, and only certain parts would contain enough useful stuff to be re-collected. 10x10 would be ridiculous, 3x8, not so much. And set them all moving outward in in different directions, making it nearly impossible to collect them all. Devious!


For Solar 3, since you're going over the top, I'd say make it so that stars orbit a central star if you create, say, planet number 4 into a star. It should totally be able to have its own planet rotations, and for unrealistic fun, they should always hit speeds that make it so they won't collide with other planets in their own system (unless you pick one up moving fast, in which case the brakes don't have time to slow it enough before BANG). You could play with how the planets between the stars... twist. Say they all re-evolve into terror squads from the harsh life they're forced to endure and never able to make it above size 2 or 3, depending on the space between the stars.

Also, I'm pretty sure everyone here would be interested in hearing about your new project - so keep us informed! =D

tl;dr:
-Planet coloring based on aggression levels, etc.
-Setting for star limitations to prevent sudden 6-star systems (lots of mouths to feed).
-Ability to eat said mouths (stars) at a low % of current mass.
-Setting for stars to even out mass between them.
-Planets become asteroids at roughly the same low % of mass when booming. Oh, and they fly off in different directions to add to frustration factor!

Solar 3 - True binary star systems with planets trapped between /orbiting between them, so Vin Diesel can crash land on one of them and become Riddick.

[Lemming Jesus]

Make us care about our life planets by putting the tech trees and other things in. Right now I just run around slamming into things and eating whatever I want. Let us select a planet that will never be absorbed to make sure I don't accidentally eat my life.

[kevinfitz06]

How about istead of planets you use ships and make it pvp. Something where you can build an armada of sorts and mess other ppl up.

[Lord_PorkSword]

I'll be working on this game at least until winter is over (I'm in Australia, so it's winter here) as I do not want to start a new project in the winter, it's too damn cold :D

Heeeey a fellow Auzzie! Dunno where you live in OZ but I agree that it's damn cold here atm. Especially down south of Adelaide! :eek:

[Murudai]

Man, the issue is HOW to make life more complex.

I've already said I'm not adding more controls, because I don't want to turn the game into a big complex RTS. So how do you make non-linear life which you can sit if you can't interact with it directly at all? It's a seriously difficult problem, and what I'm mainly stuck on with my design.

For Solar 3 I'd put in proper mouse controls to edit things on a solar system level (and build the core of the game around that from the start), but Solar 2 isn't like that, and I don't want to hack in some controls in after it's already been well received and so many people are happy with it already, I'll break all my balancing and possibly ruin it for some people who were very happy with it.

So I really have to think, HOW can I let players control that life.... should I just have no control, and just have random life planets and you can pick the best ones to nurture (which is the simplest way to do it). Or maybe you collect rare special asteroids to give life "special abilities", or maybe the ships themselves gather these asteroids and you can kill the ships if you don't want that specific asteroid. It's really tough.

:(

I wish I was designing an FPS, so I could just be all "BIGGER GUNS WITH MORE BOOM" and all is done.

[Lord_PorkSword]

Maybe simplify life planets into passive/defence and aggressive civilisations and add the option per planet so players can choose which one they'd like the planet to behave like.

Agressive civilisations act as they do in the current version and then have the passive/defence civilisations stay on planet until your system is attacked and they then launch to defend the system.
Have aggressive planets have more, faster ships but weaker planetry shielding and the passive planets have stronger planetry shielding and fewer but stronger, slower ships.

[Murudai]

If I can't think of a better idea, I'll just do the random one. So once evolved, each life will have a bunch of set stats. Such as "aggressive vs defensive" or "missile ships vs beam ships" and other things like that where there is a sliding scale between two extremes. So the idea being to simply pick the ones you want to nuture, and kill the life on the other ones so you can get new life.

[Polantaris]

Murudai, great job on this game. I'm very impressed, especially since you're doing it solo. You did a great job!

That being said, I thought I'd give some suggestions after playing the game for a while, that I thought might be useful in improving the game. Feel free to say no to any of them, you're not going to hurt my feelings.

I understand that some of these might have been suggested already. I don't have the time to read 13 pages of a thread unfortunately, at least not right now.

1) Life Variance. Right now it seems to me that once you get life on your planet(s), it always does the same thing. It always makes the same ships, and when it levels it always levels the same way.
Perhaps you could add some additional ship types, and additional ship weaponry, and when life is created, it picks random ship types and weaponry types. That way, even if it's not a huge difference, getting life on your world is always different, which adds to the sandbox experience.
On the other side of this, I love that they do their own thing that you have no control over. The point is to be a planet, not be a race. The Earth has no say on what we do, so the entire idea seems perfect to me.

2) Slightly more information about how things work. I'm not saying that it should be added into what the Entity says to you, but perhaps some Help tutorial pages in the menu to help newer players really figure out what there is in the game. I've been reading only a little of this forum and found out there's a TON of things I never knew about this game at all. I stopped reading because I wanted to discover these things for myself, but not everyone wants that. I know there are people who probably will and/or have complained that there is no documentation that they could find on half this stuff in the game itself. I don't know about you, but I hate having to go into web browsers and the like to read up on stuff about a game, the information should be in the game itself. A good example for this is Mutli-Star systems. I didn't know how to make them at all, and the game never tells you. It's like it expects you to know how to do it.

3) More missions. Honestly, I know that there have been a lot of complaints about them, and people apparently don't really like them and/or don't really do them...but I think they are awesome. They're my favorite part of the game simply because of how crazy they are. I never expected to get Stars thrown at me, my planet to become a Disco Ball, or to take place in an intergalactic heist. If you can keep that kind of originality, I want to see more, because they are a blast.

4) If you're going to link Physics/God options to the Mission Progression, there should be a log to remember that you did them. I want to unlock everything then screw around with the options and also re-do the missions. I don't know if it does this (I haven't tried, but it seems like it doesn't), but it should keep the options unlocked, so that you can reset all the missions to replay them with crazy changes.

I'll be happy to post with more suggestions as I think of them if you want me to.

[Zanmor]

I was thinking of putting in more missions, but what seems to be pretty apparent (from the global achievements at least) is that people are perfectly happy to play around in the sandbox and most don't finish the missions (which is a shame, because the final boss and ending are really quite epic).

That is a shame. I would love to see more missions.

As far as things that people have already mentioned, I like the idea of having greater control over the life on my planets. It could be as simple as being able to tell ships to dock so I can make sure they don't attack things I don't want them to or don't get destroyed/lost when I start moving. Press the button again and they're off doing their thing again.

And building a system around a black hole sounds like a lot of fun. It might be tricky to get things into orbit, but once they were in orbit it could work just like having stars with orbiting planets (though I don't know how you'd handle multiple multi-star systems where a player might want to have stars eat a planet or two.

It would also be great to be able to customize the controls.

Ah, one more thing which seems pretty simple to me. For us mouse and keyboard users, it would be great to be able to just click on the planet/star we wanted to select, instead of cycling through with keys.

Great game, glad to know you're still working on it.

Edit: I don't know if this was mentioned, but I just thought it would be rather enjoyable to be a ship. Just fly around and shoot asteroids like the old arcade game. :D

[your evil twin]

I absolutely love the missions, they are both funny and clever. I only just got the game a couple of days ago, so I've only played version 1.06? (I think?), and I find that while some of the missions are a bit challenging, none of made me go "AARGH!" with frustration, they have all been satisfying to complete.

When I first started playing the game, I did a couple of the missions but then grew into a planet, and the asteroid missions disapeared, and then I had a new set of missions for planets. At first I thought "CRAP!", went into the options menu and did the option to clear all data, to restart the game again. The next time it happened I noticed there was a "basic respawn" menu that let me turn back into an asteroid and finish the asteroid missions.

It might be useful to add that as a hint once the player has turned into a planet. "If you have not finished all of the Asteroid missions, you can return to being an Asteroid from the Basic Respawn menu." Something like that. I suppose the downside there is that some people will skip straight to being a star or binary star or neutron star or black hole.

[Murudai]

You can't respawn as something until you've played as it. But yeah, maybe putting a message there isn't a bad idea.

[your evil twin]

Ah right, I didn't try skipping ahead and spawning as something I hadn't been yet. :)

I think there needs to be something that emphasises the fact that the missions are the meat of the game, and that they lead to an actual climax and a reward. A number of reviews on youtube have people saying "I'm not sure what the point of this is, but it's fun", and "I'm not sure if I get anything by doing this mission... perhaps just achievements." So I think they get the impression that the game is just levelling up into a black hole and swallowing the universe, and the missions are just fun distractions to do along the way. But it seems to me that in fact the real game is doing the missions, and it leads to a sort of final boss fight and that's the "true" end of the game, while if you level up into a black hole then you've failed at that and so instead have the alternate ending of swallowing the universe and then recreating it.

In the trailer for the game, the God character says "Feel free to explore, it's a big place," and then after a few seconds of showing you flying around in space says "Once you are bored of that, I've got tasks for you." I think you need more of that in the actual game, things telling the player to feel free to mess around, but when they've had enough of that, to do the missions. Or more hints that the missions lead to an epic conclusion.

[DarkDestroyer36]

more stars and stages and custom skins

[Polantaris]

You can't respawn as something until you've played as it. But yeah, maybe putting a message there isn't a bad idea.

Honestly, I'm not trying to be rude here, but the biggest issue with the game that I have is that there's not enough information given to the player. I absolutely love playing, but there's quite a few things that really would have helped to know long before I figured them out. They're simple things too, like the Basic Respawn menu, and then there's complex things that people might not really realize on their own, like how to become a multi-star system.

Creating a Help file for players to read with a lot of the mechanics explained would really help players get into the game, I think.

[Mad Max RW]

I'd like the ability to use my mouse to target planets/stars I want to absorb instead of cycling through all of them until I land on the right one. Too many times I accidentally ate the wrong planet.

[Murudai]

Well, I didn't want to spoil the majesty of discovering the universe for the players who want to do that, which is why I didn't have any help files. For players who do want that info, hopefully they are diligent enough to hit up the internet and find these forums or similar where essentially the "Help" files and "Guides" can be found, so I'm not too worried.

[HDMika]

edit: nevermind, just noticed that you are already working on the stuff I suggested (challenges).

[Keleto]

First of all I would say you've made quite the game, one of the best indies I've played and with only 1 dev is simply amazing, actually I feel jealous of your skill, even though I'm sure there are many many hours behind this game.

As I see you consider some suggestions or requests I wanted to ask if its possible to add steam cloud support? I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to implement but don't know if there are some legal/economical strings to that. Personally I think ALL! games should use steam cloud (those in steam that is) or another cloud data storage (still another account is annoying so steam cloud is perfect for that) and if I'm doubtful about buying a game steam cloud makes the difference.

Before posting this I searched the forum and only found 1 guy asking for steam cloud but no answer so don't hate me too much if you've answered this before.

[paramortal]

The only thing getting in the way of me playing Solar for more than 5 mins is that I can't customize the control layout. Being able to control your entity with the mouse would be nice also.
Thankyou.

[hartogragekid]

Only thing I couldn't help but feeling is the lack of a next tier of orbits.
E.g. Having your suns orbit a Blackhole of yours. You could then absorb these. Also would be nice that each sun has its own orbitting planets. That would make the overall scale a lot more nicer than having 6 suns with 10 orbitting planets. If anything - heighten the planet cap per sun!

So basically what Zanmor said, but his reply has gone unnoticed.

Edit: did I forget to tell you how much I enjoyed this game? Keep up the good work.

[SerFox]

Cross platform support?

*pleading eyes etc*

[Murudai]

Cross platform support?

*pleading eyes etc*

After the next update that's actually what I'll be looking into next, as I believe I've found a way to port it to OSX and Linux.

[SerFox]

After the next update that's actually what I'll be looking into next, as I believe I've found a way to port it to OSX and Linux.

I'm guessing it's been made with XNA since it's on Xbox 360? I've heard mono is one of the tools you can use. I'm glad to hear you're considering it. :)

[Sylenall]

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet but, an option to adjust the depth of orbit would be really nice, meaning you could adjust how close/far a planet orbits you.

That way it wouldn't be so difficult to farm asteroids for planets closest to your star(s). Could be an extra cheat/physics option.

Great game and awesome job.

Beat it today, praise to the holey hole for smiting my last duel opponent :D

[SerFox]

When can we expect any advancement on a cross platform version? :P I'm unfamiliar with this games development cycle, as a result of not being able to play it :P

[Misterjscape]

I Agree to all of the statements from page 11, though making us be a galaxy would be hard, maybe for Solar 3? Now for my ideas...

Flingable asteroids/planets.
Please.....
Also it could work with the asteroid base idea, again from page 11. Let's say you threw a asteroid base at a enemy planet,
what if that planet caught it, the asteroid base would then sabotage the planet by shooting it and sending ships to attack it.
I'd find it amusing.

Battle Rewords.
Having huge battles with enemy star systems is pretty awesome but, if you fight them you will probably lose some mass/planets, or even die altogether! So why not have a Reword? Sure you could just ram your planets into the enemy planets, then steal them but, that usually doesn't end all that well. So maybe once the star is destroyed it could leave something. Maybe a asteroid that grants bonus shield, or maybe it could be something that will increase one of your planet's mass a bunch.

These are my two ideas, hope you consider them!
And just because the game has been released shouldn't stop you from doing what you want.

[Murudai]

Being able to grab and move around objects will likely be one of the core mechanics of Solar 3! So flinging things around will definitely be a strategy.

In Solar 3 the focus of the game won't be so much about missions but more a balanced simulation sandbox and it'll reward tackling larger fights.


And it's less about "doing what I want" and more that I have so many things I want to change and add that I'd be essentially scrapping a lot of the game design and balancing and most of the content of Solar 2, which is a waste. So instead I'm just going to leave Solar 2 how it is and focus these ideas into Solar 3, where I can tackle them from scratch and balance things properly from the start.

[Rosen_rot_stein]

if i may suggest an element.

As you want to have an sandbox games (best type of game) you need something to keep the player interested in play for longer than 10 hrs or more. So maybe by adding a tech tree of life that's a lot /bit more in-depth than Solar 2 is atm.

Also checking up on the real life space mechanisms, no im not asking for universe sand box lol i want to fly around, absorb other stars, smash planets and finally have a choice of types of planets i have or the types and colours of suns with different attributes.

+1 for a great game! you are doing very well!

[Joppsta]

I would say... having not bothered looking to see if there are any mods available for this game so far... mod support? ^^

I think though that having it as an option to have in-game music be your own from iTunes or whatever would be a sweet addition though.. of course that may be awkward to code too.

More control over the rotation of your solar system would be nice, like being able to rotate/counter rotate and maybe an upgrade system? RPG features are usually always a great way to addict people... look at the flash game scene that flourishes with surprisingly simple yet addictive web based games.

The thing that keeps people hooked is those little upgrades.

But your "tech tree" would be sufficient I think.

All I know is I'm glad I bit the bullet on the sale because this looks like a promising concept with plenty of room for expansion if you choose to do so.

- Joppsta

[Anbaraen]

I dunno if I like the tech tree idea. As it stands, I really like how.. You feel like a planet, y'know? You can't influence the life on you at all. That seems.. *right*, I think. To the type of game Solar is. Just my two cents - loving the game so far.

EDIT: This is in regards to teching specifically the civilisations on your planet, not the makeup of your planet. So.. I guess you could change the kind of life that develops by teching into different biomes, or something, and still keep that aspect.

[Wraith_Magus]

Sorry for not reading through all of this, but it's at over 200 posts, so I'll just drive ahead with my own thoughts, and maybe just repeat some things...

First, I rather enjoy spending my time as a star cluster and having 9 planets (so that I can still grab incoming rogue planetoids and consume them) rather than doing most of the plot stuff (although it's not really my fault, the star system story missions never even appeared, apparently as a bug).

The problem is that, at 10+ large stars, with 2500 mass apiece, and 9 life planets, my system has a rough mass of 25k and by the time anything is even on the screen, it's already being sucked in by my gravity well... and my outer planets are practically off the screen to begin with.

I like playing with these star systems and trying to protect my life planets and get them the highest "scores" possible, but it's nearly impossible to keep any but the inner planets sustaining life - I keep bumping into a rogue planetoid I couldn't see, which catapults one of my poor life planets straight into the firey maw of my central star cluster!

So, first of all, I'd like to see a "zoom out" button.

Playing this game to protect my life planets is like playing one of those insane Japanese Danmaku shooters, but with 10 different hit boxes I have to protect, and I tend to have a cloud of white nomad ships off the right, an incoming red star system up and down from me, and a meteor swarm to my left, and I wind up having to charge left and hoping that my shields can take a couple dozen direct meteor strikes before I end up the filling in a star sandwich. Just plain having a little warning before I have a interplanetary traffic accident would be nice, and for that, I need a zoom function.

Another thing is, aside from just generally making the life stage more detailed, I'd like it if planets (or species) had names. Instead of just being "purply life planet third-from-innermost", if they had names, I could feel a bit more connection to them.

In that line, having the ability to just stop time (or at least, stop the incessant rain of freaking death as every freakin' object in the entire universe seems to be a missile whose sole reason for existence is to collide with you and destroy all life on one of your planets), and zoom IN to look at your little planets and their not-yet-completely-eradicated civilizations in a relaxing respite would be nice.

Finally, in the star cluster mode, when I have 20+ different things to cycle through in the interface, I'd like to have more detailed control over what I am viewing. Firstly, it would be nice to just have a different pop-up for planets and stars, so I don't have to cycle through every star I have to get back to the planets when I want to check if a planet just went extinct or just lost shields. Likewise, having the ability to turn off the data on my planets and stars independently from the quest markers (which, when it gets crowded, I have trouble telling the difference between a quest marker and a planet) so that I can still read one while putting the other out of sight.

[xizar]

I hope that Solar 3 will have OS X support.

I also hope that you will (should it be feasible) port Solar 2 to OS X.

[Wraith_Magus]

To continue the topic from before, I do think focusing more upon evolving life forms would be the best way to make the game interesting. I also would like to second the notion that the game shouldn't become an RTS - aside from the insane rogue-star-dodging, I actually play this game intermittently with games that really are tense shooting games that burn out my nerves, and I enjoy the "fishbowl simulator" aspect that some games that run more as simulations can offer.

There's a big difference between adding complexity that the player has to watch and manage and adding complexity that is in the background, "under the hood", and where the player doesn't even have to look at it or care about it. This sort of under-the-hood complexity is the best kind of complexity, as it rewards the player who just wants to stop and watch and explore the game without getting in the hasty player's way.

I play and love Dwarf Fortress, a game with "complexity issues" to most (although this is mostly due to a lack of a proper tutorial, much of the game is actually fairly simple, it's just that there are 8,000 simple things and 5 complex things presented to the player all at once with no warning), however one of the things that can really grab you (and definitely has grabbed the creator of the game) is the complexity that the player may never even really see or care about - the effort taken to give the game geological accuracy (Limestone is your money layer - coal and hemitite in a flux layer!), the geological processes that go into forming the game map, the fact that the game builds a few dozen civilizations, and then processes through 1000 years of simulated history to give each world a unique story to discover if you so choose, and now the guy is adding in much more complex cities that can handle up to thousands of individual townspeople, and where towns naturally develop and go from sparse farming towns to crowded cities (with adventure-ready sewers) dynamically based upon population density along the trade routes that lead to the local power centers. And this is in a game where most people just start play on a random barren patch of land to start their own towns, they may very well never even see all those cities unless they go looking for it.

Giving players more sense that the game isn't "all about them", and where they are simply sitting back and participating in some grand diorama of cosmic creation can go a long way in making a game more subtly enjoyable for the player who wants to sit back and sip some tea while they play.

Realism, and possibly even teaching some kids about astronomy, would go a long way in games like these (you know, aside from the planets that can arbitrarily move omnidirectionally).

I'd make the following suggestions:
* Make life psuedo-random. Don't have life evolve spontaniously (at least, not without taking much more time than it does), make it so you have meteors and asteroids that contain single-celled life in hibernation that you can capture. In Solar 3, if you are adding in mouse support, give players the option to mouse over an asteroid to tell what sort of life traits it has.

* Make life take a while to reach the "shields and spaceships" stage and make life survive a few glancing meteor blows. Pretty much the only way you can directly interact with a planet is to smack it into a meteor, so the only option you have shouldn't be "wipe out all life".

* Make life reactive to its situation - if you have "aggressive" and "defensive" ships, make the game track how often the planets take meteor strikes or how often enemy ships invade, and make the game react. I notice that I already get more missile ships when I'm fighting red enemy ships, and get mostly the triangular asteroids fighters when I just fend off meteor strikes.

* Make nomads colonize planets instead of trying to blow every planet they find up.

* More difference in the types of planets and asteroids. It would fun to have gas giants and brown dwarves as intermediary steps between earth-type planets and stars. Put out dusty nebulas for stars and planets to suck up (accreting Saturn-like rings a bonus) when they have enough gravitational pull to add mass and different types of matter to their astral body. (With mouse support, you could mouse over to "look" at a dust cloud or asteroid to see what is in it.) Then, you could start tracking whether stars and planets have heavier elements or lighter elements (rocky versus metallic asteroids, or even nebulas that have alcohol in them - they really exist!) to change how voluminous the planets are compared to their mass.

* Let planets have Luna-like moons through smashing a planet's asteroid moon into enough crap, or let chunks of a planet that take a large enough hit form a Luna-style moon the way the real Earth's moon formed, or even "binary planets" by accreting enough junk into a moon to grow into another full planet. Having a "Jupiter" gas giant with a huge number of moons and a dust accretion ring as a guardian of a twin life planet in a trinary star system would be a fantastic little thing to show off.

* Life can be at least subtly different depending on what sort of planet it is on. Whether the planet is small and rocky with little to no atmosphere and no sun or if it is far from their sun or close to it, or if its sun is a pulsar or a red giant all make a huge difference on potential life. Life that evolves on a gas giant surrounding a binary red giant and pulsar star may be a sort of "gas whale" life form, used to super-high pressure and having huge, slow ships. Life that evolves on a tiny rock with no sun would be radically different. If a planet changes, such as being an extrasolar capture planet, or the planet suddenly having a much thicker atmosphere, the life on that planet may or may not adapt to its new form of life.

* I know this may be asking a lot, but in Solar 3... 3d. Not as in 3d graphics, you can keep it as sprites if you want, but 3d movement would be huge, and make the game less of a frantic dodging through the shooting gallery style of game. It would just make the game feel more open. (You can use R and F as up and down, and then, if you have mouse support, you can hold a button like SHIFT or right-click to turn the mouse into camera control.)

* Again, I would reiterate some sort of "super-slow-motion the game and look at your planets" option (maybe from the menu, if nothing else is available). So that you can actually pause and take the time to look at all the

* Again, the ability to rebind keys. Not to harp on this too much, but the first thing I always do in a game is rebind the keys. I have yet to meet a game where I haven't rebound the keys in some way, simply because I never agree with developers which keys are the most ergonomically positioned.

[Wraith_Magus]

Sorry to keep piling this on, but...

It seems very strange to me that stars have to dodge asteroids. Why are there no asteroid belts that circle stars, and why do stars that directly impact a star cause that star to lose mass? Shouldn't a star just absorb incoming meteors?

I also think there could be more "intelligent" life that can keep track of what you have been doing while playing, and adapt their strategies to what you do. For example, if you take a lot of planet-to-planet collisions or even planet-to-star collisions, maybe they can try creating double-layered shields that are much less than half as strong as the normal shields, specifically to take advantage of the repulsive nature of the collapsing shield. Being attacked by enemy ships, however, makes them more likely to build the stronger single layer shield.

You could also include different kinds of weapons, like a Dyson Sphere Circle array of satellites that could be powered by very large stars that take lots of ship attacks that are solar-powered laser satellites that operate purely defensively. More aggressive life forms, meanwhile, may take up more offensive attack drones or even build "suicide" ships that are basically big space mines to lob into the enemy planets.

It would also be quite neat to see an intelligent life form that will start using gravity beams that can pull in asteroids or even smaller planets to feed a planet or star if you don't move too much, and let the life forms take over somewhat.

[SerFox]

I think what could help port this to OSX/Linux would be monogame. It's mainly stable for 2D games, Terraria was fan-ported to Mac with it. Unfortunately I don't know coding, I'm a musician, and despite my tinkering, I have no idea where to start ._.

[Murudai]

I think what could help port this to OSX/Linux would be monogame. It's mainly stable for 2D games, Terraria was fan-ported to Mac with it. Unfortunately I don't know coding, I'm a musician, and despite my tinkering, I have no idea where to start ._.

That's the plan. MonoGame released a new version recently that officially supported Linux, which gives me the greenlight to the start the port. I'm working on it right now.

[exee]

That's the plan. MonoGame released a new version recently that officially supported Linux, which gives me the greenlight to the start the port. I'm working on it right now.

That's a very good news!

In matter what could be improved...

I think some sort of choosing target for your planetary life would be nice. I mean, i was doing one of those planet mission where i had to destroy a planet. After long fighting i've managed to crush this "enemy" planet into solar system and it bumped out with evolving life, shame i couldn't order my units to attack and instead i had to bump into it to destroy it. Fortunately shields absorbed most of the impact, yet still it felt kinda odd.

I think that anything to improve sandbox by adding more things to do sounds really good.

As it has been suggested already, making fights more interesting and rewarding would be nice.

Keep up good work.

[Tomwyr]

i would like international keyboard support. I'm fine with wasd, but since I use an azerty keyboard it translates into zqsd.

[YARRR'd]

According to the store page this game uses Steam Cloud. So saved games should be uploaded to Steam Cloud, right? Solar 2 creates an empty folder for no apparent reason, please fix this. The path for me is C:/Users/me/files/SavedGames/Solar2/solar2_save/AllPlayers.

At the very least rename it to "My Games" so it uses the directory so many other games use for their save games. Or if you can't because of some weird copyright issue, it could be hidden in the appdata/local folder which is also employed by numerous games.

[Robinbanks]

Loved the game, it reminded me of Osmos but a lot easier to play.

I agree with the plan to work on the sandbox mode and rather than having missions. The missions kinda felt like there was no reason to do them (no in game bonuses). I enjoyed just trying to complete the achievements most because they gave me something to do maybe they could be given a bigger role in the game or just increase the amount.

Thanks and looking forward to seeing more of this game in the future :)

[Silluete]

I would like a button to make game HUD and all lines between star and planet disappear so i can screen shot my system and use it as my Wallpaper. i don't know it's easy or not,but thanks anyway.

[ericL]

id like to know where is solar 1? or is there no solar 1? i want solar1!!

[funkychicken121]

Galaxies would be nice. Maybe there could be a way to implement that...

And to your comment about being the only developer, if I knew how to program games, I would help :D

[Murudai]

id like to know where is solar 1? or is there no solar 1? i want solar1!!

Solar 1 was an XBLIG exclusive (http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Solar/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802585501c9), that was back while I was still learning game development so it wasn't anywhere near as polished as Solar 2, so you won't see it on Steam or anything.

As for help, thanks for the offer but I'm right. I like just working with myself, it's easier to keep my design vision focused. Sure, it takes a bit longer to develop games, but I'm in no hurry, and I enjoy doing it!

[funkychicken121]

Solar 1 was an XBLIG exclusive (http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Solar/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802585501c9), that was back while I was still learning game development so it wasn't anywhere near as polished as Solar 2, so you won't see it on Steam or anything.

As for help, thanks for the offer but I'm right. I like just working with myself, it's easier to keep my design vision focused. Sure, it takes a bit longer to develop games, but I'm in no hurry, and I enjoy doing it!

Good to know. Let me know if you need a beta tester for your next game. :) I'd be happy to give some constructive criticism/ideas.

[edlyg]

Some basic usability suggestions -

* There needs to be a mouse control mode in addition to cursor keys. My right hand fingers are not used to cursor so the first time i played Solar 2 my right palm was in pain after a while. Basically the clicking and holding in certain spot should apply force in that direction, and the farther the click from the center the more force should be applied.

* Mouse click on an owned object or an orbit should select that object for info viewing (in addition to selection by cycling that exists now).

* Currently selected object should be indicated all the time, perhaps optionally.

* The keyboard shortcut for consuming the selected object - i need this when I want to grow rather than increase amount of stars, so I want to consume life planets that are about to become stars instead of smallest objects, so I would still have lots of planets that would grab the asteroids to grow. If I just consume everything to avoid making new stars, I can't grab the asteroids until I get 10 new planets.

* the hotkey that sets star that consumes planets, instead of the smallest star. also the hotkey that resets this setting to default, meaning that smallest star consumes. There should be some kind of indicator to show if this setting is active (around the star that is selected to consume).

* When I have maximum allowed planets, I should still be able to catch new planet, but after grabbing it the consume smalles planet should be executed automatically. Maybe make this an option.

* a key to un-orbit (release) planet instead of consuming it.

* IMHO allied ships shouldn't die to my own objects all the time.

[edlyg]

Now game changing ideas...

* maybe the planet evolution should be altered. Before becoming a star, a planet should become gas giant and after growing that it should become a star.

* since the life already somehow survives planet growth due to asteroid consumption, maybe it should also adapt to living in a gas giant and even in the star.

* perhaps there should be a way to throw away orbiting asteroids to avoid planet growth if they were captured by accident. Maybe a way to pass them to other planets.

* maybe planets with life should develop some way to grab those asteroids more reliably? instead of crashing most of them into planets and stars... maybe not just any life, but with some conditions (make experience useful?).

* maybe make life building ships from asteroids instead of out of thin air. so they grab an asteroid and turn it into some ships, unless you use them to grow planet instead. If there are no asteroids, the planet size should decrease with new ships built. This might make growing more challenging.

* some way to steal other stars' planets. the ability to steal planet should increase with distance of the planet from its star and with player's stars total mass relative to the current planet owner stars total mass.

* make it possible (with some restrictions/conditions) to alter planet's orbits. for example move developed planet inside to protect it, or move it ouside to grab asteroids for growth.

[the daddydoodle]

Murudai, Solar 1 was awesome. It was a real gem when I downloaded it and played the crap out of it. Then one day, Solar 2 hit Xbox. I downloaded it immediately and put 15 hours into it. Then to my joy, recently I started playing and your update must have happened. I did new challenges, and unlocked the whole "dark matter" sequence... loved it.

I'm not going to suggest anything. you're the game programmer and all, i'm the gamer. i know when i go on Xbox live, one day, Solar 3 will be there, and i'll buy it instantly.

can't wait, but don't rush a masterpiece!

ed

[schachmatt]

Murudai, I mostly wanna tell you what great fun I had with Solar 2! The achievements were part of that grat experience. Well done!

When I bought Solar 2 I actually thought I would control celestial bodies only indirectly and i would think I would enjoy it even more if the player was more of a force than a physical embodiment, like a Q from Star Trek.
Is there a game currently in production and is it a sequel or something else?