Battle Space Team

Science_Officer_Jim

Hi Henry and all you space team cadets and admirals!

Just wanted to share an idea of 'Battle Space Team'.

Two teams work together to blast the crap out of each other. Think about taking all the great collaboration and team work aspects of space team and putting a competitive edge on the game.

Jobs could include working together to:
Charge and raise shields.
Prepare and fire an array of different weaponry.
Plot courses and take evasive manoeuvres.
Hack computer main frames and core systems.

I had some further ideas and just wanted to know what you thought.

SPACE TEAM!

iBkin

I, for one, like this idea, but it seems to stray from the main concept of spacrteam, where you just follow instructions.
maybe there could be a commander who decides the actions that the teams take. he could create a queue of actions for his team to follow. the leader would decide the actions, and the team would play in the classic way.
example: team A encounters team B in space (the start of the game)
the captain of team A commands his crew to open communication channel
the captain of team B receives the communication, but ignores it. he commands his team to charge weapons.
team A realizes that team B is charging his weapons, so they need to raise shields. If they don't raise shields before team B completes charging and firing of weapons, they get shot and lose strength.
team A must now repair the ship and either return fire or run away. More importantly, the captain needs to decide which order.
at any time during the game, either team could choose to use time upgrading their ships speed, weapons, or shields.

I'm sure you get the idea. I feel kinda bad that we just took a beautifully simple and friendly game and made it crazy and complicated.This could almost be a separate game, or at least a different game mode.

hengineer

Thanks guys! These are all good ideas. I did consider some kind of versus mode for Spaceteam but ultimately decided that I wanted to focus on cooperation rather than competition.
Another interesting twist would be to make the game mostly co-op but have one player be a "traitor" who has to sabotage the team in secret.
Everything is going into my Spaceteam 2 ideas list

Writhyn

First off, I LOVE this game! Probably one of the most imaginative simple games I've ever played.
I'm new here, but I thought I'd chime in on this thread:
While a battle mode might be fun, it may be more in the spirit of the game to simply add enemy AI ships to the list of random threats that occur. They, like asteroids and the wormhole, could be avoided, which would be preferable because battling alien vessels should be hard.

Failing to avoid would result in a change to "combat controls" (really just an excuse to force the players into a fresh control panel -- very tough in the middle of a round!). Here's the kicker (and again, this is merely a suggestion); players would be able to then switch back and for between the battle panel AND the navigation panel, and they would be responsible for keeping track of both or they'd be dead. Combat instructions could be a different color to help out a little, but maybe not.

So really all combat would be is suddenly the players have to deal with two panels instead of one, and there'd be lasers. LAZERSSS! Again, great game.

hengineer

Wow, @Writhyn that would be pretty intense. Alien ships were actually something I considered with the instruction being "Bank left!" or "Bank right!" and you would all tilt your phones left or right. But I decided that it was too similar to wormholes, and didn't have time to add it. Your idea is a lot more interesting! I'll add it to the list for Spaceteam 2

Writhyn

@hengineer Thanks, man! I was playing this with my wife, and it was so intense we were literally rolling upside-down with our devices so we could still press buttons while evading wormholes. Another "must avoid" hazard would be awesome.

hengineer

Other ideas that I never had time to add:
- A "Panic button" in a glass case that you have to flip up before pressing
- A pair of keys that have to be inserted into keyholes and turned at the same time (by different people). The keys would fall in from offscreen and could be dragged around or thrown back offscreen to another player. Of course they wouldn't land on the correct player's screen to begin with, so confusion and throwing would be required

Writhyn

I love the key idea! Another thought I had would be a rewiring requirement. Players would have to cut and cross wires behind certain control panels (of course this might mean they had to somehow dislodge their own controls!).

iBkin

those are great ideas! since the roadmap that you gave in the kickstarter didn't include a spaceteam 2, is it safe to assume that is not currently in your plans for 2014?

hengineer

@iBkin That's correct. I'm more interested in exploring these other ideas at the moment but I'll probably return to Spaceteam at some point. In addition to all the new gameplay ideas I'd also like to make it more portable/customizable so it could run in different environments: eg. giant touch-screen tables with lots of players touching the screen at once, or a mode where some part of the game is displayed on a common screen/TV. I've been approached with ideas like this before but it's just too much work to support it with the current game.

Writhyn

@hengineer
I know this is far in the future, and it's like a ditch-digger telling an engineer how to do his job, but...I have an idea regarding the keys you mentioned in an earlier post.

What if battle was basically exactly like I said in my first post, but here's how it would be resolved: during the battle, there would be an additional "laser charging" element to the HUD (a percentage or a colored bar, whatever). As the players frantically maintain both battle commands AND navigation commands, the laser charges a little for every command finished. It is depleted when a command is missed (i.e. the alien ship scores a hit). If the players succeed in charging the laser to 100%, THEN the two keys drop into the screen, whereupon a mad scramble to sort out which key goes to whom ensues, and the players have to insert and simultaneously turn the keys in the battle controls. If successful, the ship's laser fires and destroys the alien ship.

Basically your keys idea, but with a context to make them more intensely stressful.

I may be a bit of a masochist.