So, I thought that if you were building a game that was simple enough and didn’t require the complicated art sets of something like NWN, it might be possible to make a game that is like a personal MMO. It’s a static world that doesn’t have an earth shattering, universe-ending problem but several things that threaten empires or kingdoms or the rise of an imprisoned god or something. Basically, within the game, you’d actually have several campaigns that were made up of mission chains. These campaigns could be played or not depending on if you ever ventured into them.

Basically, it’s like building The Forgotten Realms instead of building Icewind Dale. The art would be less specific to the story because the story itself is just one of 5 that you can hook on to.

Then, you could keep releasing new campaigns that worked within the world. I’m a glutton for punishment, so I love the idea of overdesigning a game with tons and tons of missions and content and the like.

And, like I said, a couple of months ago, I was designing a very similar game. In fact, I think a couple of us were. Tom had some kind of space trading game.

A radial menu that pops instantly and has menu items always in the same place would basically be a movable command card…which is definitely doable, since my new GUI system (which is immediate-mode) can handle movable GUI elements very easily. I’ll think about it.

And you’re right – I won’t really need two combat systems. I’ll only have one, just with very different units involved depending on whether it’s ground or space combat. On the ground, you’ll have four highly mobile units that can only do one or two things. In space, you’ll have a single, much less agile unit that can do a whole bunch of different things. So even though I’ll be using the same system, the combat should feel different enough to be interesting to the player.

Now, this system isn’t real-time. It’s going to be more of a simultaneous turn-based kind of thing.

And radial menues is the fastest way I can think to actively control an RPG party in a game paced more like an RTS (what we might call squad combat strategy). I had what I think was a cool system that dealt with it and was quite pretty. I love squad combat games. I’d love to see a game like Myth but with the kind of quick, intuitive interface that allows you to play it at the pace people play C&C or Warcraft games. But Myth didn’t have all that crappy building and resource management. It was more like playing Warhammer.

Radial menus are effective, only not the way they were done in NWN. If you can call them up instantly, like by alt-clicking or shift-clicking, then they become basically a simple gesture system.

And you and your radial menus

I like, very much, the third and most complicated system you’ve described. I don’t think it has to be two different combat systems if done right, but it might be. Earlier this year, I had been designing this exact game and I’ve come to some conclusions.

Firstly, the best way I figured around the two different combat systems was to design the systems to be run by the other method. So, I had a radial menu system (because it’d be best if your ground units only had a couple of abilities). And you could basically drive the units by radial selecting them and moving on. The ship was best played with a toolbar and clicking on targets. However, both systems exist in both modes. You could radial menu the ship around and you could toolbar the units around (like playing Baldur’s Gate). The only difference is controlling one unit or many (pause and play makes the world go ’round).

Secondly, with regards to planet info. I’d have to go with star map with top-level information on a rollover/small window. Right-clicking or alt-clicking on the planet loads a Full screen info window with data in panes. Then it’s about letting the player decide what information he or she wants active.

The other advantage to the fact that the groudn combat is a second system entirely is that you can leave it out until you need it. However, if you want to have a crew of units that go out on the ground (Firefly instantly springs to mind as an example), I recommend having that crew be useful on the ship. Your ship, in addition to equipment slots, would have “crew slots.” Putting Kaylee in Engineering makes her go faster. Putting Wash in the pilot slot improves turning speed or something. You get the general idea. Then, you really have to worry about your away missions, because you could lose the +5 bonus to stealth because your Rogue/Navigator died disarming a trap on Rigelius 5.

Good luck!