[Hajo]

Hi,

one of the most pressing problems in my space exploration game is the lack of research. The game is meant to include a scientist career.

A scientist will advance in his career by doing research and publish the results.

In this post, I'll focus on the problem how to make researching alien technology fun for the player:

The PC will find alien gadgets and artefacts in abandoned alien settlements. This gives him the input for his research activities.

Now, how to do the research in a fun way?

Putting an gadget into an analyzer and later on getting the results is boring. Also it's not really the way to become a famous scientist, anyone could put something into an analyzer and read the results.

So that's not the way to do it. I think more player involvment is needed.

My current idea is to give the player tools that help in research, without doing the research for the player. E.g. a laser cutter can be used to open alien gadgets. Used wrongly it will damage the interiours, and it can be dangerous, e.g. if the PC tries to cut an loaded energy cell.

An X-ray scanner will allow to peek inside. But some alien gadgets could react bad on X-rays.

An example of sucessful research:

1) PC puts the unknown something into the X-Ray scanner. He'll discover three building blocks.

2) The PC uses the laser cutter to separate the three building blocks. (Since he knows the sctructure from the former scan he'll not damage them overly).

2a) Two appear to be hollow and have pipe connections. (The PC scientist will recognize those as tanks)

3) The third component has wire connectors as well as pipe connector. The PC puts some electricity on the connector. The component gets hot inside (The PC scientist will recognize it as a heating element)

4) Now that all components are identified, the PC will recognize it as a fluid heating device.

5) After that the PC will look for a publisher and publish "Alien water boiler discovered"


Problems - help needed:

- I'm missing a lot of research operations. The example contained three: scanning, disassembling and powering

What else could be used to research technlogy?

- In three places I wrote "The PC will recognize ..."

What do you suggest: when and how should this happen?

- A scientist will have skill levels in technologies, e.g. mechanics, waves, electronics, biotech

How exactly should those level influence research and when or how should the PC advance in one of the areas?

[Nephilim]

One thing I remember from the old pen-and-paper days was a dumb D&D adventure where the players encounter alien artifacts, and could try to figure them out.

Despite the fact that the game would have a human there to guide the research, they instead came up with an artificial game mechanic for determining whether that alien weapon would blow the player's head off or not while they tinkered with it. (You get the humorous visual image of a dumb barbarian squinting down the business end of a blaster.) Not useful in a human-controlled interaction, but something like it might be of use to you.

Basically, in their game mechanic, you'd have a flow chart that would start with a cursory examination, and from there, you would roll dice, check skills, or whatever, to move through the flowchart. Failed rolls usually meant being boggled (or worse), while successful rolls move the player closer to being able to actually use the artifact. It wasn't linear, either - some minor cognitive errors could be corrected, but took you down a longer path.

For your game, maybe you could do something like this. You'd have a flow chart, and the player can make comprehension progress through the flow chart by applying research tools and making successful skill checks against electronics, quantum physics, chemistry, or even archaeology and linguistics. Tool checks would have to be initiated by the player, while knowledge checks could be automatically advanced. Each node on the flow chart would have a description of the object at that state, similar to what you described. When the player gets to the end of the flow chart, the object is considered known.

You could probably generate these flow charts on the fly by having a componentized representation of the artifact, like you mentioned above.

Note that research tools here could include other alien artifacts. You might have to use an alien power cell to make that element heat up, rather than just hook up some power to some wires.

This last point ties into something I'd like to note about your alien artifact example: that technology doesn't sound very alien. Seems to me that the fun part of alien artifact research for the player would be figuring out some new scientific principle the technology is based on. In other words, it would be cool if the alien technology isn't just an obfuscated version of our own technology.

In this case, you'd have two research goals: the superficial "what is this object and how do I use it?" goal, which might not take as deep an understanding, and the more profound "what are the principles of the science behind this technology?" goal, which requires in-depth understanding and probably the inspection of multiple artifacts. The latter goal would be much more interesting to a scientist, and has greater story potential. Once you have that understanding of how it all works, they can apply that knowledge to improving their own technologies, or to creating new alien artifacts (or repairing broken ones). Might be a fun game mechanic that makes the scientist profession very compelling.

[Hajo]

[Nephilim]

I make educational games as part of my job, so these sorts of interfaces are particularly interesting to me. We recently got a grant to do some science-based learning modules where kids can do scientific experiments (in a computer simulation) to learn about food and nutrition, so we've been looking at ways to model scientific inquiry in an entertaining way ourselves.

One thing our design team was bantering around was the idea of having an abstracted view of the scientific investigation. Most RPG's and adventure games focus on items and inventory, but what you want to focus on here is ideas and understanding. So instead of just collecting items, you also collect knowledge. Each glob of knowledge that you eke out of your investigation is represented by an icon, and it can be used in a drag-and-drop manner along with physical objects to represent cognitive action.

A concrete example of this idea can be seen in the "Law and Order" games that came out recently (although I believe this idea predates those games). You have a notebook of the details of your investigation, where all your evidence is represented with draggable icons. The icons can represent people, places, things, etc., but also facts like "person A was at nightclub B last night". By dragging these elements into police forms, you advance the investigation in more compelling ways than if you could only shuffle physical items around, because you can make cognitive connections between ideas.

For your game, you could take a similar approach. Collected artifacts show up as evidence in the lab. You can drag the artifacts onto your tools to apply the tools to them, or you can drag them onto analyzers, microscopes, or scientific databases to research them. You could even drag them onto other science officers to get their thoughts on the topic. Nonsensical drags would just snap back, but sensible actions could produce more artifacts (as in your example where an artifact is broken into sub-artifacts), destroy artifacts (if they do something destructive), or produce new "items of knowledge". These items of knowledge could then be dragged onto each other, or placed on a cognitive flowchart, to make logical connections that produce even more icons.

Note that this interface works both for investigation, but also for building new tools from existing artifacts, or repairing artifacts that were damaged when they were found, or even for combining alien technologies with Terran ones for new products.

For some added depth, the success of these drag operations could depend on skill levels, like you mention in your post. If your chemistry skill is low, your chemical analysis of that artifact may result in a different icon (or no icon) being produced than if it is high. This would give a real gameplay benefit to beefing up your various science skills. But you could also have it dependent on the precision of the tool or the version of the database, or whatever, giving the player a motivation to do things like upgrade the tools and databases in their lab. Do you buy that sexy laser torch, or do you shell out the bucks to keep your Linguistics database up to date? And with an iconic system, you could easily set up the interface so that the player may even trade information (as opposed to items) upon meeting a friendly alien race, or ask aliens specifically about points of your investigation that are holding you back. Seems like this could lead to very deep and satisfying gameplay.

The nice thing about this system is that for implementation, each icon object would just have to know what happens when it gets dragged onto other icons. Could be pretty cleanly represented in an OOP fashion, I suspect, and the raw behavior generated easily with flat text.

In terms of ideas for developing the actual story-side technologies, my advice would be to start at the end product, and work backward. Come up with some fantastical technology, come up with the principles behind that, and then how it would manifest in artifacts. For your actual technology ideas, well, there's a lot of source material out there. Some examples to draw on might be the water-based technology from "The Abyss" or the crystal-based technology of new-age Atlantis myths. Scientific American magazine has lots of forward-looking technology discussions that are ripe for picking.

[Hajo]