Neumann

A game about being a self replicating spacecraft

This poject is dead af. Scope grew too quickly and i didnt plan ahead enough. Still, i learned  a lot from writing the NGS interpeter, and im definitely revisiting the in-game scripting concept someday in the future. I'd like to think i'll remake this project sometime, maybe when i've ironed out a solid scope and stuff.

The rest of this post is from many many months ago, dont believe anything it claims.

/!\ Extremely early prototype, literally not even any of the game is remotely added. (Stay tuned though, this project is in active development)

This post isnt updated frequently, to get a more recent look at how this project is doing you can:

• Visit my twitter, where i never shut up about this
• Read the devlogs, which i occasionally write with a rundown of what's changed and what's to come
• Visit the Neumann trello, where you can find way more in-depth info about specific parts, and follow along with the most up-to-date progress
• Visit the gitlab repository (source is currently not public (i do intend to open source this once its in a playable state))

take the rest of this post with a grain of salt, it most likely contains outdated info

This is currently these builds contain ONLY the custom in game script language interpreter (called NGS) and its debugger.  As of build 8, a very rough and basic integration between NGS and the game world has been made. Currently you can only set the absolute position of the sample vessel. Please keep in mind that this is in no way representative of the final game, and is purely a debug build. Nonetheless, its a big step forward which is why i've uploaded it.

as of now, NGS is *mostly* done, in the sense that its usuable as a programming language. Its missing  some things here and there

basically the jist of the idea is, you're an ai tasked with exploring the galaxy for potential colonization destinations for humanity & find cool stuff along the way

sounds easy, but youre gonna have to manage a ton of vessels which are all gonna be wildly far away, so you wont be able to control them individually (unless you like waiting a few years for every interaction you do) so you (yes you) also need to write up scripts that make the vessels act on their own. Im hoping to give the player lots of freedom in this, with generalised vessels that can be constructed to any size you want, like if you want some smaller drones around a bigger bulkier transport ship to mine things while it ferries around the mined resources to maybe an even bigger vessel that handles all the production. Im hoping to make these all the same generic vessel. The same counts for peripherals, but smaller sizes would seriously limit their capabilities (think small power cells, small thrusters, cargo, short ranged transceivers, etc)

Alongside that, i also have a networking system planned, for intra-vessel communication. Space is a big place and again, you're most likely not very close to most of your vessels, so networking will play a pretty big role in keeping track of- and controlling your fleet. This comes with all the fun stuff like the range of a vessel's transmitter, i.e. a small vessel will not be able to fit a transmitter that can phone over to the other side of the galaxy. Keeping your fleet networked up would be quite important, since manual control is possible*, it will just be limited by how far away you are (network signals will need to physically travel to the receiving vessels, and this may take real long if your target is very far away) but also, updating the vessel's code would be impossible if you can't reach it

(*maybe not, to be determined)

id like to mention that it would be possible to transport your base of operations (your "self" basically) either physically by moving whatever vessel the computer you run on is placed in, or by transmitting yourself to another vessel. That latter one could be risky as the target vessel would require a very capable computer and god knows what else, havent ironed this idea out quite yet. (this feature is most likely scrapped). oh and if your main vessel were to be destroyed itd be game over so staying close to earth would be the safe bet, but it would make communicating with your fleet hard after a while.

Have not thought about power much, will probably have a few types like solar, nuclear, etc,,, maybe steal Elite's fuel scoop

Ive already mentioned that all vessels will be running their own player-written scripts in NGS, but the vessel will actually need a computer to do so. A computer also consists of components, suprise :^). Its gonna consists of probably a few components like usual: a CPU with a speed that determines how fast the code runs, a HDD to store persistent data (like scripts, but you could also store charted systems or surveys or whatever else you want) and RAM that stores the NGS variables

• Fabrication concepts have changed, check the trello for the most recent plans. Most of the rest of this still stands.

Probably time i mention how production will work. Im thinking that theres a universal printer, maybe a molecule printer or whatever, that will be able to print any raw component as long as you have the time, raw materials, and power to do so. I want components to be extremely scalable, so a ship can be built in any size, and the ships peripherals like transmitters and cargo and whatnot could be made in any size, and the ship's computer could be made to any specs. The caveat being that the pheripherals and computer can of course not be bigger than the ship. The smaller you make the vessel, the smaller, weaker, and less effective (but cheaper) the components inside can be. There will probably be some other manufacturing equipment for specialized components, but i want everything to be manufacturable by the lowly printer, if maybe at a slower speed or quality or higher power demand or whatever.

This game is probably not going to be very visual. I have a sort of terminal N-curses like UI in mind, with probably some vector representations of objects and such, which i think is a rly neat vibe but you might hate!!!

havent actually mentioned anything about the environment have i.

yes this page is long but its 6 am and i need these thoughts to go somewhere

Probably going to have simple solar systems  randomly generated, as im gay and so bad at math you'd start to wonder how im a programmer, so no fancy orbits. VERY LIKELY just going to straight up parent planets to moons and spin them around to fake the orbit. I have literally no clue what else is gonna be out there. Would like to have some content but ive already got so many things planned that i do not really have the brain to think about it much (even though this will actually be the thing that provides the game loop) Maybe the planets themselves will have stuff on them. Maybe humanity sends a colonization ship and you're gonna need to get them there and provide the infrastructure for the colonists? i have no clue dude im just the gal in charge

very very many ideas and probablys and maybes i know i know but id really like to get this game in a playable, fun state because im fairly sure ive been trying to make this exact game (or variations of it) for like, ages without realizing lol. ALSO i should mention that a lot of the ideas for this were borrowed from Dennis E. Taylor's excellent bobiverse series of books, so go read that!!!

tl;dr: space game about computer brain trying to desperately stay in contact with its many siblings to see all their holiday pictures.