First - Thanks, Tynan! Awesome game! Second - End game, discuss?

[aequabilitas]

TL;DR :  I wanted to post a thread to thank Tynan and express my support and appreciation, to analyze what "End game" means in a fortress-like, and to share my idea for a possible way to handle end-game content Rimworld.  If you're Tynan and you're interested in the thought of using vehicles as a mechanic for allowing the player to access procedurally-generated "instanced" content, but don't have the time to read a whole novel - skip to the last couple of paragraphs!

Tynan, I massively appreciate your work on this fine title.  Despite its early stages, I see your game as having a great deal of potential.  You are forging new territory, in creating a "fortress-like" management sim with not only the same degree of granularity and depth as Dwarf Fortress, but also accompanied by polish and excellent design practice.  I rarely purchase pre-release games, but I made an exception for yours and I am glad I chose to do so.  I also rarely register for forums or participate in communities, but felt like I should at least this once.

  By seeing the quality and quantity of your continued work in the short time since I became one of your customers and supporters, I am both convinced that my contribution to your endeavor is well-placed and also that you deserve to hear that.  For your information, I became interested in your title through viewing a Let's Play by MathasGames on Youtube and that's what led me to my purchase!


Anyway - What is end game really like in a "fortress-like"?  In Dwarf Fortress, throughout play you are largely concerned with putting together a "recipe for success" whereby you can both survive attacks and support your population.  This can be difficult, as population scales up quickly.  Before you know it, you're trying to figure out how to feed and house 50 to 100 dwarves while holding a herd of enraged elephants at bay.  A lot of things have to come together - a sort of progression - before a player can truly say they are "safe" and "stable" and no longer fear losing their fortress.  Since Dwarf Fortress is such a mind-numbingly complex game, and since its interface is so maddeningly obtuse on Toady's insistence, this takes a lot of time and effort and many people never achieve it.

Once you get there, "end game" in Dwarf Fortress ends up looking more like Minecraft in ASCII than anything else.  In between occasionally tweaking your fortress to keep it chugging along, you leverage your fortress' huge amount of dwarfpower and do silly or impressive things with the really robust simulation of the game world.  Great works, huge statues or structures, feats of engineering - etc.  The deep simulation allows a large degree of creative freedom to the player.

In Rimworld, I feel like a different sort of end-game will need to be envisioned unless Tynan's eventual goal is to create a simulation of approximate complexity to Dwarf Fortress - which for a graphical game would be a monumental undertaking and hard to imagine!  Further, I'm afraid that it would be extremely difficult to create a simulation that deep and still have a game with a stream-lined interface that is fun and accessible to play.

So, what kind of mechanics and gameplay can we envision to keep the player interested in their fully-developed and stable colony?  Will a Z-Axis eventually be added to the game?  That's probably one of the only things in Rimworld I see preventing a conceivable creativity-based "Great-works" end-game, but I see no reason for that being *necessary* if Tynan has other ideas about what the player should be doing once their colony is mature.

My idea -  Vehicles!  With the right research and materials, you construct a vehicle.  You can choose to load the vehicle with certain supplies and a limited number of hand-picked colonists.  Then you "embark", and a new map is generated procedurally.  You can then set up a temporary camp, hunt for resources or cool things with your favorite colonists, face dangerous situations, load up your vehicle with your findings, and return to base.

Different kinds of vehicles could be made that allow travel to different map-types, with their own unique loot-tables or content.  Theoretically, a mechanic like this could allow for the player to raid other factions in retaliation!  This could even allow the player to *be* pirates!  Cannibal colony abducting peaceful natives, anyone?!  Build a space ship, craft life-support suits, fly to an asteroid and mine a bunch of rare or important materials?  The possibilities go on and on!

This would have an effect of making the game feel so much larger than the initial map that's generated for your colony!  Who needs a Z-axis?  Just because your map is out of resources doesn't mean you have to stop collecting them!  This could be a way to acquire new researches and allow the player to access all kinds of content, and makes the world and game-environment feel much wider in scope.  You don't even need to animate vehicles - Loading and drafting a crew and activating a vehicle could give you a menu with options for the kind of travel you want to do depending on the type of vehicle.  Pick one and a map is generated and loaded, and your crew and your vehicle appear somewhere on it.

Of course this is a complex idea and I don't know if it will even be considered by Tynan - but I'm sure some others out there might have some thoughts on their own for other ways to do end-game, and I was hoping we could all talk about it some!

[a89a89]

YES, YES TO ALL OF THIS!

[Pulaskimask]

I think Tynan is already considering a way to "beat" the game by building a ship to get off Rimworld and return to your home planet. Perhaps this could be done Pikmin style with your ship parts being randomly dispersed throughout the map and off the map in other colonies. In order to rebuild your ship you would need to collect the pieces you find on the ground, repair the damaged parts, and trade or visit and raid other colonies to get the other pieces.

[AwesumnisRawr188]

I like this idea! It's kinda like State of Decay: Breakdown, without the zombies.

It would be sweet to start with a rickety old jeep and travel a couple miles away from your colony, to a futuristic VTOL spacecraft and fly to the rimworld's many moons.

[linkxsc]

perhaps after getting off the world in your ship. the game loads up and starts playing like that ship game he has in the prototype pack. perhaps when you die in the ship game your crew could get dropped on a world and start a new colony