Design Direction 2025
This is a list of primary design directions for 2025. These are high-level problems which I would like to have a focus on for the following year.
This document is intended to discuss the most important issues that I believe face the codebase, but isn't intended to serve as a design document for implementations or solutions.
This document is to be reviewed in 2026 and will be expanded as new ones come to mind.
The current high-level development goals for the codebase are listed below. These are tasks that the head-developer considers to be milestones to achieve.
- Many rounds have long periods (60-90 minutes) of inactivity before sudden action.
- Antagonists struggle to create drama, leading to dull rounds that drive players away.
- Goal: Make individual antagonists stronger—not necessarily murderbone capable, but significant threats to crew and security.
- Detection should not be a game-over point for any antagonists; it should be part of being an antagonist.
- Dynamic mode will adjust antagonist count to balance more powerful antagonists.
- Expected outcome: Fewer antagonist rounds, but more engaging ones.
- Create a unified exploration/mining system that smooths over some of the flaws with the previous system.
- The current working draft can be located at https://wiki.beestation13.com/view/User:Powerfulbacon/unified_exploration_and_mining
- Introduce swing combat and rework melee combat to have secondary 'heavy' attacks on certain weapons.
- Introduce weapon attack cooldowns per-weapon rather than per-click.
- Make attack cooldowns per-weapon, so that clicks are not dropped while on cooldown.
- Work out a way to make hit combat work against both players and structures (precise attack on left, swing on right?)