This is an archived page! This page is very old and the content is not up to date. Not everything (if any) which is written here will be in the final game!

Design Proposal

Genre

Orxonox is a mix of different genres:

• Vertical shooter
• First-person shooter (similar to HalfLife, Doom or Quake).
• RPG elements in the background (for vehicle, spacecraft evolution and modifications).

Audience

All gamers between 12 and ? years, who like arcade style games, especialy Linux and Mac gamers who do not have access to many good games.

Intentions

1. The game is meant to be a thriller. There is a huge universe and a great background story surrounding the player. The player will be able to influence the story.
2. We want Orxonox to be the first real open source game, where the player is free to choose any spacecraft, vehicle or any other equipment to accomplish a task.
3. We also want to enrich the open source gaming scene with a game creation framework that is scaleable and extendable to other game principles without to much coding work. We would like to make Orxonox mod-friendly.
4. There will be network support for "capture the flag", "deathmatch", "team deathmatch" and "cooperative play".

Story

Structure

The game will be structured in scenarios with a few missions each. The player will have to choose between two different fractions: the attacking Noxons or the defenceless humans.

Mission Types

• Search and Destory: Destroy all who oppose.
• Rescue Missions: Rescue a person or object from enemy territory.
• Travel: Fly from A to B, where the route is not given, but free to be choosen by the player. Survive.
• Time pressure: Fly through a level within a given time.

Interaction

• Mission goals will lead you throgh the game.
• The scripting engine will take care of all actions happening in the game to make you feel, as if the universe was alive.
  • Area trigger actions like small in-game animations, cut scene movies or radio messages (remember the GMan in HalfLife?)
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Scalable network capability in multiplayer mode

Story Line

• The story is non-linear, meaning that the player can choose the development of the story with his/her actions. See the "story influence principle" below.
• There are multiple endings of the story for each race.
• View the current story.
• View some mission snippets.

Story Influence Principle

• If you fail in a critical mission, you will have to redo it until the mission is complete (normal behaviour of games like HalfLife). These missions will be marked in the briefing.
• There are some missions that you can't succeed in because the enemy is too powerful.
• However there are also missions that you have to accomplish, or else:
  • the next mission will be harder (e.g. insert a virus into the Noxon metabolism to shut down defence towers. If you fail, the next mission will be to attack the base with powered turrets.

Game Characters

Player

The player is a human/Noxon pilot. He/she will command a spacecraft, for the main part of the game and will have the choice between different spacecrafts.

Character Attributes

Every ship (player and NPC) in the world has following attributes:

• Energy: main attribute. the energy is produced by a reactor. There will be different kinds of reactors, with different energy output and different amount of slots. The number of other devices connected to the reactor is determined by the number of slots.
• Engine: needs: energy slot; determines: speed, agility, acceleration.
• Weapon: needs: energy slot, may need amunition; determines: damage, firing rate, type of shots, speed
• Radar: needs: energy slot; determines: objects that are identified as enemies, hmoing capabilities of rockets, hidden enemies, secret bases
• Shield: needs: energy slot; determines: the amount of damage deflected/absorbed by the shields, damage to the ship
• Hull/Armor: needs: -; determines: the amount of damage which can be dealt to the spacecraft without it falling apart

Character Attributes Modification

Collecting the stuff left by dead Noxon spacecrafts (from now forth called noxon-energy) and use them to

• upgrade certain attributes directly.

To not make the game to complicated this is the only way to upgrade character attributes.

Spacecraft

The spacecraft is not pure machine. It got a life of its own that is influenced by the pilots play. The spaceraft is semi-passive. This means it will never interact activly with the player, but it will adapt to the way the pilot plays. So if the player does some "key-actions" the ship will react to it by learning new abilities spontaniously. The "key-actions" can in-/decrease the the "down-and-dirty" rate (further called DADR), which will dependent on the height of the rate unlock some abilities. If you are a nice player you will have negative DADR rate and if you are fucking brutal you will get a positive DADR rate. The player will never see the DADR level directly as a number (like in normal RPG games).

Key Actions

The spacecrafts intereacts with the "down-and-dirty" rate on following actions:

• Kill civil persons/buildings/crafts: increase DADE.
• Rescue civil persons, save civil crafts: decrease DADR.
• Certain story decisions in the game: in-/decrease DADR.
• Aggressive play: bump into an enemy spacecraft and finish it up this way: increase DADE.
• Silent attacks: attack the enemy silently without affecting to much attention: decreasing DADE.

Abilities

As a reward for high "down-and-dirty" rates you can unlock following abilities. [pos] means positive DADR, [net] means negative DADR rate.

• Pure Energy Bomb [pos]: Shoot a pure energy bomb creating heat and preasure that destroies everything within a certain radius.
• Heightech Radar [pos]: The radar capacity is encreased and you will see enemies far away (before they see you).
• Long Range Rocket Slots [pos]: Enables the spacecaft to use long range rockets. They can be used to eliminate opponent s far away. Untraceable.
• Orbiting turret platform [pos]: Platform that holds a gun that always attacks the nearest enemy (autoaim-autofire).
• Height Frequency Rocket Slots [neg]: Enables to increase the short range rockets shooting speed to be more powerful in combat.
• Height Stability Hull [neg]: The hull will withstand more damage.
• Height Capacity Shields [neg]: The shields will have some bonus strength. This will make it hard to get through them.

Enemy Types

Playability

Replayability

The game has some replayability value because:

• The story is non-linear.
• There are different endings of the story.
• You can replay missions and buy new stuff in the meantime.
• There are many different weapons with different effects on different enemy types.
• Character skills have a big influence on the gameplay.