Introduction

In a distant universe, mindless hordes of mana-warped monsters assault all known worlds. With a powerful progression System, civilization stands firm, but casualties are high.

The System has thus enacted protocol TERMINAL, allowing factions to connect expendable combat drones to remote pilots from other, non-magical universes.

Mission Parameters

A small scavenger faction accepted a System quest to establish a forward base on a tomb world. Pilot a drone to help the faction grow, survive, and ultimately exterminate all the monsters.

To facilitate remote drone control, the System provides a text-based, mouse-driven shell to input drone commands across the orthogonal universe connection. Should the drone be destroyed, a copy will be spawned at the base’s System pylon, though loss of items and mana may be inevitable.

Note that due to relativistic phenomena, time effectively stops in the remote universe while the pilot makes decisions.

Details

Explore a hand-designed open world, with diverse biomes, locations, resources, anomalies, treasures, and dangers. Delve into post-apocalyptic magitech ruins, hunting monsters and scavenging materials to boost your faction's base, and absorbing various kinds of mana to fuel your progression.

Earn faction prestige while helping research new tech, craft new items, and construct upgrades. Spend the prestige on gear, consumables, and progression from the faction shop, or influence faction project queue orders.

Disrupt and exterminate a monster ecosystem that mindlessly attacks anything, including each other. Monsters will grow stronger over time, and will attempt to conquer other monster spawners. While your base starts in a less dangerous sector, it won’t stay that way forever.

Blast monsters with mana-powered energy weapons and railguns, or equip powerful catalysts to bolster your innate spells. The world includes nine magic types plus physical damage, and also includes mechanics such as evasion, accuracy, stamina, over-time status conditions, environments, armor-piercing, calorie burn, stealth, detection, and more. Exploit them all to defeat your enemies.

Subjective time is simultaneous turn-based. Remember that while you’re doing things, the world is doing things too, and assume that whatever you can do, entities in the world can do too.

Outcomes are both deterministic and emergent. If you make the same decisions, you may expect the same results, but there are an immense number of possible decisions, and each can have ripple effects through the world.

Design Principles

Gameplay over graphics

I’ve seen too many games sacrifice gameplay to graphics, and I’ve instead focused on creating and refining gameplay mechanics, while developing a text-based interface that’s understandable and easy to use.

An advancing world

As the player acts, so does the world; the world doesn’t wait for player-triggered questlines. The NPCs you'll find aren’t mere scenery, they’re doing world-changing things. You can, for instance, see NPCs advancing projects such as research or crafting as you explore the world.

A hand-designed world

I've enjoyed RPGs with custom, hand-designed worlds more than those with procedural worlds, and so this RPG will also have custom worlds, biomes, lore, monsters, and so forth.

Least-special player mechanics

While the player is somewhat special in the world (being the only remotely-controlled drone), nearly everything the player can do the NPCs can also do. The player can kill monsters, explore the world, study artifacts, and scavenge materials: so can NPCs.

No added RNG

For me, RNG-driven rulesets haven't proven to be enjoyable. This ruleset is thus designed to instead provide a dynamic experience via a massive number of choices and variable-driven deterministic outcomes.

For instance, if the same attack misses one time and hits another, it’s not because of a dice roll, but because of a variable: the enemy may no longer have stamina to evade, or the enemy’s evasion was lowered by additional incoming attacks, or your accuracy leveled up, or AoE damaged an in-zone object boosting concealment enough to diminish its effect on the zone and the enemy.

Straightforward Rules

In RPGs, I enjoy making progression decisions when I understand the game rules, so, I designed the algorithms controlling variable outcomes to be as simple and understandable as I could.

For instance, damage is determined by subtracting resistance from damage, while armor-piercing subtracts resistance. This is a simple integer operation, but the relevant stats can be collected indefinitely. While a fire elemental may have high fire resists, stack enough fire damage and pierce, and your fire attacks can still overwhelm its defenses.

Finally, if possible, I want the basic rules to be accessible in-game, so that players can make informed, and hopefully fun, decisions.