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Looking for Comments on Game Idea: Star Trek meets Nethack meets 'tmux'

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Hello everybody,

I have been a long time brewing this idea based on the Star Trek universe that would be played from command-line. I would like to post it here to receive feedback and suggestions on the idea, or any possible help to move forward.

To explain the topic title, the game would be based in the Star Trek universe, with the user assuming the captain's seat on a galaxy class starship, fully-staffed with first officer, chief engineer, security, a communications officer and helmsman.

It would be inspired by Nethack in the sense that it all takes place on the terminal, animated and illustrated purely by ASCII characters. (This may seem like an ugly prospect at first but more on this later).

The player would operate the game the way a user utilizes multiple shell sessions with the linux program 'tmux' ( screenshot of the program: http://tmux.sourceforge.net/tmux3.png ). In the game, there would be several, perhaps dozens, of screens and views the player could pull up displaying diagnostic info, personnel records, sensor readings, main view screen, etc ... The player would be able to manipulate, customize and navigate through his or her screen configuration. One idea was to be able to have multiple 'clients' for the same game session; meaning players could connect from multiple shell sessions to their star-ship, and dedicate different screens/views to separate monitors.

The game would be a turn-based RPG, with quests obtained from different planets, star-ships, entities along the way...

The game could easily be an MMORPG. Players would play in an accurate representation of the Milky Way galaxy.

Battles with other ships, enemies, would be turn based, as implied above.

The ship would require maintenance, upkeep, etc ... Starbases may play a role here.

Warp travel to faraway places would be traversed in real time. For example, if an active quest requires you to travel 3 days at maximum warp, the game would have to run for 3 days. The game should allow the player to leave it running in the background, or online perhaps.

As for the graphics, they would be purely ASCII driven. The UI would most likely be built using the ncurses library. Unicode Braille Patterns would be used to draw pixel graphics on the terminal. The graphics depicted would be limited to graphs, sine curves, 3-d shapes and probably a crudely drawn star field for the view screen, with interesting effects when warp drive is in effect. This page has some interesting demos of Unicode Braille patterns being used to draw graphics: https://github.com/asciimoo/drawille

Also, perhaps for face-to-face communication through the view screen or personnel portraits when communicating with staff, the best we could use would be ANSI art graphics (see image to ANSI art websites).

Looking for input; honesty always appreciated.

Thanks,
chowdhury

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Looking for Comments on Game Idea: Star Trek meets Nethack meets 'tmux' chowdhury <adnanchowdhury88@gmail.com> - 2014-08-28 16:28 -0700
  Re: Looking for Comments on Game Idea: Star Trek meets Nethack meets 'tmux' ifox12 <ifox12@posteo.net> - 2014-09-09 14:01 +0200

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