Although I'm a space game diehard and especially a fan of anything that eschews the "warporn" that seems to make up the vast majority of space games, I'm having trouble giving feedback. Your idea is quite amorphous. I like the newly born universe and potentially strange pockets of physics as well as the idea of player persistence. I think such a grand setting may struggle with having a grand purpose. Open-ended exploration games can be beautiful in their initial freedom then deadly boring once you exhaust the creative possibilities. With such a positive focus, what about casting the player in the role of curator / protector of this universe, maybe something like the Monolith from Arthur C. Clarke's 2001? Maybe you're some sort of evolved consciousness exploring this universe from another one, and being so far beyond your biological sensibilities you only gain by engineering space-time, uplifting life and discovering the nature of the new universe (which could be inhabited by volition at a fundamental level).

The player being an evolved consciousness from another universe is in line with what I have in mind for the game and fits well. Bringing up life and inciting activity as a means of discovering/enabling more of the universe sounds exciting to me, and indeed could be part of the solution to the inevitable boredom of exploration games, without casting the player in an explicit role.

Just to further elaborate, you could take the angle expressed by some cosmologists that the universe is inimical to life. Radiation, vacuum, cosmic debris, shifts in the state of matter itself all might be said to constantly threaten life, and life through war, ignorance and stupidity threatens itself. You could make a potentially very poetic game out of being a force of good in such a setting, as the player can't be everywhere and can't save everything, which maybe adds an element of strategy. Depending on how hard you want to make the science, your choices could span millennia, and your actions would shape the universe over epochal time.

This would be a good counterpart to players bringing up life, and a way to bring synergy between player persistence and the logic of the world. Whereas I previously thought player persistence to be almost "fluff", this approach makes it more meaningful. The tension between life and death would be very obvious as all player's efforts are combined to reveal more about the world, which is perfectly in sync with my core ideals for the game.

Thank you for your inspirational input, Wavinator. Every reply helps me solidify parts of the design.

This seems like an interesting idea--and a potentially challenging one!

As to interactions, one thought that comes to mind--but which admittedly might well not work out--is allowing players to tinker with matter that they encounter--its state, excitation, radiation and absorption, etc.--or perhaps even with localised physical parameters--fundamental constants, etc., then allow things to evolve naturally. In some cases this may lead to blasting a planet bearing nascent life with sterilising radiation, while in others it might lead to wonderous new sights or life forms.

Of course, actual physics of this sort is somewhat... complex, and may be a bit much to ask of many players, so perhaps an analgous or simplified system might be in order.

This is all somewhat off of the top of my head, however, so take with a grain of salt! ^^;

... the only way I see that this can happen is if I don't look at what successful games have done in the past. Game design while keeping your head clear of prejudice and preconceptions, if you will.

I'm not entirely sure that I agree, but I do believe that I understand the desire that you're expressing. But I don't intend to argue that at the moment; instead, I want to mention that one thing that I do think is likely to be useful--especially for so experimental a game--is to look for and study games that attempted similar mechanics or themes, but that failed. In particular, try to determine what issues they encountered, and address those as called for.

In short, even if you don't look at extant successful games, I do suggest looking at unsuccessful ones.

I'm not sure of what games might be applicable to your project, but if none occur to you then I do think that it might be worth doing some research; simply asking on fora for examples of similar games might be a starting point. Such games might well be few, but I imagine that at least some applicable games have been attempted before.

Thanks for the replies, always boosts my motivation :).

Below I have tried to compile a summary of how I believe my game stands out. Keep in mind that we're discussing an early prototype, with a lot of malleable parts, as I am hoping that this thread will help me bring the ideas into a tangible shape. Being alone on the project, I lack anyone to juggle thoughts with, but thanks to the awesome gamedev.net community all hope is not lost!

My intention is to focus on what happens between the planets, rather than on them. No Man's Sky is a fresh and vast game which has inspired me from the start, but from what I can gather a large part of it takes part on the surface of planets. I would really like to explore the dangers and anomalies of deep uncharted space, the precautions you need to take to avoid being sucked into a black hole, colliding with a planet or moon, being engulfed by exploding suns, exotic hungry lifeforms mistaking your ship for a meal, or contradictions in logic frying your ship's computer.

In EvE online, there are hidden pockets of space with old relics and databankthings which you can access with special equipment. I would really like to expand on this concept. Not to mention the pirates looking for easy prey, keeping you on your toes.

I feel stupid for doing little to clarify my viewpoint on combat and player challenge. I often feel that games trivialize combat, making it part of a repetitive routine. I prefer an experience where combat is exilirating and terrifying, getting my adrenaline pumping and requiring my complete focus. In Chivalry, your weapon has great consequence. With a single swing, you can decapitate an enemy (or enemies), or mortally wound your teammates. I absolutely love this and cannot put the game down .

Judging from official footage, ELITE has an approach of including the environment in combat, inviting you to lure your foe into difficult to navigate asteroid fields and such. It is this kind of environmental hazard I would like to take further, defending yourself from the laws of physics rather than bloodthirsty sentient beings. I am attracted to Thaumaturge's thought that the universe is harmful to life, but players can help raise it.

Additionally, The Binding of Isaac and FTL are good single-player examples that force you into thinking before engaging, the risk being that you lose all assets and time invested in the game. The way I would like to handle player (im)permanence is to limit the assets the player can acquire, such as gear/experience points, but have death be permanent, a pattern seen in the games I just mentioned. The goal is to make the world interesting enough for interacting with/manipulating it to be a reward in itself, rather than provide arbitrary in-game rewards. I am thinking that if the player dies in an interesting place and he can keep the coordinates of his death, he can attempt to enter that region again (or go off in a different direction and explore something else). Maybe I am naïve in my approach, but this kind of reward is what keeps me playing Dear Esther, Proteus and Bientôt l'été. Some game worlds I enjoy exploring, but layers of arbitrary game mechanics break immersion and stand in the way.

I am not leaving combat out of the equation in my game, I see it as a terrifying rarity. When attacked in an unknown space, you cannot know what is going to happen. This happens in Amnesia and Dead Space. Using weapons for defense is a valid option, potentially eliminating the threat completely, but you are risking your life by not running. If the player has the potential to be malicious with his weapons, such as performing genocide, I would like that to have a consequence intrinsic to how the game works.

Naturally, the project is ambitious and out-of-scope at this point. I want to leave alternatives open for discussion with strangers on the internet, to inspire and be inspired. When I find out what appeals the most to me, I will pick a direction and base the game on that. For now, I am playing around with prototypes and really enjoying this friendly community :).

It's be great to be some immense being, trans-universal or trans-dimensional, shepherding life through the cosmos, or not, as the whim takes me. Maybe like a benevolent Orz, with each instance of me just being my transdimensional fingertip pressing through into conventional spacetime.

As a mechanic, it'd be interesting to be able to manipulate the fabric of space -- to stretch and squeeze it to achieve various ends. For example, to make a gravity well in a dust cloud that will eventually become a star. Or to deflect a war fleet away from the cradle of life that you've been protecting. Or to subtly guide a colonization ship to an appropriate new home. Maybe if you make a well deep enough it goes through entirely: if the structure of this universe is (say) very folded and convoluted, you could maybe "dig" deep enough to come out on the other side of the fold, creating wormholes.

It could even be how you move (the area around the cursor becomes a temporary gravity well and you fall towards it).

Yes! A great, immense (but humble) being from another world. I would like to play on the idea that we (humans) are great beings to start with, who can affect the world dramatically, knowingly or unknowingly. Playing with the very folds and fabrics of space and time is an appealing thought, "digging" out wormholes would be a very different mode of transportation ;). Have you got any other ruminations on the consequences of playing engineer with the void itself?

I'm pretty fond of the idea of playing with physics. I feel like so many games touch on physics or play at implementing physics however orbital physics is a true challenge to fly and use. Even just exploring the use of orbital mechanics to sling shot or decelerate from extreme speeds on the approach to a solar system could be pretty exciting. What types of thrust and ways of moving through space and time have you been thinking of exploring?

The super complicated thrust based control system of Star Citizen is very impressive though I think it's a bit of an engineers wet dream more so then a players. Since for the player all it really means is figuring out the limitations it presents. I'm not sure what types of controls your game would present to the player to navigate the universe but I would seriously mull over the ways the player could/would do this as this represents the way your player connects with your presentation and is the way the player expresses and communicates their feelings about the experience which can even be deciding factor on the directions the game takes as you prototype the project.

I've prototyped systems with newtonian physics, making movement behave more or less like it would in space and having the ship consisting of separate modules that all require power from the reactor, etc. If you, for example, pushed the engine too hard, the ship become unresponsive due to low power (power would be routed from the side thrusters or from the weapons to the main rear thruster, if you were going for max forward velocity).

This was indeed more fun to develop than it was to play, so I am keeping controls simple. The mouse cursor starts out in the middle of the screen, if you move it right or left it will cause your ship to rotate around the Up axis and the distance of the mouse cursor from the center decides the velocity of the rotation. This is taken straight from Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed (I believe Freelancer has a similar mode of control). Holding down LMB accelerates your ship, RMB decelerates. Holding down both simultaneously will take your ship to a full stop. My ideal is for the control scheme to be understandable even by people inexperienced with computers/computer games and aid you rather than fight you, I love it when an interface just works, as if my in-game representation were a physical extension of myself. After I have prototyped more features, I'll probably have a better idea of the specific requirements.

It's be great to be some immense being, trans-universal or trans-dimensional, shepherding life through the cosmos, or not, as the whim takes me. Maybe like a benevolent Orz, with each instance of me just being my transdimensional fingertip pressing through into conventional spacetime.

As a mechanic, it'd be interesting to be able to manipulate the fabric of space -- to stretch and squeeze it to achieve various ends. For example, to make a gravity well in a dust cloud that will eventually become a star. Or to deflect a war fleet away from the cradle of life that you've been protecting. Or to subtly guide a colonization ship to an appropriate new home. Maybe if you make a well deep enough it goes through entirely: if the structure of this universe is (say) very folded and convoluted, you could maybe "dig" deep enough to come out on the other side of the fold, creating wormholes.

It could even be how you move (the area around the cursor becomes a temporary gravity well and you fall towards it).

Yes! A great, immense (but humble) being from another world. I would like to play on the idea that we (humans) are great beings to start with, who can affect the world dramatically, knowingly or unknowingly. Playing with the very folds and fabrics of space and time is an appealing thought, "digging" out wormholes would be a very different mode of transportation ;). Have you got any other ruminations on the consequences of playing engineer with the void itself?

Some of Stephen Baxter's sci-fi, like the books in the Xeelee sequence, has some neat ideas about things to do with spacetime engineering. Like creating impenetrable geometries to protect a cradle of life from a threat, like I think one story takes place on the "interior" surface of a engineered hypersphere, or something like that. Or getting enough mass -- billions of stellar masses -- to rotate around a point fast enough to rip a hole into another universe.

One species perfected the construction of closed timelike curves and re-engineered its own evolution. That'd be a crazy way to get new gameplay abilities -- by traveling into the past to tweak your own species' development.

Thank you, I will make sure to check those books out.

Right now I'm busy fleshing out specifics of the game, to properly answer important basic questions about how the game universe works... it is time consuming and confusing.