So generally for a trailer we want to try and provide a decent summary of gameplay. I feel like the best way of doing this for SS13 is to show a hectic round from multiple perspectives In terms of how we could do it, we could learn more on the cinematic side and make a rendered trailer (similar to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD8LdxRSueA) or use game footage/replays. Eitherway I think that we should avoid using voiceovers (VO is cring) and rely on music and pacing to carry the mood. Structure wise I think it should basically step through each department with things progressing as multiple antags/events occur with the station We could use a satirical announcer like stanley parable but the writing and voice acting would be hard to pull off without being cring The trailer would start with the crew arriving at the station and transition between different departments showcasing their gameplay and character. Possibly starting with HOP -> Security -> Science -> Med -> Services -> Engineering?

"Colony" is a gamemode intended to provide a substantially different gameplay experience while still retaining the majority of the regular game features. It will mainly focus on survival on a procedurally generated planet rather than a traditional station in space. The goal is to foster players in a more cooperative environment that utilizes our powerful procgen and planet systems to create an experience that's more constructive and has more codependency and player interaction than a typical station gamemode. Goal The goal of the Colony mode is to create an escape beacon while surviving increasingly difficult waves of enemies. To do this, you'll need to work together with your fellow colonists to not only gather essentialy resources but to also fend off invaders. Escape Beacon The escape beacon is the "success" state of the Colony mode. To create it, you'll need to use a special lathe available out the base outpost. To assemble it, you'll need to get several parts that each require high amounts of materials as well as unique items that cannot be found outside of random generation.

Suit Tiers Softsuits A softsuit is the minimum possible safe amount of material to keep someone pressurised in space. It has relatively high mobility, but has insignificant protection. Also, because of this minimalist design, it's very compact and can be folded safely into a box. Hardsuit A hardsuit is body armor with the pressurising layer of a softsuit, allowing safe movement in space and protection from the dangers of the void. It has moderate mobility and considerable protection. While slow, movement speed can be improved with the addition of assistor motors that require electric charge. Due to the rigid armor, it takes up significant space and cannot be easily folded. Mechs Mechs are all protection, no speed. They have a lot of armor and provide serious protection, but move very slowly. Additionally, their considerable weight must be carried by electric motors, and so are vulnerable to running out of power or EMP. Also, don't even bother trying to put this thing in a box.

Nanotrasen vs. Syndicate will be a medium-pace symmetrical combat & strategy-focussed gamemode for upstream, featuring two sides locked in a turf war. The idea behind implementing this gamemode is to serve as a draw for more combat-oriented players and developers, and to give one of the overlooked wizden servers (miros/spider) more of a draw by playing this gamemode. It can also be used for stress-testing physics & grid simulation as well as a proving ground for combat mechanics like the melee/gun reworks High-level Each team has an automated respawn cloner system, with a finite amount of charges for a round. The primary goal of each team is to either use up all of the cloner charges, or destroy the cloner entirely and take control of the enemy ship. Each team (nanotrasen / syndicate) gets a medium-large stationary ship with various amenities such as an armory, medbay, command center, cargo bay, and notably a very large hangar from which to launch smaller ships. The hangar starts out with several stocked ships already, and more ships can be bought using money. The 'playfield' is enclosed with an asteroid ring, and the middle of the playfield (halfway between the two ships) contains many lootable salvage wrecks for each team to fight over. There are also 9 bluespace beacons which passively generate money for whichever team has captured them--1 spawns in the ship itself, 2 near each team's ships, and 3 near the center of the playfield.

This hackmd book serves to aggregate all currently project managed-approved Space Station 14 upstream design documents for public viewing. Documents in this book are ordered with implemented mechanics first. If you'd like to become a member of the SS14 design hackmd, you can DM mirrorcult and you may be accepted, assuming you're a known contributor or designer in Discord. It's recommended that you read the SS14 Fundamental Design Principles document to get a high-level overview before consuming the other documents here, as it'll provide context for why things are the way they are.

Salvage will comprise of 3 divisions: Magnet Expeditions Shaft mining Unnamed fourth part TBC Magnet Current magnet gameplay gets thrown out the window (magnet itself stays).

Right now every type of gun feels effectively the same, since they all share calibers and gun types have largely similar stats. This leads to unfun gun battles where the person who brought the gun with the better bullets will just win outright, and there's no diversity in what weapon you choose. Giving types of guns distinct statlines to follow and then adjusting guns within that type to veer from the statline in different areas creates more depth in gunplay and allows players to plan ahead and choose their gun based on what they expect to be fighting. The problems: Making guns share calibers was a mistake, since it's now impossible to isolate a gun for balancing Almost every gun in the game either hits like a wet noodle or shreds you to bits (mostly the former) Laser guns are just bad Features needed to properly implement balance: Armor Piercing (weapon ignores a set percentage of armor values on the target) Bullet Velocity (Represents how fast the bullet will move through the air, and how much damage it will deal when it hits a target. High Velocity bullets will have a higher velocity than standard bullets, which means they'll fly faster along their trajectory. Bullets that can penetrate objects/mobs have the option to lose velocity upon penetration, as well as bullets that can ricochet off walls. A bullet's velocity is directly tied to the damage it will deal when it hits a target, and a CVar toggling the ability for bullets to lose velocity over time should be implemented.)

Virology is a weird job. In a game about social interaction, their job is to work with diseases; something famous for not being great with crowds. The fact that both /tg/ and goon both missed the mark entirely with their Virologist content has led many to believe that Virology fundamentally can't work in SS14. But there's much more depth you can have with viruses than just adding chems until you get the good symptoms, and I hope to achieve that. Could disease content work without a dedicated Virologist job? Possibly, but I believe that just like how Atmospheric Technicians enhance atmos content, Virologists can improve the disease experience for everyone. The Problems Before I outline my ideas, I like to include a segment explaining what issues I have with the previous system, so it's clear what I think needs to be fixed. and I'm going to keep doing it until I'm banned from hackmd To start, let's go through the basic flow of a legacy disease outbreak. The event rolls, announcement plays, and a few seconds later people start feeling sick and vomiting. Suddenly people swarm to med to gulp down spaceacillin, and the outbreak is cured at the cost of a few players who forgot about the cellular damage. A few players may decide to struggle through and hope the disease cures itself, so they just take the slowdown like a champ until the round ends. This sucks.

Plant entities, location-based cross pollination, new mutations, and the murder of SeedData. Designer(s) EmoGarbage404 Discord/Forum Thread

Cooking in SS13 is generally usually really boring. There are a couple of flashes of good content, but for the most part things are just 'stick it in a microwave/"food processor" and out comes something good', which is really lame, honestly. SS14 seeks to amend this while also keeping the design fairly simple and intuitive as well as easy to expand on in code. Cooking will be based on CGL2 (construction graphs), meaning that it'll be easy for any new coders to write recipes and things can be expanded to work based on general events rather than hardcoded. General Design SS14 cooking will be based on a couple of principles: The crafting menu should be avoided as much as humanly possible. Having it clogged up with a million recipes, and having to search for them in a menu to make them, really sucks in just about every way. Food should be as modular as possible and ideally should allow for custom creations, at least to a certain extent. Cooking should be based around having many different tools and machines at your disposal in order to create unique paths to creating all foods.

Fugitives are a soft port of the titular event from SS13, with some changes to make the event feel more interesting and replayable. Mechanics Each Fugitive event is made up of two teams, the Fugitives and the Hunters. The Fugitives will arrive on the station unannounced when the event starts, somewhere in the maintenance network. The Hunters will arrive a few minutes later, docking in their custom shuttle. The goal of the Fugitives is to evade capture by the Hunters and escape on the emergency shuttle alive, while the goal of the Hunters is to capture or kill the Fugitives and lock them up in the Hunters' shuttle. An important part of this is that each team's objectives don't relate to the crew at all, and each team is explicitly told they can't harm the crew unless necessary; instead of there being clearly defined good and bad guys like with other antagonists, the crew can choose who they want to help. This can lead to much more interesting social interactions for everyone involved. When the event starts, the type of Fugitives and Hunters are randomly selected. Due to the expanded selection of teams available, the number of possible combinations skyrockets, which helps every Fugitive event feel unique to watch and play. Hunter Teams

The R&D techweb is not only a disservice to the creative and fun activities of science, but also a rope, constricting it from evolving past it's limited and basic design. The system itself prevents science from benefitting from the fruits of their labor. Part of this is inherit to the design and part of this is due to how people have chosen to add to it. Issue 1: Worthless Unlocks Almost every single recipe unlocked through research, with the exception of a few late game science items and power cells, can be found easily on the station in either a department or within the tech vault. This results in no one ever actually needing to go to science to obtain these items. Even still, it conflicts with the concept of Cargo, since they're both just supplying items that are on-station. While some exceedingly useful items/machines are still created, there are still easily 80+ recipes that have no use due to being items that can be obtained a variety of other ways.

this isn't finished Different kinds of turrets Gimbal Gimbal turrets can rotate around an axis, allowing faster response rate as the ship itself does not have to move. Gimbal turrets are usually less powerful than their mounted counterparts. Mounted Mounted turrets are mounted to a grid, requiring the ship itself to be oriented to fire. Mounted turrets are significantly more powerful than their gimbal counterparts. Lasers

Hope this goes better than heretic will add more details soon:tm: the scrungly While nuke ops is a really fun gamemode, there's not really much opportunity for planning out your assault on the station. Sure, you'll have an initial idea of where you're going to enter, but after that everything kind of falls apart as you all run off shoot up the station for the disk or go stealth ops. Drop Troopers is an attempt to make a nukie-style antag that actually encourages the team to stick together and make a plan to follow to succeed in their mission. why not just make this a nukie thing I understand the reasoning for saying this should just be an alternate option for nuke ops, but besides being terrified of the feedback I might recieve if I radically changed the gamemode, I feel like the two ideas are way more different than Drop Troopers just being, as mirror said, "this is nukies". Nuke Ops differ fundamentally from Drop Troopers because of how they're meant to activate the nuke. Their entire strategy revolves around alpha striking one guy, the Captain. This means the time it can take to win wildly varies depending on how competent the Captain and the crew are. In this sense nuke ops is a very lethal version of Capture The Flag; the operatives have to go into the enemy base (the station), retrieve the "flag" (nuke disk), and get back to their base safely (reach the nuke and arm it). If that concept is compared to Drop Troopers, the differences become more evident. Unlike nukies, Drop Troopers have no "flag" to retrieve; they start with everything they need to win. There's a set amount of time it'll take for the Troopers to win the round, unlike nukies with any% disk get speedruns. Instead of having a nuke they can place anywhere they want, Drop Troopers have a set list of locations they'll have to defend to win the round. And instead of constantly playing offense up until the nuke is armed, Drop Troopers will be forced to play defense whenever they're defending a hacking site. Instead of being another version of Capture The Flag, Drop Troopers are a lethal version of King of the Hill.

it's not done yet stfu ask before editing you gremlins the main idea Chemistry, at the moment, is shallow and basically a button pressing simulator. My current plan is to make many chems available from at least two sources, like nitrogen being available from Botany and Atmospherics, and water from... fucking everywhere. Chemistry should also be made to be more complex. At the moment, it's an extremely simple 'add this thing to other thing in bucket get different thing' system. Injecting a bit of real-life chemistry rules (in moderation, too much realism is not fun) could really spice up the system. Also removing the chem dispenser because an infinite supply of anything that doesn't require at least some human interaction is awful.

Cargo is probably in the worst place out of all the departments in SS14, and anyone who has the strength of will to repeatedly play Cargo Technician can attest to that. It used to be tied with Sci for the worst department to play in my eyes, but now with Emo's updates, Cargo is now firmly in last place. What's interesting about Cargo's current state is this; if the structure of its core gameplay loop has already been implemented, why is it so unfun to play? No Good Way To Earn Money The only reliable source of income cargo has is salvage, and half the time they don't bring in anything to sell and just spend all their time building a shuttle. When cargo techs are resorting to selling vending machines and constantly printing wrenches for income, something has gone horribly wrong. Nothing Else To Do Medical can help make chems or manage bodies during downtime, science can switch between subdepartments, security can go on patrol, and engineering can monitor the singulo or do building projects, but cargo has no side activity to do. They can't go and salvage because there's not enough hardsuits, and even if they could there's a point where there are so many salvage techs that not everyone gets to actually help loot the salvage pulled in. Cargo has to either delve into maintenance, greytide, or sit around the department waiting for an order... Which never comes because nobody ever orders anything Besides the regular demands by engineering for AME fuel and the occasional request by the chef for a cow, nobody ever orders anything from Cargo because it's either already supplied on the station, or it's too much of a hassle to walk all the way over to the cargo desk, wait for a cargo tech to notice and come over, and tell him exactly what you want. And since all the money for orders comes out of cargo's budget, the requester doesn't ever have to pay anything, they'll usually just get it for free if they bother to ask. The Requests Console, Public Order Computer, wider selection of goods, and the economy (so people could actually pay for their orders) in SS13 helped solve this issue, but in the current state of SS14, Cargo doesn't have any meaningful way to get payment, or anything meaningful to buy.

You know it, you love it, you hate it: destructive analysis. Break this thing and reap the rewards of a king. But how do we make it good? The Rework Turn destructive analysis from a way of generating points from a low-effort task (collecting random shit off the station) into a niche machine that can be used introduce new rare technologies into rounds. In more simple terms, steal blatantly from Terraria's Journey Mode. The Stuff Rare Recipes Currently, things like upper level machines parts and tools cannot be constructed. This is generally good for balance, as allowing these to regularly enter mass-production is likely to spell disaster for any semblance of balance.

Pictured: you shot the anomaly with the APE one too many times... Abstract Anomalous Research (henceforth going to abbreviated to AR) is a new R&D subdepartment that seeks to provide an alternative style of gameplay to XenoArchaeology. The design of AR seeks to address a few core weaknesses of the current gameplay, namely: XenoArch requires RNG and cooperation to even function. While this isn't bad by any stretch, if you aren't able to cooperate or get good luck, the subdepartment becomes entirely ineffective. Xenoarch approaches a maximum participant count around 3-4 players. Past this point, one's individual involvement with Xenoarch is not as engaging unless you can acquire a larger number of artifacts. (see point 1) The supplementary passive point generator is fucking lame uninteresting. Science gameplay rarely affects people outside of the department.

(Sorry if this might seem like rambling it's my first time writing a design doc, ping me on Discord if you want any clarifications on something) Abstract The Heretic is able to learn Forbidden Knowledge that allows them to use Pacts, and has Corruption that steadily grows and is required for them to progress between stages and Ascend. General Rundown This rework gets rid of all of the knockoff cult sacrifice bullshit and makes Heretic into the most complicated way to kill yourself SS14 has ever seen. Here's how it works. Stages Heretic is split into 4 distinct stages, which I have not come up with unique names for so they'll be identified by their numbers.

Current system The current hunger and thirst system, as of right now (2022-11-30) is based on a penalty given if players do not remember to replenish themself with food and drinks. This can imply some social gameplay such as a crewmember going to the kitchen and asking the chef for food, same for the bartender, but in practice it negates any social behaviour due to the amount of vending machines available on all station maps. There is zero benefit on the chef doing his job versus just using said vending machines, or even just drinking water from water tanks or sinks. This causes the system to become a chore for the player, rather than something that increases interaction and fun between the players. Proposed system The proposed system shifts the basic principle behind hunger and thirst from penalizing players ignoring it, to incentivizing players playing along with it in a social way. The system is based on the currently existing flavor mechanic, where eating or drinking a certain consumable notifies the player of the consumable's flavor ("Tastes like bread" and so on). A specific player will have his own preferred flavors cycle multiple times in a round. Satisfying your own preferred flavor awards you with a small bonus, in the form of a boost of a certain statistic for example (movement speed, melee damage, armor and so on). Ignoring the system altogether does not penalize the player in any way, other than possibly being at a disvantage in certain situations (combat for example, if you're against someone who's well fed and has some combat related bonuses). The system also favors the production of specific, single consumable types for player, instead of mass producing food to give players enough nutriments. This has the small benefit of reducing entities (instead of having 50 pizza slices hanging around for the random passing greytider to hoard, you'd probably cook specific requests and deliver them to the requester). The document will analyze food in detail but the same exact idea can be applied to drinks with no specific implementation.