Systems, planets and size of levels

[beni]

x3n and I had some time to talk about general gameplay. We never really defined how the playable world in the game should be like.

We know to extremes from the gaming industry:

• * A level, pretty linear where you have your mission and goal and when you're done, you leave the area for good. Examples are most shooters or Freespace and Aquanox...
  * A large world where some parts maybe off limits, but you get missions from some person or entity which will be solved in this world. Perfect example: GTA x, many roll play games and adventures or Darkstar One, Freelancer...

We agreed on a rather open world, but with some limitations, so you can't go to any part of the world at the beginning, but freely cruise without just following the main story.

As Freelancer and Darkstar One are the two role models in this case, we compared those two games, as I did earlier in this post.

We decided that one level should consist of a planet with its surroundings. The planet should be rather large (as in Darkstar One) but the surroundings should be interesting and filled with life (as we know it from Freelancer). Combining those two concepts, we should come up with a pretty good base for exciting story telling and levels.

[beni]

Some new ideas about linearity and free world.

When a single level is a planet we could use the relative position of the planets to allow or deny travel to one another.

Let's say we're at Jupiter and want to go to Mars. This may be not feasible, because Mars is on the other side of the Sun. Instead of traveling the short distance of 550'744'561 km, when Mars and Jupiter are really close, one would have to travel 1'006'569'273 km.

So as the story goes on and important missions are solved, we could let the planets wander and change positions. Like this we have the means cut off parts of the free world where the player can travel and change stuff there.
I'm thinking about some major mission, which either helped the pirates or the companies around Jupiter. Jupiter will then, when we maybe solved some missions on Mars travel too far away and instead Earth is close and we can travel there, where we couldn't before.
While we're on Mars and Earth, cut off from Jupiter, the story in the Jupiter system evolves and the next time we have the possibility to travel to Jupiter some things have changed. For instance the pirates could have won some battles and be a greater thread to the companies, or the other way around.

Anyway, controlling the positions of the planets and let the story missions move those planets in order to cut off the places one can travel to would be a good mix between linearity and free world and it's even easy to explain.