Vega Strike is foremost a good space simulator, and our efforts in coding should go towards that aim. However, what keeps people coming back again and again, long after the initial wow of the graphics has faded is a good story.
Re: where to start regarding stories -- a couple of thoughts:
1) There's an outline of what should be happening in the overall setting over the course of the UtCS game time-period (in the lore document). This effectively divides the game into some reasonably distinct chapters that the player-story should align with. To what degree we want player actions to trigger advancement of the setting-scale-story and to what degree we want to do the reverse is probably not a uniform decision. There would be benefits to having the first movement from the introductory phase of Aeran action against the Forsaken to the full-blown war between Confed and Ascendancy be player-triggered-if-possible (i.e. how much cheesing of not-advancing-the-plot-for-game-mechanics-advantage you want to accept). After that, having the setting-story advance independently and trigger availability of different story path options becomes potentially more interesting.
2) There is very little groundwork that has been done in player-story beyond the first chapter of setting-story. There was some discussion of a series of lightly railroaded mission goals to take the player on a bit of a grand tour of unique handcrafted locations (i.e. Sol, Kubernan, Ktah, etc. [of which only Sol exists as an asset, currently]) and introducing characters of later potential importance/path opportunities (e.g. Mirabel as a contact for the Andolian military, gearing up for the expected conflict ) before ending with Lauktk's memorial service back on Ktah.
3) From a story-philosophy perspective, we never particularly expect Deucalion to enact radical change on the course of history by the course of his actions during the game, or at least not to do so on most possible paths. As an analogy, if the setting is WWII, then the general expectation is that it is a" Casablanca" story or a "Saving Private Ryan" story, not a "Tora! Tora! Tora!" or "Midway" story. The setting is big and doing its own thing, and Deucalion is living through it and finding his own path - which will hopefully interact with the setting, but not likely be one of the easily remembered names in the history books, so to speak. After all, if you go full on merchant/smuggler/etc. you're more Rhett Butler than Christopher Blair...
@Loki1950 @ministerofinformation would it be beneficial to pull those things out of the forum and into a repository where we can model it and track the history easier?
Don't see why not - the discussions in that forum should probably be merged into one or both of the design/lore docs, depending on what was being discussed; some of it's assuredly already there and some of the discussion is useful as context notes, but not useful for general reading, so should probably be relegated to end-note/discussion sections out of the main flow of the documents, I suspect.
It's a bit overused, but we could start Deucalion with no memory, and him finding out who he is through speaking to various people. This would also open the way for loads of little stories, with a mission or two. These mini stories would be a good way to get the practice in writing in the Vega Strike universe.
Vega Strike ()image (https://www.vega-strike.org/assets/img/masters/vegastrike_logo.png) is too large for the profile pic on Twitter. Can someone create something for the VS Engine for Twitter?
It's a bit overused, but we could start Deucalion with no memory, and him finding out who he is through speaking to various people. This would also open the way for loads of little stories, with a mission or two. These mini stories would be a good way to get the practice in writing in the Vega Strike universe.