Strategy ‐ Development Plan 2025 - BeeStation/BeeStation-Hornet GitHub Wiki

Unlocking stuff through research = we already had this shit Passive roleplay

• Roles should matter. Stay in your lane, anti-sandbox.
• Not heavily based on player skills. Character skills should matter a lot.
• Things going wrong is normal.
• D&D – Failures and successes are both funs.
• Every man for themselves, everyone has a goal but 
• Chemist only limiting factor is the cell, which can be mass produced and instantly sswitched.
    ◦ Botany/chemist being botany/chemists. Babysitting plants sucks.
    ◦ Economy: Resources should be consumed, resources should require sustaining.
        ▪ Cross-department interactions.
        ▪ The station needs to not just be able to produce everything.
        ▪ Every department should import and export something.
        ▪ Departments need to have a bounty system.
• Something should happen, don’t let rounds be stale
• Something to do with dead time
• Have a purpose
• Believable setting
• Competing hierarchies inter-department (conflicting interests, or outside forces from Nanotrasen)
• Illegal services – Good for you but bad for others
• CEV eris style completely independent departments.
• Mine for money on lavaland.
• Lathe tax - 
• Tie antagonist spawning to a security spawning which is visible.
• Off-station roles shouldn’t be antagonists.
• Economy – Prices randomized to make rounds more unique.
• Maintain station orbit

Key Questions:

• How should we treat character skills vs the player's skills. How important should items be vs the character's skills, if an assistant picks up a gun should they be as strong as a security officer?
  • Depends on the over-arching goal of the server. Story = important, Action = Less important.
  • Theres different ways you can make a satisfying system, but nothing should be made impossible with low-skill. Nothing should be abritrarilly debuffed. An untrained person might be worse at using a gun, but the bullet should still do the same amount of damage.
• Should players expect to have rounds where they lose their character and are forced to play as another character? Should players always be able to respawn as their character no matter what?
  • For example: If you are not a surgeon, you can still do surgery but you will have actual consequence if you fail. Consequences can make for interesting stories, and random pure luck scenarios can also create a D&D campaign. If you restrict it fully, you limit the number of interesting outcomes.
• Should you show numbers to the player like surgery success chance?
  • Showing the numbers like disco elysium can be nice, but on one hand numbers can be bad in the roleplay.
  • What if instead of a number, you colour the text?
• How should away locations be treated, who should be allowed to go to away locations (if anyone), what should they be and how should they interact with the station?
  • It depends.
  • It should be up to the crew who goes, but anyone should be able to go. Command staff should have the ultimate goal.
  • It shouldn't be physically impossible for an assistant.
  • Captain and command should never leave the station.
  • High interaction between away crew and station crew.
  • Roles away from the station more often than not are bad, but leaving the station for a little bit is good.
  • Away roles should be an emergency thing, where there isn't a dedicated job for it.
  • Responsibility to choose people to go is to command. That's an order.
  • High risk, high reward - do it when you need to do it; benefit greatly or suffer. Station consequences make them more important.
• Command
  • We wish HOP and command would maintain roles and distribute tasks better.
  • Main issue with the HOP is that you have a super hard time keeping track of people. Did someone die, did someone leave, is someone actually doing their job? (This is an issue with command as a whole)
  • PDA app for managing crew, remote access and tracking etc. Assignment system.
  • Idea of being able to give orders and set department objectives that players focus on. Prominent for sub-staff. They can easilly find their current objective.
  • If command staff were given a central objective, they should coordinate to give sub-objectives, but this is dependant on command staff that delegate and good designed central objectives.
  • New joins should be able to see their department objectives, so they get an idea of what is going on. To have it easilly accessible, it would have to be inherently limited to what the game can track. More abstract objectives would be more difficult to manage, in terms of game design and administratively. Do the pros outweigh the cons if it has to be limited?
  • We already have an issue with people not playing heads. Tools that are a little bit restrictive and easy to manage people could make it easier to take on the responsibility of the department.
• Should antagonists be defined strictly by an antagonist system, or should antagonists be defined by roleplay and character preferences?
  • Ideally, the latter.
  • If we end up going towards a system that is crew vs antags, and antag becomes literal then we want strictly defined antagonists.
  • If we end up going towards a more freeform system, then antag will be more ambiguous.
  • Lean more towards a more cohesive crew objective, but with natural antagonists that lean towards the core objectives of the station.
  • Current antagonist system is weak as neither side has an incentive to care about the other side.
  • Crew tends to be more interesting when the antagonist is active and everyone has to engage with that, rather than antagonists being invisible in the background. Group activity is more fun.
• Should antagonists have quick access to any item for the sake of allowing gimmicks, or should antagonists have to put in significant work to get items to further their goals which could result in them getting caught earlier but creating more interesting build-ups?
  • Preference towards the latter.
  • Not opposed to having progressive style systems, but the current system is perfectly fine.
  • Grouped antagonists to work together to sneak in items to the station could work.
  • Have to think on this more.
  • As long as stuff isn't instigating conflict, it doesn't have to be perfect.
  • This has a reliance on maintaining a pop, which has an inherent risk: Bigger items that could be more impactful require more engagement
  • Am I allowed to help an antagonist, if I am not selecetd as one? At some point players know that they are not helping the station. You also run the risk of the cyborg problem where people are looking to be recruited.
• How should antagonist objectives be treated? Should they have any objectives, should their objectives be open, or should they be defined by redtext/greentext?
  • Depends on the direction.
  • Like objectives that are scalable.
  • Don't think objectives that have no trackable components did anything. (nobody did them)
  • Do think that greentext is a touchy subject, since people either like it or hate it.
  • Preference towards grouping antagonists into factions, rather than as individuals.
  • What about the game at super low pop?
    • There is no way for the game to work at this pop.
    • Different factions of antagonists should be working as a faction coherently. Right now its a free for all. Antagonists still need to be individual driven, rather than just told who their allies are.
• Do we develop on the population we want, or the population we have?
  • The problem is that we only maintain that level of pop for 1/4 of the day.
  • If we cater to low population, then help build it up it would help with population.
  • A lot of the issue is that people don't join because they don't want to play a 5 person round - spiral of death.
  • Low-pop must be playable.
  • We need to figure out why we have low populations in european times, could be due to low european timezone draws in SS13 as a whole.
• Should the station be neutral or forced to align with Nanotrasen?
  • In terms of game mechanics, the station should be centrally aligned as a group (the crew are aligned).
  • In terms of lore, it could go either way.
  • The idea of rebellion being possible every now and then as a rare treat is okay, but by default people on the Nanotrasen.
  • The station should have a reason to oppose the antagonists of the round.
  • So long as the crew is centrally aligned, then it doesn't matter.
  • History of SS13 has not pushed the station in any direction story-wise, so it doesn't really matter.
  • The lore should be more world centric, but everything on the station is fluid and depends on the current round.
• What if characters were persistent, developing skills based on duration of play. An actual progression system?
  • More than just unlocking roles.
  • Possibly requires wipes/resets?
  • It doesn't have to be skill based, something cosmetic like a title?
  • This would help identify new players to support them, and naturally gives senior players priority towards acting leadership roles.
  • This would require moving away from non-canonical round structure, and each round would have purpose.
  • Use cross-round mechanics to control player behaviour.
  • How would player behaviour change if their death mattered a bit, for example not gaining reward or progression when dying.
  • Risk being: Too risk-adverse or grinding. Players too afraid to do things. Better than being afraid of being banned though.
  • Theres a lot of ways to stupidly die, a lot of systems would have to be changed for this.
• Should the non-antagonist crew be neutral or forced to align with the station?
  • Every crewmember is an individual.
  • Policy: Players should be urged, if not forced, to be aligned with the group.
  • The crew should not be able to freely run counter to everyone else, as this encourages shitter behaviour.
  • They should be neutral at worst - They do it for the money.
  • Is there an incentive for a player to not seek out antagonists to aid them in their dirty work.
  • It could work, but there are a lot of strings attached. It depends on the community's response to mechanics of this style, and it would be extremely hard to design a system that works well.
  • Chaotic neutral is okay: Chemist who just gives out whatever without question, but letting players choose to be evil could be negative.
  • You can try to design something in this area, but expect to fail.
• Should rounds end in a climactic end to the story, or should the crew transfer out of the station with no significant issues or barriers.
  • You can't realistically have a climactic end every time.
  • It's satisfying if the tension builds and releases with a satisfying end, but this is not how the game works.
  • It would be too much work and overhauls to have a climactic end every time.
  • Strike a middleground.
  • Issue with dynamic is that it always end in hyper chaos.
  • Rephrase to: How do you make people care about what happens to the station? You need to incentivise players to take routes that lead to a more dramatic route.
  • On the path of well-defined sides, having an environmental element helps increase tensions: As an example: The station is getting fully raided not necessarilly player controlled. Existential threat to the station. Do this on a smaller scale with environmental impacts that benefit one side more than the other, that furthers a goal that is counter to yours - You visibly know the enemy exists and is getting stronger, even if you can't directly see it.
  • You need a way to keep up the pressure outside of spawning in more antagonists, even if the antagonists die. Keep the pressure up.
  • It has to feel momentum is being gained - it has to feel like the round is progressing. No random events, all must build up.
  • No random events that are going to suddenly change the entire round.
  • Prevent rounds from feeling like it stagnated by continuously revealing about how a side is progressing.
• Should players be encouraged/forced to act as their role, should spiders, for example, be forced to be territorial, hostile and, uncooperative with the station even if another player tries to talk to them?
  • Rules can only be enforced if admins are there.
  • Mechanics such as being a friendly antag actively is bad for the crew, even if you try hard not to.
  • Don't let antagonists be friendly.
  • You have to play as your role.