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New team based antagonist - Scrappers
#1
Alright, i've been thinking about a big project for a good long while and i'd like dev and community input ahead of time before anything happens so that effort isnt wasted.

General idea: A new antagonist type, the space raiders, or "Scrappers". A team-based antagonist that would spawn together on a shuttle and be free to go on station to achieve whatever objective they make up for themselves with the possibility of doing it together as a team, while not being forced to, similar to wizards. The general aesthetic is a patchwork of cobbled together scrap, imagine "madmax but in space" in terms of general outfits and gear. The idea behind the items they have access to is that it's easy to produce, efficient, disposable, very much unsafe and is pretty much always based of stolen and/or scrapped items. While the items have a general run-down look and tend to deteriorate, they are nonetheless efficient at what they do, and arent just discount versions of the gear the syndicate provides, instead being focused on different goals and means of causing trouble. They are not affiliated to any factions, being an essentially free-willed anarchic group that tries to give hell to the "corporate overlords" by free-loading off their hard-produced goods and services.

Gameplay: The group spawns on a shuttle that looks like an NT shuttle patched up with various pieces of random metals adorned with a frankly garish amount of spikes and skulls. The bandits have very little in terms of starting gear and may go to the station on some customized pods (which are also very distinctly stolen and repurposed with an equally ridiculous amount of spiky parts and skulls). Their main gameplay loop revolves around two items:


- The scrapping tool: A hacked together grip-like tool that is solely intended to tear down electronics and turn it into usable scrap. Using it on an electronic machinery will cause it to spark and begin an action bar that slowly tears it apart, producing scrap and rendering the machine unusable at the end of the process. The bar takes longer for more essential machinery. Exemples of valid machinery would be: Vending machines, sec scanners and gear, Loudspeakers, the cloner, arcade machines, consoles, manufacturers, sleepers and so on... General idea being that since they are scavengers, they just repurpose and steal whatever they can get their hands on. Which brings me to the second tool:

- The makeshift satchel: A satchel which can be stuffed with scrap. Using it in hand brings up a menu with recipes which can be crafted for varying amounts of scrap. Those recipes may also include other minor materials such as steel or glass, but the vast majority of recipes would involve some amount of scrap. The items that are available to be crafted are exclusive and not reused syndicate items, with a general idea of being unsafe, unstable and ruthlessly efficient. Examples would include: Scrap armor and shields, scrapped together melee weapons made of sharp edges and moving parts, scrapped bots, general gimmickery, and in particular craftable, modular guns.
The modular guns would have their parts crafted individually with the idea of having a few choices to make. A gun is made up of four parts, the trigger, the barrel, the magazine and the stock. The player has to decide which parts they want, as they each have upsides and downsides. For instance you may craft a trigger that allows you to shoot faster but deteriorates faster. Or a magazine that accepts .22 in large amounts but slows rate of fire. The idea being that if you found ammo, you can craft a gun around it and adapt it to your desires. I'm still debating wether to allow scrap-ammo or not. The guns also deteriorate and eventually break down after enough use, giving back a minor amount of scrap.

So the general gameplay idea is to land on station, start scraping machinery and gather unique gear which lets you accomplish whatever nefarious intent you may have. I've been trying to make it distinct from other antagonists so that they may be a fresh alternatives to the team-based ones we got. This antagonist has no game-ending condition unlike nukies and may accept mid-round antag spawns.

My current biggest issue is finding a way to make the early game viable. Currently we have two antag types:
-Antags which start off weak but possess stealth which allows them to take on crewmates one at a time and slowly build up power (see vampires, changelings, spy thief...)
-Antags which are overt and easily spotted but possess enough up-front firepower to deter or at least dissuade a small group of crewmates (see nukies, wizards, werewolf...).
I'd like to have the crew be aware that bandits are on board, but this would likely gather an immediate response from the crew as it may be considered a station-wide threat. If i give them too much firepower off the get-go, crafting and scraping is irrelevant and it'll make it seem like discount nukies, which i really want to avoid. On the opposite, i'm not sure i want it to be a purely stealth based antag until they are powerful enough, as i believe it would be too close to spy thief and i think the idea of bandits roaming among the crew and generally being a nuisance is fun. I'd love ideas on this aspect.

Any suggestions, feedback or ideas would be more than welcome.

This was meant to be posted into suggestions and ideas. Apologies.
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#2
I'm definitely all for a new, and more low-key team based Antag mode. This means potential for it being on the RP Server! The Scrapper aesthetic is very unique and hasn't been seen much in the game before, if at all, so that alone to me is a very appealing concept.

I do have similar concerns however when it comes to viability of the early game. While I can imagine how this would operate on the RP Server where things are more low-key, when it comes to Classic I'm not really that sure as I don't play that nearly enough so I'll only have to resort to speculations. I can imagine they'd get swarmed really quickly in the early game and killed due to their long term potential to cripple the station by breaking critical systems. I think from the start, they should be granted the ability to craft one or two weaker items, either for self defence, or to start an early gimmick with said general gimmicky items, so the average Staff Assistant or Sec Officer will think twice before just bludgeoning them to death. I can imagine for instance splitting into two teams, where one goes and stealthily scraps, while the others just go around being delinquents to keep Sec occupied. Giving them flash protection from the start would also be beneficial.

Definitely looking forward to see what becomes of this project in the future, and hopefully I can contribute to it in some way.
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#3
like the idea, wrench is right that flash protection would help tremendously at least to shake off staffies

curious about team size? feasibility of splitting group into two so that some folks can scrap without being valid hunted instantly.

if it makes any sense, I really like the concept of this but something about the balancing "feel" seems hard to pin down. ability to break critical systems like spief sounds good, opens counterplay from a lot of other depts. but then how to keep them all from validhunting off the get-go if the team size seems big and intimidating; unique style I think adds a lot of flavor to gamemode but might be too identifiable.

generally, I think the idea is good and you've got some good base elements to build off of that already exist in the game. the finer points of validhunting are something I think youd only be able to gauge if this was fully fleshed-out and patched in for testing. so the short of it is to keep the questions in mind but without any big obvious balance issues with what you outlined, I think the only way to know how it'll play out is to have it actually be played out.
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#4
love love LOVE the concept and theming... probably would have to see it prototyped to have any particularly nuanced thoughts but right off the bat I like that they're destruction focused without necessarily having to Superkill like nukies, and also I enjoy anything that gives engineers more ways to help the station
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#5
Interesting...

[Image: unknown.png]

Maybe we should chat sometime.
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#6
I know something that other antagonists have as a mechanic to help with potential early game shutdowns are added lives in some way.

Perhaps a similar mechanic could help here? Like a jerryrigged cloning pod that works once for each scrapper before exploding back at their base/start point etc.

Or any sort of revive mechanic really. I think it fits a sort of scrapper, reckless and unstable antagonist for players to not really fear death and live life on the edge. Something to facilitate that could be good.
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#7
sounds extremely cool and interesting, i love the idea of space raiders attacking the station
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#8
I'd absolutely be down to work on this ***if*** we can get a dev onboard. This seems really, really similar to the surplus ops event I made, and it'd be incredibly easy to swap some items around in order to appropriate my old code for scrappers. Ping me in the discord if you want to talk more about it.
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#9
I second the idea of a “discount cloner”, I know that personally take more risks when I take soulguard as a wizard so this would be a unique way to encourage risk taking.
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#10
Discount cloner: "Yeah it.. kinda works or it should, probably." Takes damage after cloning someone and the more it clones people the higher the amount of damage, damage can be fixed by slapping scrap cloner patches onto it. It can also mess with the person getting cloned no matter the amount of damage unless a special (and pretty cheap) upgrade gets put on it.
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#11
This sounds really cool, I like the extra lives idea. Also makes swarm tactics more viable.
You had me at "Mad Max"
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#12
(10-05-2022, 09:48 AM)Bartimeus Wrote: My current biggest issue is finding a way to make the early game viable. Currently we have two antag types:
-Antags which start off weak but possess stealth which allows them to take on crewmates one at a time and slowly build up power (see vampires, changelings, spy thief...)
-Antags which are overt and easily spotted but possess enough up-front firepower to deter or at least dissuade a small group of crewmates (see nukies, wizards, werewolf...).
I'd like to have the crew be aware that bandits are on board, but this would likely gather an immediate response from the crew as it may be considered a station-wide threat. If i give them too much firepower off the get-go, crafting and scraping is irrelevant and it'll make it seem like discount nukies, which i really want to avoid. On the opposite, i'm not sure i want it to be a purely stealth based antag until they are powerful enough, as i believe it would be too close to spy thief and i think the idea of bandits roaming among the crew and generally being a nuisance is fun. I'd love ideas on this aspect.

Any suggestions, feedback or ideas would be more than welcome.

I'd recommend focusing on mobility with minimal power early game, that way they can get out of dangerous situations however they wont excel in them. Stuff like telecrystal dust that you can crunch to instantly teleport you somewhere nearby, shock implants that will cancel stuns at the cost of damage, the ability to set up hidden teleporters in the station, etc. The main focus early game would be on mostly out of sight low risk targets (things like public tool storage). Later on you get more stuff towards crowd control, stuff like telecrystal coated frag grenades that teleport people away and large inflatable barricades. This allows you to play more cocky, allowing you to do things like break into sec and quickly break down there stuff while sec bashes down the barricade. Middle game would be more focused on you collecting your more visible and risky machinery (stuff like upload, sec stuff, etc.). Only lategame do you get good weaponry, and this is where you enter the final phase of scrapper, collecting items from people. Your primary source of scrap at this point is through deconstructing and collecting batons, automenders and all other sorts of stuff from people through violent means. This should hopefully have natural escalation to where the scrappers start of a nuisance and slowly become more of a threat. 

I'd recommend instead of a satchel they have to reconfigure there scrap at the base they spawned in. This way instead of them being ever present at the station, they're only seen on station occasionally, this gives them good downtime to plan and also makes the crew less on edge. I think a good way of doing this would be to have scrappers incredibly focused on consumables, that way they have to return to restock if they want to stand a chance early on. It should probably be pretty easy for them to do so, probably something as simple as a handheld device with a five second stun and movement cancellable action bar. 

I think the things that would be really useful to have as scrapper should also be really good scrap materials. Making batons and ruckt kit really rewarding to scrap would introduce far more interesting gameplay then scrappers sit in mechanics outpost for 20 minutes before they rampage. It would introduce an interesting immediate loss in return for long term gain that would be sick.
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#13
Don't know what to say that hasn't been mentioned yet, but this is a fantastic idea.

In my opinion, since the bandits' are based around scrapping and reclaiming, maybe you can have them start weak early and have them loot stuff from the Debris and Asteroid fields, that way they could slowly accumulate power while remaining fairly undetected. Maybe they'd run into the occasional non-antag pilot and you could RP it out. Alternatively, you could also have them loot some civilian gear and then stealthily starts scrapping stuff on the station instead.

Then, you'd have two playstyles, start causing havoc after you're fully geared up, or do hit and run tactics as you get stronger with every bit of scrap. Both are cool and easy to deal with, if you just scrape away at the station in bits, security can handle it, and if you go full nuke mode, the round will be almost over so that even if security fails to contain it, it's not a big deal.

Not to mention that the whole "wasteland" aesthetic is severely under-utilized and would make an excellent addition to the game.
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