Game Research: Freelancer

Next, I shall look at the game Freelancer to see what it achieved and how it worked. Freelancer is a sandbox space simulation game, in which the player is tasked with flying across the galaxy using a network of wormholes, to complete missions, escort ships, trade goods and uncover the story. As a key point, the ship you own can be upgraded as the game goes one, with the type of ship lending itself to certain types of jobs; freighters for trading goods, fighters for partaking in dogfights with the pirates which pervade the galaxy, and numerous other ones. Each ship has a shield which can be focused on a specific side, or diverted to other ship responsibilities, like the engine or weapons, allowing for a deeper and more meaningful experience when flying the ship.


The game was mainly played using the mouse. A curved line followed the cursor, and it mapped the movements of the ship after it, allowing for complex manoeuvres to be made without the need for lots of training or complex button presses. Simplicity is the main point of this, but small keyboard presses for things like diverting energy from one sector of the ship to another, or pitching/yawing the ship to make daredevil moves in combat. Procedurally generated objects, like asteroids and ships, allow for a richer galaxy as well, and make the player feel as if it is in a populated sprawling galaxy, even if they are travelling light years across space.


As a game for its time, Freelancer had been highly anticipated, earning Chris Roberts, the games designer, a lot of intrigue and expectation. Unfortunately, due to a merger with Microsoft and some technical limitations of the time, his vision of this dynamically changing world was not brought to fruition, and unfortunately it left for a game which ended up being less than expected. However, it was still seen favourably, with a high production value and some interesting game play until it became stale.

We did consider creating a procedurally generated space simulator like Freelancer, as it would be simple to make assets for it and a control system wouldn’t be too hard to make. However, we ran into a problem with what we would populate the world with. Unfortunately, space simulators require some kind of content or a solid mechanic to keep the player interested, which is something that Freelancer failed with a little bit. Considering the target platform is Android, it would altogether be too much of a task to have to come up with a core mechanic which would not only compliment the game style, but also be easy to play on a phone or tablet device.

Game research: Diablo

For the first set of research, we will be looking at Diablo, its mechanics and the effect it had on the games market. It is an isometric hack and slash where the aim is to dungeoneer and find rare objects and gain levels, with the aim of doing the same in harder dungeons until they are strong enough to fight Diablo himself. It is a simple concept, in that it essentially requires little thought other than enter dungeon > kill monsters > acquire rare objects > go to town > enter harder dungeon > rinse and repeat. Because of its simplistic but exciting approach to the idea of exploration, letting the player be guided by their want for adventure and the story.

It used a system whereby it was mainly point and click, by left clicking on the enemy it would attack them with your main weapon (which could be a sword, bow and arrow, whatever you had equipped) left clicking somewhere which wasn’t an enemy would move you there. There were also spells which could be set in the spell slot, and these could be used at any time by pressing on it. Lastly, during combat the player could drink either a mana or health potion to gain an amount of either back. These all together made for an exciting fast paced combat mechanic, constantly trying to maintain your health while fighting off hordes of zombies.

The game was rated as one of the single best games in the history of games, with its fiercely addictive game play and replay ability due to the fact that the single player quests are randomized every time you create a new game. It inspired a whole genre of games, simply called “Diablo like games” due to the hack and slash nature. Games like Path of Exile and Torchlight are successful because of the foundations laid down by Diablo.

As a potential avenue for the base IP, it is something which might end up being quite awkward to script. Due to the real time aspect, and the fact that it is interesting because of the huge amount of diversity in enemies and in depth lore and story, it is something which would require more time to create to a decent standard than a different style of game.

The first post
This is it, my first post on the blog, on my way to documenting the process of designing, producing and evaluating my game. The group consists of myself, James Taft and George Lawton. Between us, using Unity, we'll be creating this game, including assets, code and any necessary additive parts. Ideas generation has already begun, we have done multiple mind-maps and are exploring other venues of ideas gen, which will help us expand on the game idea we have chosen. This idea is based off the Wasteland and Fallout series, being taken from the Fallout IP specifically. They are old games, which were played on DOS and other, more dated consoles. So we thought it was a prime choice for a "reboot" it would be isometric, and be realtime, similar in gameplay to the Diablo series or other isometric games.