A mix-mash of a bunch of crazy ideas to be formed into a game because crazy ideas might make an interesting game much more fun. The game must be spherical because spherical geometry is hard. There must be space like physics which means moving forward will cause you to drift forward forever. Rotating will only rotate you in one spot while you continue drifting in the same direction. It's faster to turn around backwards and accelerate than it is to brake and slow down. The final part is you can only shoot cannon balls side ways with the exception of automatic cannonades which can fire in any direction.

The weird firing side ways while moving forward mechanic allows lots of fly by attacks. The large amount of health on each ship also means most of the damage is pointless. This is fixed by the order/mission system which forces players to meet in certain areas to earn money. If you want a bigger ship with more damage, you have to figure out how to attack people while touching a planet (trade), attack people and pick up their cargo (pirate), or attack people and capture the planet (invader).

In the fall of 2022, I'll even add wizards into the mix in the form of a custom magic system or one borrowed from the Spelljammer universe. These polygon ships will become pirate ships manned by fantastic creatures and wizards. A goblin pirate ship flying through outer space firing cannon balls and casting necromancy upon elven archers. Dwarfs as we all know, prefer technology and will use bigger cannon balls instead.

I imagine spells being tracking cannon balls with scripted events such as explosions or curses. I'll create a magic system which applies different buffs and curses to your ship, friendly ships, and enemy ships. This might make the game system more interesting if you can dash forward by 100 units 3 times within 30 seconds.

Another possibility is a MOBA style attack system with rectangles and circles that you must line up to deal damage. This will allow a small ship to deal large amounts of damage on a larger ship by lining up it's attack. That would be a good magic system. Different spells can have different attack patterns.

I studied Linear Algebra than transferred those concepts to Quaternions, with Quaternions as the metric space. This means every position is a quaternion and angles are also quaternions. Quaternions are a beautiful way to compute position and distance since multiplying (mentally the same as adding vectors) quaternions result in spherical trigonometric functions. If everything is a rotation relative to the north pole, the distance between A and B can be computed as inverse(A) * B. Using this property, we can compute line segment intersections (a bullet hitting a line segment of a spaceship's hull). The code is on GitHub if you like to review it.

The ultimate goal is to transfer these concepts into 3d with 3d quaternions. What would be fun is if every direction in 3d space was actually a sphere and if you travel in one direction for long enough, you would always go back to where you started. The first task would be solving this in 2d with a 3d sphere before attempting this in 3d with a 4d sphere.

The only known physics bug would be rotation being misaligned as you approach the south pole. I don't know how to fix that yet. I have to think if a model which matches what is being shown on the screen and re compute orientation/rotation relative to that model. The current model is that the world is a pizza pie dish with the north pole in the center and the south pole being the perimeter of the pizza dish. This model maps orientation maps straight lines along the sphere as a curvy path along the sphere. Visit the game model page for more information.