ALTERNATIVE DOZ IDEA: Currently I like this idea more than the previous one proposed and I think it may also be a better fit for our team (given that I doubt we're going to get a third person at this stage.) I'll wait until I hear which DoZ plan you prefer, though. Basically cut down, reduced scope StarControl with a hint of Daiteikoku. - Space travel. I was thinking two layers of screens here, each explored by moving an MZX player (char edited to look like a ship =P) around. Highly simple but what the heck, no point wasting time on this. Galaxy view, with a few different star systems to visit. Each step in this view takes up 1 point of fuel. Solar system view, with planets and their moons visible. Touching the border takes you to galaxy view. The whole thing would be made up, with fictional names for all entities, so creating these would just be a matter of dumping different coloured circles on the screen. No need for drawing orbital paths - no efficient way of doing that in MZX anyway. - Planet view. With a view of a planet (or not) and a menu giving a few different options of things to do. You can TRADE, which would be buying or selling things at given prices. Some would be trade commodities (same buy and sell prices) and others would be hardware to put on your ship. You can EXPLORE and cause certain events (with some degree of randomness, some only available once, some plot-related?) to happen. I envisage this (and most other parts of the game) to be just described through a text interface with some choices. - Ship customisation view. I'm not entirely sure how this would work. I'm sort of imagining a grid view of your spaceship (like in Starscape and FTL) that you drag equipment onto (with weapons needing to go in certain places etc.) but this might be a little too much work and not really compelling for the kind of game. I figure you'd be able to buy ship hardware and ship upgrades (as well as obtain some through events)- upgrades would increase certain values, among other things allowing you to equip more hardware. - Combat. Here's how I figured it would work- you'd fight 1vX against a number of enemy ships. Some of these you'd find in story-related events, some as random battles when exploring certain star systems. My view is that you'd have two screens with a sort of side-on view, with your space ship on the left of one and the enemy ships on the right of the other. This would make it clear that everyone is far apart and make it easier to animate weapons etc. All weapons would have (as well as stuff like damage and possibly ammo) RANGE and COOLDOWN TIME values (with RANGE in km and COOLDOWN TIME in seconds or something- their values will be equivalent, anyway, as I will describe). Your ship would also have its own overall weapon cooldown time, which could be upgraded.) Basically, ships would start at the maximum possible distance apart and then automatically close to the most distant range value out of all ship weapons. You'll then get the opportunity to fire weapons at every possible time. It would basically be 'pick a weapon' 'pick a target', nothing fancier. After someone fires a weapon, ships keep closing until reaching a certain minimum distance at which everyone just exchanges weapons as soon as they become available until one side is wiped out. E.g. if you have two weapons, one with 1000 range and 700 range (and 1000 range is the highest) the ships will start at 1000 range and you'll be able to fire that weapon immediately. After that, if the 1000 range weapon has a cooldown of 200, you'll be able to fire it again at 800 range and again at 600 range- of course, between the last two the 700 range weapon would be available and your ship's overall cooldown time might only let you fire once every 150, in which case if you fire it you may have to wait until 550 to fire the 1000 range weapon again. - Plot. You'd start out with a bit of an idea of what to do and basically be directed around, although if you just went exactly where you're told you might not have a powerful enough ship to finish the game. I figure a couple of parts might just require you to explore a particular solar system looking for something so it may not necessarily be that straightforward, but we'll see.