In this update I'd like to show some of the in-game screens we've been working on. In Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager, the missions are organized in the following way:
Programs Categories -> Programs -> Mission Configurations.
In a nutshell, 'Program Categories' are groups of related programs. For example, 'Earth orbiting satellites', 'Mars probes' or 'Lunar expeditions'. The full game will feature 40 of them!
Each program category contains one or more 'Programs'. On average, each program category contains three programs. Some of them have 1 (e.g., the 'Space planes' program category) whereas some others have eigher (e.g., the 'Lunar probes' program category). When you open up a new program, you get all the mission components that belong to it. Notice that some mission components are effectively used across many programs, which obviously lowers down the costs of R&D.
Every program has one or more 'mission configurations', which are basically a sequence of mission steps. Mission configurations can last as short as 15 minutes (e.g., a suborbital Mercury flight) or as long as decades (e.g., the Voyager probe, which is available in part 2). Most unmanned programs have a single mission configuration, whereas the manned ones have a lots more. For example, the Gemini program has 14 mission configurations. Most of them are based on real missions, but some of them are fictitious (e.g., an orbital rendezvous between two manned vehicles where both Pilots perform an EVA). Those fictitious missions are the ones that make the best use of our renders, since they allow us to show animations and display things that you cannot find on historical footage.
For each step of a mission configuration, there are a number of variables that influece its outcome: the involvement of each mission component, their reliabilities, the flight controllers responsible for that stage of the mission, the flight crew (if any), etc. With so much information to digest and understand before attempting to launch a mission, we tried several approaches and came up with a set of screens that we believe you'll find useful when playing the game.
The first screen shows all the available mission configurations for the 'Experimental Space Plane' program.
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