Space Station 13, Relaystation

 Space Station 13 is my favourite game.

Well, maybe second-favourite. Third on a bad day.

I am going to assume the reader knows about this game. If you do not, then there is little I can do to explain it. Think Town of Salem meets Dwarf Fortress for a start. All the complexity, both social and mechanically, that statement implies comes too with developing for the game. It is open-source, but based in a strange programming language from 20 years ago. I can just about wrap my head around simple bugfixes, and sprite changes are not entirely outside of my power, but my main strength in developing for Space Station comes from mapping.

This is not a map I made. This is Metastation, the map against which all new additions to my chosen server of TGstation are measured. Through rose-tinted goggles and against a legitimately good design, all are found wanting. I remain partial to the defunct Kilostation layout, but that is neither here nor there.

This is a map of my own design, provisionally titled Relaystation. It is a bare husk compared with the feature-complete Meta, but knowledgeable players should be able to pick out which departments are which based on a few key features. This design results from a long-term frustration with the game, where some players are given busywork in the form of research and development fetch quests instead of deeply interactable content. This map has been created without those jobs in mind. The roles left are those with extreme mechanical depth and options, like the circuit-builder system or chemistry. These jobs let players set their own goals and develop unique creations each round, rather than repeating a checklist of actions to progress to an eventual reward. Other roles, like medical officers, have been stripped down to a set of emergency equipment intended to be used by other jobs as needed. 

The station as a whole is much, much smaller than the average. Even with planned expansions to the maintenance tunnels the map is perhaps only a tenth the size of Metastation, with much less population in mind. Often, I have seen maps intended for small crew sizes balloon out of proportion until players are too isolated. The opposite problem, keeping them too close together and therefor insufficiently vulnerable to the dangers of space, presents itself with a small map. But the docking ports visible on Relaystation highlight how the map is designed to encourage EVA work to put players back at risk, especially since there are decompression airlocks instead of the typical in-out system used in TG codebases. I do not know if Relaystation will ever progress beyond this sketch stage, or if I could ever possibly host a version of it, but the simple act of mapping is relaxing enough to be worth it alone.

For now.