Designing the Game Elements of the Route Simulation
The Helios star system is the setting for Space-Truckers, but up until now, we haven’t gotten into what that entails. A topic covered in exhaustive detail in other books both fiction and non- is the well-known fact that Space Is Big. Like, Really Big. At the scale of a solar system, distances involved are so large compared to relative sizes of things that trying to represent this huge scale accurately in our game will neither be fun nor performant.
An Overview of the Helios System
The following diagram is a rather stylized view of the Helios system – the home setting for Space-Truckers – from a bird’s-eye view. Bracketed planetary bodies show the two different start and end route possibilities –outward going in toward the sun and vice versa. In the following diagram, the different shaded regions correspond to different potential encounters for players during the driving phase:
