The year is 1998

I’ve played a few games where eventually, the technology runs out. You’re in the year 2066 and all the concepts that everyone could think of when the game was made have been exhausted, and you’re just repeating yourself.

Sometimes this is the game. What do you make when you run out of research in Factorio? The answer is: science.

Because of the length of time it takes for a flight to take place, and to enjoy the scheduling aspects of the game, I’ve known that players are unlikely to play this game on 1x speed. Since the very early concepts of the game I’ve known that the years will likely clock up quite quickly, especially at the start of the game when you’re just getting started.

The solution to this is to use other mechanics to make progression enjoyable. As the game grows in complexity each time you add a route or an aircraft, I’d be interested to find out where the progression will fit in without it feeling like a chore. I think it’s likely to be around financial and service goals. We’ll revisit this another day.

For now, I want the technology to be tied to a year so that there aren't faux steps to unlocking certain aircraft. You're just playing the same year over and over, and aircraft are always being manufactured.

Perpetually 1998

I was trying to pick a significant year for air travel. A certain well-known supersonic jet was retired in 2003, and I'd love to feature one in the game for players to use on their own routes. The superjumbo A380 was starting to be manufactured then, but wouldn’t be in service until 2007. Somewhere around 2005 kind of makes sense, but the aesthetic that I want the game to feel like is much more in-keeping with the end of the 90s. Maybe it's also because the 90s is very fashionable at the moment. Because there is no perfect year, and 1998 felt to me like a fairly significant one, I’ve chosen that as the game world year.

This also then led me to pondering about an overlapping subject, which is should the aircraft be real? Should the manufacturers be real, should the engines be based on real specs? I think I’ve landed on an answer that I’m happy with, but maybe it’ll change with time.

Manufacturers

The manufacturers will be unique to the game. There's a few reasons I came to this decision.

At an engine-level, the difference between two engines on the same aircraft makes a difference. In the real world, that can vary massively. It would restrict the game design by following the specifictions exactly, and so if you allow some changes then you might as well not use the name at all. There’s also a risk that you could annoy (to the point of being sued) some people if they felt the changes weren’t fair. It would also add a layer of interest to the game to have to make trade-offs for the engines, rather than allowing an ‘obvious’ choice to take away the fun.

Simiarly to this at an engine-level, but also with aircraft, some of the names are very difficult to follow. Players will be making choices much more quickly than they would in real life, and be allowing naming to have a level of intuition built-in, it’ll make the game easier to understand. I don’t want to make it completely obvious with overly simplistic names (Big Engine for Big Planes Model 1), but a pattern that’s easy for the player to understand will go a long way to making the game quicker to pick up.

For the aircraft, being able to make unique ones to the game allows there to be more concious differences between them, and avoid a sense of loyalty to a particular brand because of its country of origin.

It also hopefully stops me getting sued.