my weekends have started to slip back into various unfinished games and smaller side projects, but i've managed to keep some amount of design process for Satellite on my schedule.

i went over some of the plans regarding the trade off of player time and money. i'm convinced that, although Satellite expects to be free to play, it will need to strategize how it incentivizes spending money in a way that isn't quite like what other existing MMOs are doing now.

Satellite needs to feature at least one path of content to experience that heavily reduces necessary investment of time in grinding and is also completely free. this would be the game's main campaign. i put trust in the idea that players will have diverse interests and want to explore collecting things, customizing themselves, and exploring side content. the lore of the game is the hook for those kinds of interests, and it provides the completeness of a game for free that encourages players to convince other prospective players to "give it a try, since it costs you nothing."

moreover i feel like the part of the game that is truly a game is unfair to call a "free to play" when paying money in an option and a player is otherwise forced to spend a week grinding to reach the next chapter of the story. something i have personally experienced very recently.