Answers sort of in reverse order...
re: The "FROGGEH GAME"... Dragonfly Odyssey is on hold at the moment waiting for more models. I need a decent game-ready dragonfly before I can proceed and given that I'm not actively working on it at the moment, I think the guy who offered to model one for me has prioritized it low on his to-do list. A tad ironic... but anyway it lets me focus on Mythruna-related stuff for the moment. Every time I play the song and picture the end of the game, I really want to get back to it, though.
re: The rest.
The plan is to produce a simple game that I can progressively add stuff to... but the base simple version is basically:
-connect
-select a name and ship, no login or anything
-plop into the game and can shoot stuff and other people and your score is tracked
-basic game mechanics are that you have laser, shield, and thrust 'batteries' that slowly charge. Using these reduces the battery charge (firing the laser, getting hit in the shields, thrusting) and if the batteries are empty then you can't use that thing until you get more charge. You can control how much of your generator is partitioned to each one... so maybe you always trickle more into your shields or whatever depending on your particular play tactics. Any of the three if charge in isolation will have enough charge trickling in to run that particular item continuously... shields being the exception since there is no fixed drain, it depends on how many things you are running into or how many shots your are receiving.
-if you get hit without shields, you die. Shields = heath, basically. You might be able to survive some glancing bounces against a planet or asteroid... but that's it.
-power-ups would include extra batteries to increase the amount of charge you can hold... and extra energy to give a quick charge.
-there will be some small planetary body (small in relation to your ship size, ie: not realistic planet size) that will exert gravity. Enough to potentially orbit said planet.
-asteroids will exert some amount of gravity based on their size.
Some of those features may get cut for the open source version depending on how playable the game is without them.
The full version of the game, at this point not necessarily open source, would be slightly more MMO-like in that you have real logins and your "ship" exists outside of the specific arena combat. ie: you can earn credits in combat and buy/sell batteries and upgrades for your ship. In this mode, you would login to a lobby where you can chat with the other players online. One arena combat game is running at a time and if you miss the opening then you can hang around and bet on the outcome with the credits you earn (you earn some small amount of credits just by being online). Maybe you can also pay credits to add more asteroids or NPC mobs to the arena or something... one shot sort of deals to hedge your betting.
You should be able to bet on things like:
-player X wins
-player X loses (last place)
-player X kills most asteroids
-player X kills last asteroids (last place)
...whatever stats I can end up mining and have a best/worst, you should be able to bet on with some n:1 payoff scaled non-linearly by how many players are playing at that moment.
(Edit: and if it wasn't obvious, non-combatants get to watch the arena session while it's happening, of course.)
To play in an arena combat session you must "buy in" by putting some credits on one of the open slots. If there is high contention for slots then the top N bids are accepted for that session.
Arena combat would work a little differently in that in this case it would probably be a larger arena and I would add the 'hunting' features that let you find other players. These would be the energy signature trails as well as a sensor ping that you can initiate... kind of like a sonar pulse. It costs energy to perform and other players will be able to detect your ping... but you eventually get an echo back from all ships letting you know what direction they are in. (Note: there may be a way to 'hide' from these sensor pulses by landing on an asteroid....)
Killing other ships may drop some of their power-ups... they lose them and you can take them. Not all... just some... so that death costs something.
When no arena combat is going on (or perhaps if I support multiple simultaneous game fields) you can play in solo mode where you cruise around an arena filled with asteroids and NPC mobs just to keep from being bored and maybe earn some resources through (rare) powerups.
At this point I could continue evolving the game to have larger asteroids that can be 'carved' with lasers into bases... potentially a meta-space between arenas where your bases can live, etc.. More "persistent world" type of stuff.
re: "cost", I'm not sure yet. I could sell the game as a one shot. I could sell servers or whatever. Or I could go with a free-to-play model where the game is exactly as I described above but you could 'buy' additional credits if you don't want to wait/earn them. I could also just put up a patreon link or something.
If it does turn out to be as fun as I think it might... then it would be nice to get a little extra revenue coming in to pay for my server costs. It would also potentially let me put servers up on real hosting if they become popular (and pay for some Mythruna pro hosting as well.)
But... the bottom line: step 1) get a minimally fun and playable game to test networking. And that's no small thing because if it isn't fun enough for people to want to play then there will never be anyone on to play with... and then I can't properly test the networking.