Feb 262025
 

I can’t tell you how much of a rollercoaster yesterday was. We hoped to see a strong Kickstarter but reaching our goal is less than one hour is just amazing, and a real expression of support from the community. Thank you all so much. (You can check out the Kickstarter here!)

We’re not stopping here. As I write this, we are on track to double our initial goal today! We hit our first stretch goal, for the Hansian species, overnight. Hansians were first mentioned in our lore in the short story “Interdicted,” which we posted up on the website a couple of weeks ago.

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STARS REACH Kickstarter is live now

 Posted by (Visited 1102 times)  Game talk
Feb 252025
 

Today we are launching the Kickstarter for Stars Reach.

Why a Kickstarter? Well, the funding climate is rough. But we have seen that players love what we are making.

So we want to prove to the industry that people want a modern sandbox. An alternate world that feels alive, not like a static cardboard set. A game where different sorts of playstyles come together to make an immersive and dynamic galaxy. Where you can play the way you want, and the game values it, and the other players value it because you matter to the game’s economy.

I’ve been dreaming of making this game for thirty years. It’s what I wanted to do right after Ultima Online. It’s what I hoped Privateer Online could become. I cannibalized ideas from it for Star Wars Galaxies. The tech stack is inspired by what we did with Metaplace. It’s the culmination of all those years of design work and dreams.

If you also share the dream of getting online worlds back on track from a multi-decade detour into pellet-gathering themeparks, please consider backing, even if it’s only at the $1 tier. Every backer helps show momentum and interest. Do it as a favor to me.

You can back the Kickstarter here.

Flooding Gaiamar

 Posted by (Visited 1487 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , ,
Dec 132024
 

A true story of what happened in the pre-alpha testing last night in Stars Reach.

It began as an upwelling under a basement.

Oh, ever since the crater lake next door had overheated and spewed a geyser far into the sky, water was everywhere… condensing on every surface. But this was something more. It bubbled up from under Leric’s house, right there by the fountain in the middle of the settlement on Gaiamar.

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Aug 282024
 

When it comes to interim stages of game dev, I am a bit of a packrat. I have paper maps from when I was doing Ultima Online, and UI sketches for Star Wars Galaxies… of course, for my current thing, Stars Reach, I have a whole pile of images and videos going back to the very earliest days of the project.

I mention this because we just posted up a little article about movement and the camera in the game, which has pictures from some of the prototypes that we did to test out moving around. Just for fun as I was writing the blog post, I actually located the last version of the prototype and played around in it!

Some of the things you can see in these shots:

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Aug 212024
 
GIF courtesy of hooby, showing sunrise on the test map

This past weekend was a huge milestone for us — the very first regular players landed on an alien world in Stars Reach and ran around and had some fun!

This was a pre-alpha test aimed mostly at testing our login systems, infrastructure, bug reporting, and a few other plumbing items like that. We turned off most all of the game systems we already have, in favor of getting baseline metrics with only movement and chat enabled.

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