Using a vision exercise to define what Stars Reach is about

 Posted by (Visited 2919 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , ,
Jul 312024
 

Long-time blog readers may recall that I have posted about my standard “vision exercise” before. It’s a simple four question exercise you can use to think through what your game is about:

What is the game system about?

What is the game’s experience about?

What is the player’s goal (in the system)?

What is the player’s goal (in the experience)?

The point of this little exercise is to clarify what the fantasy that you are trying to fulfill in your game narrative is, clarify what the mechanics in your game point towards, and see whether they line up well.

I’ve got a blog post up over on the Stars Reach website that walks through applying this to that game — check it out if you are curious to learn how SR is essentially a climate change metaphor!

Remember, you can always wishlist on Steam, sign up for the Discord, or even to playtest — tests start this summer, and if you have noticed, summer is ending pretty soon so that means testing must be pretty soon too!

 

SR Pillars three: the vibe!

 Posted by (Visited 2849 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , ,
Jul 242024
 

The third post in the series on the game pillars for Stars Reach is up. This one is all about the vibe of the world, and the thematic goals for the game… and how those things then reflect into the game mechanics.

Stars Reach is a game about hope and optimism. The real world is grimdark enough. We want to capture that sense of possibility that was present in Golden Age sci-fi, that sensawunda (“sense of wonder”) that it evoked.

That doesn’t mean we have to shy away from serious themes or dark elements in the storylines. We need a world that can encompass many sorts of stories. But it should be presented in an overall spirit of optimism.

The blog post shares a few of the items from our “mood board” — this is a collection of imagery that represents some of the feelings and aesthetics that we were aiming at. In the blog post, I spend a lot of time talking about the optimism of old Golden Age science fiction, but that’s not the only source of the aesthetic we are aiming for.

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SR Pillars Part 2: Easy Surface, Much Depth

 Posted by (Visited 1524 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , ,
Jul 182024
 

Yup, another week so I wrote another long post about the design pillars we are using for designing Stars Reach. (If you missed last week’s, it’s here, and I expanded on it on the blog here.)

This week, it’s all about the second set:

The Ease of Nintendo Meets the Depth of the Sandbox MMO

  • The game will be deep: a set of proven game mechanics brought together in one universe.
  • Controls and interfaces will be intuitive and simple and familiar.
  • We will support varied clients so that players can play on whatever device they choose.

I go into details on each of those over in the article on the Stars Reach website.

Something that I meant to dig into in that article, but totally forgot to, is that all this talk of forms of accessibility really needs to include a factor that has hugely affected the development of MMOs over the years: the time commitment.

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Stars Reach Pillars

 Posted by (Visited 1865 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , ,
Jul 102024
 

I have written a blog post about the core pillars of Stars Reach over on the SR website.

We have three big pillars, each of which decomposes down into a series of goals — three each — and then those provide a host of more specific design rules or guidelines that the game has to follow. It’s core to how we manage a large complex project like this, trying to keep everyone aligned towards the same goals.

It still isn’t always successful. It’s super easy to forget to refer back to them. For a while, we even had the requirement that if you were working on a design document, you had to look up the various design vision statements and paste them in at the top of the doc, in order to force you to have them top of mind.

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Wishlist STARS REACH and its living world

 Posted by (Visited 2261 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Jul 032024
 

Over the years, I’ve tried many ways of making living worlds. This video here explains how we are doing it on Stars Reach. Which you can now wishlist on Steam.

The Living World of Stars Reach

As you can see if you watch the video, we’re already pulling off something a bit unusual: modelling a world at MMO scale using cellular automata. What that means: we know the humidity, the temperature, the material, the viscosity, the adhesion, for every cubic meter of the world.

In gameplay terms, it means that you can dig a pond, fill it with water, watch the plants around it green up, watch the dirt in the pond turn to mud, get slowed down by the mud when you trod through it, watch the pond freeze over in the winter and slip and slide when you walk on it.

It means you can drown a monster who breaks through the ice. You can heat up the pond and watch it turn to steam, and float away. That’s OK — it’ll precipitate somewhere else.

Everything does what you expect it to do. Which sounds sort of ordinary, until you realize it’s also kind of magical.

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