Stars Reach Pillars

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.

If we were still in an office, I’d have them plastered on the walls. But it’s one of the tradeoffs from doing remote work, I suppose. Not the same thing at all to just have a pinned post in Slack. 😀

These aren’t the only sorts of thing we have tried, or that game teams have tried, in order to unify vision. Lots of games think in terms of “an X.” Others have “USPs” or “unique selling points.” Plenty use the hoary old Hollywood method of “A meets B.”

In our case, we have used almost all of these. We certainly speak of the living world as a core USP for Stars Reach. I am also fond of “what the game is, and what it is not,” or “Yeses and No’s” tables, where you just list off things that the game must meet, and things that it must avoid.

But I still tend to start out with pillars, personally. Usually these are the third thing I write in a design one-sheet or proposal, right after a brief paragraph describing the game experience, and a brief bullet list of features.

The ones that I wrote about today are all centered around the living world:

The most alive online world ever created.

• The game will run off simulation, rather than being built of handcrafted static set pieces.
• The game will be a true persistent state world so players can affect things for real.
• The game will be driven by player community and interdependence, including the economy.

Plenty more detail over at the SR website, and of course, you can sign up there to get in line for testing, which is coming up soon, or join the Discord or wishlist on Steam!