Old movement stuff for STARS REACH

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:

We had platforms set up with varying jump distances so that we could test how mixing up jump distances and inertia felt.

The squiggle paths were actually navigation challenges to test camera sensitivity and movement rate. You were supposed to move along them without falling off.

The varying staircases tested differing angles and collision methods to see what worked best. We also had those big pointy structures which were made of ramps of differing angles, so we could see what slopes felt natural to run up and which felt like they should stop you because they were too steep.

There are two buildings in the background — one was basically a climbing challenge, with overhangs and interior rooms and so on. The other was open platforms with stairs, but also had moving platforms.

You can see a hovering green ring in one of the shots… that was the start point for a time trial. Go through it and another ring would appear — you had to go through all of them and it recorded your time. We used this to measure whether the control schemes we were landing at were making it easier or harder to drive the avatar.

There was much more — caves, a battle arena so we could test free cursor versus mouselook controls, a giant loop de loop for testing climbing, rough surfaces so we could keep ourselves honest since the actual map would not be smooth like this… and much more.

Even this was actually our second jungle gym. We had an earlier one where we did nothing but work out camera and how aiming our wide array of weapon and tool types was going to work. This image is from a video from July of 2021!

Don’t forget you can wishlist the game on Steam, sign up to test, or just hang out on the game’s Discord!