Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

Old movement stuff for STARS REACH

 Posted by (Visited 2338 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , ,
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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The first players land in Stars Reach

 Posted by (Visited 2282 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , ,
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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The neverending griefing discussion

 Posted by (Visited 4675 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Aug 072024
 

I’ve been doing MMOs and online worlds a long time. And that means that I’ve written and said a lot of things on the Internet over the years, about designing them.

One of the funny things about reactions to the various vision blogs for Stars Reach is the number of people who have popped up on various MMO forums whose entire impression of me and my design approaches is formed by their experience getting playerkilled in Ultima Online twenty-five years ago. They are often quite confident that I have not adjusted or updated my opinions on griefing at all in the intervening time, despite the fact that Star Wars Galaxies did not have a playerkilling problem like UO’s — and I designed that PvP system personally.

There is something jarring about getting confronted repeatedly with this. Of course, in my mind, I made a pretty definitive statement on playerkilling back in like 2001 or 2002, in an article for the SWG community called “A Philosophical Statement on Playerkilling.”  The key takeaway:

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Using a vision exercise to define what Stars Reach is about

 Posted by (Visited 2795 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 2729 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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