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.
Continue reading »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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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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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!
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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