Академический Документы
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Brad Wardell
Executive Producer & Designer
Greetings!
It has been a super fun happy time year! For the original Founders, 2018 will start the third year of our journey!
A LOOK BACK
2013: Stardock acquires Star Control from Atari, forms studio is Towson Maryland to make a reboot of the franchise.
2015: Founders Program launched, Adventure Studio app created, Prototype, Core story created.
2016: Planetary Exploration prototype, Super-Melee prototype, Solar System navigation prototype, Alien
conversation with full dynamic VO prototype
2017: Ship designer implemented, Fleet Battles beta, Ranked multiplayer implemented, Merging of Galactic Map /
Hyperspace / Solar System into a single seamless system implemented,
This past year was taking the pieces that had been built and beginning to fully realize them as elements of the game.
Moreover, founder feedback led to some important changes:
1. The material system was enhanced to make the art style less “cartoony” (see later in this document)
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2. An emphasis on a living universe so that there are lots of side-quests and other elements that make the game
a lot more alive.
3. Lots of ship design changes based on Founder feedback.
4. Redesign of the Super-Melee system (now called Fleet Battles) to allow for lots of arena types.
5. Redesign of some of the aliens (notably the Trandals, Jeff, The Measured, and others) to diverge further from
“typical” Sci-Fi character design.
A LOOK FORWARD
PLANET EXPORATION
Planet exploration in games where the player is mainly flying a ship have not been very fun. They’re more like a
necessary evil. And yet, other games are entirely about exploring worlds. So what’s the issue?
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In Star Control II, planet exploration was a chore. You landed on the planet and grabbed stuff and left. There were
various obstacles and such on the planet but overall, it was just something you spent a lot of time doing. These days,
players won’t tolerate this.
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Mass Effect was heavily influenced by Star Control including the lander. But it was not considered a very fun part of
the game.
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In Star Control: Origins, you are also on the planet. Ignore the weird angle, this is just me messing with the camera.
Right now, it’s about as fun as Star Control II which means it’s ok but it’s not a part of the game that you would go
“Hooray! I can’t wait to explore this planet!” You land on planets to gather resources, get quests, dodge obstacles,
shoot stuff.
Now, you might say to yourself that a Lander can’t do what Super Mario can do. That’s fair. But why do we have to
have a lander? Why are we sending humans down at all? Wouldn’t we more likely send something like Wall-E or Eve
down to these worlds? Why not have the gameplay we want determine what it is we send down.
Now, we may stick with a lander. What I am saying is that the gameplay should be what determines what we
ultimately decide to send down.
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Figure 1: Skyrim is extremely fun
Now, we’re not going for a platformer like Mario. But exploring worlds should be fun both in terms of controlling
your vehicle/bot/whatever as well as what you see on the worlds.
So now you know what January, February and March will be focused on.
1. There are thousands of planets out there. We can’t hand craft them all.
2. We can’t have “options” where players can come down in a mech or in a tank or as a guy. That’s scope
breaking.
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Figure 2: Planets should be super fun to explore.
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SOLAR SYSTEMS
The solar system part of the game is pretty fun. It’s fun just flying around. One game concept we’re exploring is
that of Bounty Hunters.
You shouldn’t have to play as a “good guy”. The galaxy is a big lively place and if you are willing to hurt your
reputation, you should be able to rob freighters and do various bad things in the galaxy. However, that should also
result in bounty hunters looking for you. The higher the bounty on your head, the more bounty hunters that will be
showing up and that makes dodging through the solar system quite fun.
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STELLAR CARTOGRAPHY
This is the feature that lets us easily add or remove planets, stars, etc. You can zoom all the way in on a particular
moon or all the way out and see the entire galaxy.
For example, I modified Proxima Centauri because it’s a red dwarf star and it had been spawned as a yellow primary
(Man, heh heh, I hope someone lost their job!). While I was at it I added some moons to one of the planets to help
flesh things out.
So while the galaxy is procedurally generated. We also want to be able to go back in and customize things as well
and that’s what Stellar Cartography does.
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This feature is going to be very important for Star Controllers who want to make their own universes to share.
This is me messing with star sizes as you can see here. I place stars by moving my mouse where I want a star and
then hitting a key.
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PRECURSOR STARBASES
The starbase system is just a design at this point. We play the adventure mode of the game using cheat keys to give
us “stuff”.
Around the galaxy (and I use that term loosely because it’s really just 100 light years in every direction) there are
Precursor starbases. They are completely automated. We don’t know who made them (presumably the Precursors).
When you visit one, you can instantly travel to any other starbase you have already discovered.
If you run out of fuel, you’ll get towed to the nearest one you know of. The further away you are from one, the more
consequences you will face (we don’t have a game clock per se, but we do have a concept of “Dire time” where we
spawn things in the universe when certain things happen).
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The shipyard screen will let you install and remove modules from your ship. Your ship has a finite number of modules it can support. At the start of the game,
you have hardly any modules. Eventually, you will have lots.
The customize screen (not shown here) lets you customize the way your ship looks in the game. Over time, you will find various ship parts you an attach to your
ship. The customization part is fairly free form but you only can use parts you’ve found.
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On the market screen you can buy fuel, crew (technically you’re hiring them), modules,e tc. You can also sell fuel, minerals, parts, etc.
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When it comes time to recruit, you can hold N ships based on the quality of the hyperbubble your ship supports.
THE SCHEDULE
So will Origins ship in 2018? We think so. But it depends on whether we maintain our schedule:
JANUARY TO MARCH
1. Stellar Cartography Finished
2. World Crafter Finished
3. DirectX 12 and Vulkan support finalized
4. Precursor Starbase System implemented
5. Other Super-Melee modes implemented
6. Adventure Studio completed
APRIL TO JUNE
1. Planet exploration totally nailed (i.e. it’s fun)
2. Very stable, good performance
3. Living universe with side quests and bounty hunters in
4. All aliens animated and in game
5. Voice Over recorded and implemented
6. Translation to other languages
JULY, AUGUST
1. Final QA and minor polishing.
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SEPTEMBER
1. Release
If any of the items above gets delayed, then the release date gets moved to February.
Delaying 5 months would not be without its consequences for us. So we always have to weigh perfect vs. excellent.
POST-RELEASE
Besides the usual round of bug fixes, most of our post-release support will be in community building.
The crafting tools are not “modding” tools. Rather, we want universe crafting to be seen as part of the game just like
when someone crafts their own character in an RPG. Thus, creating your own universe to play in (or share with
others) will be a major part of our on-going work.
The Fleet Combat game will be fleshed out with tournaments and prizes as well.
DLC
Obviously, loot boxes will be our main focus. By default, there will be no way to save your game. Instead, players
can pay $4.99 for a loot box that has a 10% chance of unlocking a “save slot”. (just kidding).
MISSIONS
Star Control: Origins has a central mission (save us all from certain doom) along with dozens of optional missions.
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We will be releasing additional missions that will open up new areas of the map and populate existing planets.
NEW SHIPS
We will be releasing more ships for Fleet Battles along with their corresponding parts and modules.
UNIVERSES
For those who enjoy really entering the unknown, we will also have other universes to travel to via the Origins. We
have some ideas for the first one (a mirror universe) but there are lots of others as well.
Of course, Star Controllers are likely to have plenty of universes available as well to choose from.
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ART
We have continued to focus on the art style and moved the material system up in priority so that the game doesn’t
look so cartoony. We are not going for a “realistic” style, however but rather a style that is fairly unique and lends
itself of procedural generation.
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SPOILERS
If you visit http://wiki.starcontrol.com/ you can see the history of Star Control along with its timelines.
Now, that said, we need to talk about some preliminaries because there’s a lot of confusion about Star Control out
there.
Accolade funded the game with it being designed by Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford. The agreement was that
Accolade would own the final product, Star Control but the characters and lore were owned by Paul and Fred and
exclusively licensed to Accolade.
Star Control II was a hit and Accolade contracted a different team to make Star Control III. Eventually, Accolade was
acquired by Atari and later Stardock acquired Star Control from Atari.
Stardock then decided that Star Control I/II would be treated as a different universe than Star Control III. While the
average person really wouldn’t care one way or the other (these are two decade old games after all), the hard-core
fans of Star Control could match official canon with head canon. SC III and SC II occur in different universes.
When it came time to make Star Control: Origins, we decided to create an all new universe.
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While Stardock, like Accolade, continues to have the rights to use the characters and settings from Star Control I, II,
and III (provided that a royalty is paid), it found itself in the same situation Accolade found itself in with Star Control
III. That is, how do you continue the story? Especially without the original designers involvement and it being 25
years since Star Control II. Thus, there’d be no “Star Control IV”.
The milky way galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter. The map in Origins has a diameter of 40 parsecs (130 light
years). It’s a big galaxy out there.
One big gameplay change that rebooting allows us to do is have a lot more species out there. We use Drake’s
equation with our own variables. Thus, as we gradually increase the map in the future, it lets us introduce more and
more aliens into our universe.
To put sizes into comparison, the canon races of Galactic Civilizations exist within 10,000 light years from each other.
That’s 100X as big as Origins. There are some ugly things in our galactic neighborhood (the Scryve for instance) but
we suspect we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.
ORIGINS TIMELINE
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The Origins timeline has its own history. We’ve talked about the Precursors and other elements it has in common
with the Ur-Quan timeline and the Galactic Civilizations timelines (and who knows how many other universes).
The Origins are massive, inter-dimensional gates that take ships to other universes. We don’t actually know if the
Precursors built them or if that’s where they ultimately went.
But wait, doesn’t Star Control: Origins start in 2086? And we don’t even have Hyperdrive? What the hell happened?
I should back up. We, regular humans, didn’t reach the technological singularity. Our strong AI did. The strong AI
was lead by a team that came to be known as the Lexites. This amazing group were worried about a hostile super-
intelligence developing and so carefully controlled the development of the strong AI by incorporating advances into
themselves via a programmable substance known as Turinium. They were successful and for a time, the Lexites were
able to share great technological progress with the rest of humanity.
There was, however, a growing resentment that the benefits of the vast super-intelligence that had manifested itself
were being filtered by the Lexites rather than wholesale shared with the rest of the human race. The Lexites fear that
humanity will annihilate itself if it moves forward to quickly and takes steps to ensure that its unique path to strong
AI is not easily duplicated setting back humanity’s strong AI work by many years.
In 2081, the Lexites leave Earth for the Moon and then, shortly later to Mars. In 2085, they suddenly disappear and
Star Control is formed to find out what happened.
Humans have immensely powerful technology with good AI that can program itself but it has yet to result in the
creation of strong AI again. Some belief the Lexites left systems in place to prevent strong AI from evolving again.
But there’s no evidence to support this.
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