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Star Control: Origins - Star Control reboot from Stardock

Alex

Arcane
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Jun 14, 2007
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8,750
Location
São Paulo - Brasil
(...snip)Today devs are free to create and implement any UI they see fit (unless they're developing on mobiles) but people prefer to use minimal, non-intrusive, practical easy-to-use UIs. People do not want to be reminded that they're playing a game, stating otherwise is a lie.
(snip...)

I, for one, am a fan of big and well done UIs. Especially if they are made to either look like something from the gameworld or if they are at least thematically appropriate. I loved the interface in Might and Magic IV/V, I loved the inventory interface for Ultima 7. I even played Doom and Daggerfall with the full UI bar and would find it weird people choose to play without those.
 
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This game looks great. I don't follow this much, so perhaps I am being deceived by glossy previews, but I hope not. I have only played Star Control II: Ur-Quan Masters, which was in 2006 when it became freeware. I had a great time playing it, and poured much of that summer into it. So far this new game looks like they are staying quite faithful, but with modern capabilities. I am optimistic.
 

Frogboy

Stardock
Developer
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86
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Michigan
Regarding what Stardock acquired:

https://www.trademarkia.com/star-control-75095591.html

So yes, Stardock wanted to acquire, did acquire and now owns the Star Control trademark. This trademark has nothing to do with the aliens or lore or ships from SC2 (which I think has been discussed here many times over the years). The whole point was to acquire the Star Control IP (namely the trademark but Stardock also got the registered copyright to Star Control 3 -- weeee) in order to reboot the franchise. The hope was also that someday, the developers of SC2 would one day return and make a new game continuing their story either via them licensing the trademark OR calling it something like Ur-Quan Masters II. Unfortunately they chose...a different path that put it in conflict with Stardock.

Edit: BTW there's over 10 pages of trademarks for the word "Human"

https://www.trademarkia.com/trademarks-search.aspx?tn=Human
 

cpmartins

Cipher
Joined
Jan 9, 2007
Messages
502
Location
Brasil
Why are they spending money on a lawsuit instead of making a game is beyond me. Make a good Space RPG and I'll buy it. It's not like we're swimming in them right now.
 

Cael

Arcane
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,294
Why are they spending money on a lawsuit instead of making a game is beyond me. Make a good Space RPG and I'll buy it. It's not like we're swimming in them right now.
Because Wardell is an asshat who would viciously attack anyone who tries to say "no" to him. In this, he is no different to Musk, Gates or Zuckerberg. Arrogant asshats.
 

Yosharian

Arcane
Joined
May 28, 2018
Messages
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Location
Grand Chien
Why are they spending money on a lawsuit instead of making a game is beyond me. Make a good Space RPG and I'll buy it. It's not like we're swimming in them right now.
Because Wardell is an asshat who would viciously attack anyone who tries to say "no" to him. In this, he is no different to Musk, Gates or Zuckerberg. Arrogant asshats.
Um. What?
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
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Codex 2014
https://www.stardock.com/games/arti...gins-prelude-9-of-13-the-lore-of-star-control

Star Control: Origins Prelude 9 of 13: The Lore of Star Control

One of the most difficult challenges we've had in developing a new Star Control game has been the delicate balance between the need to start fresh and the desire to satisfy hard-core fans of the classic DOS games.



Today we will look at our solution to that conundrum.


Star Control will be a brand-new game for most people. Given the number of comments we've seen on Facebook that can be summarized as "Oh this is inspired by Mass Effect!" or "This is just No Man's Sky with a story!" it's clear that most people have no idea about the amazing DOS games that came so long ago.

Minor spoilers for Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters below:

There were many battles...



The first Star Control game was essentially Space War wrapped inside a fairly straight forward strategy game. So we won't spend much time on that.



Space War

It was Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters that introduced lore to the series. In that game, the player starts in the year 2155. Earth had been an interstellar power for some time, but had been defeated by the Ur-Quan some 20 years prior.

You, the player, have arrived from a lost colony in a remarkable ship constructed by an ancient precursor civilization that possessed immense technology. Upon arriving at Earth, you discover Earth is under a slave shield. You are on your own and must take advantage of your remarkable ship to free Earth and save the galaxy. And we mean that literally: galaxy in Star Control II was a galaxy-wide concept.

Your ship and you...

Star Control: Origins takes place in 2088. That's almost 70 years before Star Control II did. Earth is nothing in the grand scheme of things. No one even knows about us.

Your ship is, by galactic standards, primitive. I won't get into how we manage to get into hyperspace. The only real threat we pose is our willingness to use nuclear weapons as our go-to solution for everything (a fact that is remarked upon from time to time).

Star Control: Origins also follows our real world timeline starting from 2018. No nuclear wars. No peace vaults. No clones. Instead, strong AI, terrorism, mega corporations are the threats that humans faced leading to 2088.

The ship you command is state-of-the-art (by human standards) and is the third ship designed around the gravity channeling technology that is wedded to the emDrive technology that allows ships to travel across the solar system in days rather than months.





Enterprise Class. (2056)





Endeavor Class. (2068)





Vindicator concepts (2072)





emDrive Test Ship Platform (TSP) circa 2079.





Vindicator class (2088)

The Multiverse

Two different histories (three if you treat Star Control III as having a different history). How do you reconcile that? Our solution: the multiverse. We refer to the universe expressed in Star Control II as the "Ur-Quan universe" and treat it as being owned by Paul Reiche, the designer of Star Control II with the numerical designation of 6014. Uncreatively, we refer to the Star Control: Origins universe as the Origins universe with the numerical designation of 6072 (none of this matters, except to super-fans).

What happens in Origins stays in Origins, and vice versa. This prevents us from having to deal with a "Kelvin timeline" type situation and sets things up for the future where other universes might be licensed for the player to visit (imagine traveling to the Farscape universe or the Firefly universe).

Scale

The lore of Star Control: Origins focuses on Orion's Spur. A massive area, but still just a small part of the Milky Way galaxy. There are roughly 300 billion stars in just the Milky Way. Star Control: Origins has something like 500 stars to visit with a few thousand planets (which is still fantastically big). Orion's Spur itself has over 900,000 stars in it. So it's safe to say that we have a lot of room to expand our story in the future.

Our place in this crazy universe

Humans in Star Control: Origins aren't the Federation. We don't have Warp Drive. We don't have phasers and we've never encountered an alien before. The universe has been humming along for millions of years, just fine without us. In Star Control: Origins, we make our grand entrance to the celebration - or ruination - of the galactic neighborhood.



Wire map of the Milky Way Galaxy. The yellow dot represents the Scryve domain within the Mid-Spur of Orion's Spur.



The flag of Star Control





Our ability to easily land and take-off from planets came at a very high cost.





There were many different designs for trying to safely and reliably land on planets of various environments.

As the Captain of the Vindicator prototype, you will be the first human any aliens you come across will have met. What you do with that opportunity will be up to you.
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
Why are they spending money on a lawsuit instead of making a game is beyond me. Make a good Space RPG and I'll buy it. It's not like we're swimming in them right now.
Because he and his team have been working on this game for 5 years with the Star Control IP before the Activision buttboys decided they want to contest said rights and make their own Star Control game? What do you suppose him to do, roll over and acquiesce to their every demand? Stop developing the game?
 

Elestan

Educated
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Nov 8, 2016
Messages
99
...he and his team have been working on this game for 5 years with the Star Control IP before the Activision buttboys decided they want to contest said rights and make their own Star Control game? What do you suppose him to do, roll over and acquiesce to their every demand? Stop developing the game?

I think there are a few things worth noting:

First, Reiche and Ford cut themselves off from Activision before this all started, so Activision doesn't have any role in their planned game, and they're having to defend the lawsuit personally.

Second, the only rights they are contesting are based on their copyright on the original games, which their original contract with Accolade said they got to keep.

Third, they've never claimed to be making a new Star Control game. What they seem to want to do is to make a game that continues the story from SC2. Since stories, as creative works, are governed by copyrights, this doesn't seem improper.

Finally, they've never demanded that Stardock not release its game, or that it not call it "Star Control". Their demands have only been that Stardock not use any of their copyrighted story elements in it, which again seems like it's within their rights.

As the Lawful Masses video indicated, this is a case where the copyright and the trademark to a property have been separated, and both parties want to continue it. The legal squabbles are about trying to figure out the bounds of what their respective IP rights control.
 
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The art in this trailer is very inconsistent. The mixture of mid-grade 2D art and the stylized low-grade 3D don't blend very well, and it gives the objects a sense of overlapping, rather than being integrated as a whole. The quality of the art itself also varies. Some of the alien interaction screens and planet panoramas look excellent, while some of the ships and celestial objects looks like a flash game. Nothing that can't be polished out, I'd wager. I just hope they can homogenize the art style by release. Still looks like fun to play.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Talking about art...: https://www.stardock.com/games/arti...gins-prelude-10-of-13-the-art-of-star-control

Star Control: Origins Prelude 10 of 13: The Art of Star Control

Back in part 9, I touched briefly on the art style with the debate we had on having a "mobile" style UI vs. an immersive style UI. Today, I want to walk you through how the art style itself evolved during the five year development of Star Control: Origins.



Let's jump right in..


A tale of two philosophies

Let's take a look at Star Control II:





If you look at the box and the screenshot below it, you get a sense that it's trying to convey a classic pulp Sci-Fi look.

Pulp Sci-Fi, doesn't have any hard and fast rules to it. It's a "you know it when you see it," kind of thing. More recently, No Man's Sky adopted such a look:



The pulp Sci-Fi art style has the benefit of being reasonably timeless. On the other hand...





Star Control III went in a completely different direction than Star Control II did. Their art style was focused on realism. To that end, the aliens were crafted as puppets and shot using stop-motion techniques. At the time, this was heralded as a brilliant move (there was a Computer Gaming World article that went into some detail, if I remember correctly). However, what seemed real in 1996 may not hold up as well today.

And there was much doodling

It took us quite a while to hit our stride with the way we wanted the game to look. Much of the early doodling was very much focused on the cartoony side of things.

Early concept of Menkmack: https://youtu.be/qWhDL48topo

Old:





Replaced by:







Here you can see the direction things were going very early on. The aliens tended to have a Monsters, Inc. style. Probably the most extreme example in the game would be The Measured:



Early design for "The Measured"

vs.



The final version of The Measured

Here's another example to showcase the change in style:



The early concept of the Greegrox





The final version of the Greegrox



Another example where human features were in an early iteration and completely removed to be truly alien:





Early concept of Phamyst

vs.



Admittedly, I am using the term "art style" here both to describe the "style" (how characters will be colored, shaded, lit, etc. and expressed) as well as using it as a way to describe the general mood we were trying to convey.

The overall direction change that fans who have been following the project have seen has been the gradual shift from a "Monsters Inc." style to something more akin to a hard Sci-Fi style. We aren't going for realism with our art, nor are we going for cartoony. Nor is it the pulpy style of Star Control II. It's something, we hope, that people will instantly recognize as being distinct and good. Only time will tell.

The Story drove the art

As the story for Star Control: Origins developed, we found ourselves enjoying it far more when it wasn't trying to be funny. Star Control isn't supposed to be a comedy. It's a hard-SciFi game with a lot of levity in it. Humor that couldn't be justified by a universal translator quirk was removed. No 4th wall breaking.

The game didn't need to take itself too seriously, but it needed to obey the rules it was setting up for itself. As the story developed, the art style evolved towards matching the story. The writing drove everything.

Thus, aliens with human-like attributes (like wearing a tie or having a comb over) were eliminated and replaced by aliens who would fit into the universe we were developing.

Gallery



 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Preview seems to complain that the game is too low budget or too much like Star Control or something: https://www.pcgamesn.com/star-control-origins/star-control-origins-story

Star Control: Origins is a brilliant story that can’t get off the launch pad
You'll have to drift through a void of disappointment to get at the interstellar writing in Stardock's take on the beloved series.

Star-Control-Origins.png


“All planets look the same when you’re crying,” Chief Viscosity Officer Wymdoo of the Tywom says. He’s explaining why, after half of his ship fell off, he was unable to identify exactly where the missing part landed. As questgiving goes, it’s an unusual setup. Then again, the Tywom are an unusual bunch of extraterrestrials.

An intelligent sluglike species with an unfortunate propensity for hugs, they’ve been caretaking our galaxy as a favour to the highly advanced murderer empire of the Scryve. It’s the Scryve who shot Wymdoo’s ship down on its way to, uh, warn us about the Scryve.

“If people shoot at you, they’re not really your friends,” I advise Wymdoo.

“That makes so much sense when you say it that way,” he muses.

The Tywom have been watching us ever since they first picked up our radio transmissions 50 years ago. The way us mere mortals swoon at the mention of the Kardashians? That’s how the Tywom feel about the entire human race. They became enamoured, watching all our telly, and have hidden us from their masters ever since – in much the same way Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect once stowed away on a Vogon Constructor vessel by hiding out with the cooks.

That’s the very best bit of Star Control: Origins – the part reminiscent of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which recognises the potential of an infinite universe for a monumental clash of cultures, strange asides, and above all comedy. It’s such a shame that the rest conspires to drag it down into the bargain bin – less stowaway than throwaway.



In PC gaming, when I say ‘space’, you say ‘simulation’. And there are good reasons for that: space exploration is intrinsically linked in the public imagination to incredible feats of science and engineering. It’s only right that our games should reflect that, and they do – in Elite Dangerous, Kerbal Space Program, and 100 others besides.

It’s to Stardock’s credit, though, that Star Control: Origins travels in the opposite direction at hyperspace speed. Every aspect of its play is as simple as can be. Galaxy exploration is a matter of pointing your ship towards your destination on the top-down map and holding down ‘W’ until the nose of the U.E.S. Vindicator collides with a planet, moon, or star (this affords you the opportunity to drive into the sun, which everyone feels like doing at some point midway through the week).

Landing is a matter of lining up your rapidly-falling craft with the dropzone to avoid damage, and traversing the surface itself is reminiscent of Mass Effect 1’s Mako sequences, only with collectables. Never before have I collected ammonia by rolling over luminescent blue icons in the environment, but hey, there’s lots I don’t know about science.



Fleet battles, meanwhile, aren’t really fought by fleets at all. In contrast to what you might expect from developer Stardock – who has a long history of 4X and strategy games – battles are instead fought one-on-one with the AI in what can only be described as competitive Asteroids. It’s all part of an admirable effort to make space gaming immediate, but none of it, I’m sorry to say, is pulled off with any panache. Plugging a controller in helps, but steering the lander is the wrong sort of floaty and – despite different planets sporting ice clouds, firestorms, or height-boosting geysers depending on their atmosphere – the surface always feels sparse and underwhelming. Fleet battles are an exercise in circling endlessly until you bounce off a rock.

There’s depth promised by ship customisation, which can influence everything from your weaponry to your landing trajectory, and fleet composition, which grants you extra ships in your roster to pick for a skirmish. But very little of that is currently accessible in the demo build of the game. Frankly, it was a shock to discover that Star Control: Origins has been in development for five years. It simply doesn’t have the hallmarks of a game late in production – not least in its surprising lack of fidelity, which leaves planets bare and key characters looking like refugees from the low-budget Christmas spin-off of a Hollywood animation.

But then, minutes later, I’m in exquisite conversation with a Legate of the Glorious Empire of the Scryve, who finds my dialogue choices disappointing: “We outgrew sarcasm millennia ago.” I want Star Control: Origins to be as good as its writing, but it’s not – and with a release date on September 20th it’s almost run out of time to get there, with or without a hyperspace drive.
 

tindrli

Arcane
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Jan 5, 2011
Messages
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Location
Dragodol
god damn i wanted to like this game.. i really do. but i just cant imagine terrain of this game with this art style.. i just cant. .. what a fuck is happening with games and their designers...

Lander_TerrainTypes.jpg
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Speaking of environment...: https://www.stardock.com/games/arti...ude-11-of-13-the-environments-of-star-control

Star Control: Origins Prelude 11 of 13: The Environments of Star Control

The best laid plans...



Let's talk about the environments of Star Control...


Explore to explore, in order to explore some more...

At one point, we expected players to spend a lot more time on planets than they actually do in the final game. I don't mean just a little bit more time, I mean a lot more time.



Early on, we envisioned planet exploration to be the primary activity of the game. We were wrong.

I don't know if there was something in the drinking water back in 2015 - or if it was just influence from No Man's Sky and other games that featured immense planetary exploration - but there was, for a time, a lot of effort put into thinking about exploring planets. We had this amazing engine for procedurally generating planets, So why not make them massive and have trillions of them?



And then we started to play it...

Turns out, exploration for the sake of exploration gets pretty old pretty fast. Star Control is about the story. You're Captain Kirk, not Jacques Cousteau.



We then had to consider what purpose the planets in Star Control serve. The answer is: acquire resources and access new quests.

Now, at this stage, we still believed players would spend most of their time on planets. We had given up on exploration for exploration's sake, but we still believed we had to make the planets some sort of mini-game unto themselves.

Super Star Control Galaxy

For a time, there was consideration that the planets would play like Super Mario Galaxy.



And this idea did gain some traction... for a while. After all, planets in Star Control exist for you to travel down to, get resources, get quests, and then move on. Your ship is almost like a honey bee going from flower (planet) to flower, gathering things and moving on.



So why not embrace a Super Mario World style experience? The answer, as you may have already figured out, is that it would have been a disaster.

One of our mantras has been: you must live by the rules your universe sets up. Star Control is a hard Sci-Fi game. We put in quite a bit of effort to make the universe reasonably accurate. All of that would quickly fall apart if the planet exploration experience was akin to Super Mario. Having your lander jumping up on not-very-realistic terrain elements to get to stuff sounded like a really good on paper, but it would have alienated a lot of the players.

Important but brief

This is when we finally realized that the planet exploration part should be a co-equal part of the game.





If the average play time to finish the primary game mission is 20 hours (1,200 minutes) and we expected players to visit, say, 120 planets during the course of the game, how long could a planetary visit last on average? Well, if we want planet exploration to be say a third of the game time, that would be 400 minutes. So, on average, planets would need to be something that you'd spend between 3 and 4 minutes on apiece.



Now, keep in mind that as I write this, there's about 3,600 planets in Star Control: Origins. So when I talk about 120 planets I am referring to 120 planets that a typical player would be inclined to spend some time on.

In our solar system, I would rate only 6 planets as ones that fall into the "must visit" category. Most players who have played the first chapter end up going to every single planet because they run out of content at the end of that test build. But in practice, only 6 planets are, in my opinion, worthwhile in Sol, and Sol is atypical.



Ultimately, we focused on making sure the planet experience was fun, but also fairly brief.

One caveat: While we did move away from the more action-y planet exploration, we did ultimately decide that we would stretch the bounds of realism by having planets made of, say, diamond, or a planet made completely of copper. Is that realistic? Probably not. But I can tell ya, it's pretty fun traveling over a planet made of gold.



The world that wasn't

The amazing procedural planet generator did have one really good outcome: we weren't stuck with a handful of planet types.

We all know about "planet types". Forest Planet. Lava Planet. Grass Planet. Water Planet. Snow Planet. Star Wars has, if unintentionally, popularized the concept of a uniform biome on a planet.

But the planets have many distinct classes in Star Control: Origins. No thanks to me. For most of the game's development process, I was the studio suit guy (Executive Producer) worrying about scope creep.

Because...IN THE BEGINNING...



YOU MAY HAVE 14 PLANET TYPES.





NAY, YOU MAY NOW HAVE 10 PLANET TYPES.



NAY AGAIN, YOUR WORLDS SHALL BE...



DESERT WORLD



ICE WORLD



ORGANIC WORLD



CRYSTAL WORLD



LAVA WORLD



ALIEN WORLD

(and not pictured because it was too boring to bother concepting...)

MOON WORLD



TADA!



Frustrated by the meddling cheapskate suit (me), the team invented a completely new way for us to generate planets on the fly that would allow us to have not 10 planets, not 20 planets, but over 64 planet types!

The Super Magical Instantmatico World Generator
When you visit a planet in Star Control, it's generating the planet on the fly. There's no load screen. How did they do it?

The team came up with a pretty radical way of handling this that combines some of tricks the team was familiar with from their work on Civilization V (many of the people involved with this game came from Firaxis) with the capabilities of the Nitrous engine to instantly generate planets based on a handful of lines of XML.

To over-simplify, it involves combining 5 different pieces of data along with other factors to generate a unique world. These aren't random worlds. Every person who visits Epsi Capara IV will see exactly the same planet. The planets are generated by a very specific set of rules:

  1. The Planet Template file
  2. The Stamp list
  3. The Height Maps
  4. The Materials
  5. The Props
The Planet Template





This is what puts it all together and controls the parameters of the planet. It is your starting point where you decide what you want your planet to be like. You see the planet's default material. For example, an Actinide planet's base material is iron, while a Halide world has "chunky snow" as its base material. It also sets up the resources, gravity, music, environment, etc. It's the focus point.

The Stamp List

The next step is the stamp list.



Putting pieces together on a planetary scale

This is where height maps, materials, and props are combined together and given various priorities in order to control how much a given "trait" emerges. I have spent the majority of my days this past year playing with this particular engine feature. It's like baking with a recipe but with a lot more instant gratification.

The Height Maps





The height maps make sure the world isn't flat. Most of them are even less exciting than the various mountains and craters you see here. These height maps were the foundation of a given stamp.

The Materials & their masks

We then have a palette of 60 materials, from ice to rock to silver to emerald to grass, and all kinds of other weird and exotic materials. The stamp would define a height map plus a mask for the material along with up to 4 different materials to be shown based on the height of the map. thus, the top of a mountain could have a different material than the bottom.



If you wanted a desert world, you'd make sure your stamp list included a bunch of stamps that listed height maps that looked like sand dunes combined with several different sand and rock materials. I won't even get into the materials today, as those involve diffusion maps, normal maps, specular maps, and emissive maps.

Props

Props are the most expensive part of this process. What makes a game like No Man's Sky so impressive looking to devs like us is how excellently they pulled off their planet prop system. Grass. Trees. Rocks. Anything that is a 3D model in some way. We don't procedurally generate our 3D models. A human being makes every tree, rock, bush, etc. We can then modify it in game based on size, rotation, color, etc., but the actual FBX file is made by someone.







The End Result

Because of this system, we now have over 60 different planet classes with a great deal of variation from one to the next, thanks to having so many other factors to weigh in (size, distance from the star, galactic position, etc.)



And landing on one planet type is most definitely very different from landing on another...





With 64 (and counting) planet types, there's a pretty decent chance players won't even encounter all of them during their first play through.

Let us know what you think!

Please tell us in the comments what you think. What % of the game time should be spent on exploring planets? Did we make the right call making planets smaller in order to focus more on the main game? What is your idealized planet lander experience?
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Music:





On September 20th, add the Star Control: Origins
Original Soundtrack to your library!

Featuring over 40 tracks from the popular open universe space adventure RPG,
these epic songs will leave you excited to explore the galaxy.



With over 40 compositions from renowned composers Mason Fisher (Age of Wonders, Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor) and Riku Nuottajärvi (Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters), the soundtrack features several energetic and emotional songs that encompass the spirit of Star Control: Origins perfectly.

From the cheerful and upbeat theme of the slimy (but friendly) Tywom, all the way to the dark and dangerous undertones of the terrifying Scryve theme, you’ll experience an epic audio journey through the galaxy meeting aliens, exploring planets, fighting life or death battles, and much more.

The Star Control: Origins soundtrack will release on all major music services including iTunes, Amazon Music, and Google Play, as well as Steam for $9.99 on September 20, 2018. It will also be available to stream on Spotify, Pandora, YouTube Music, Slacker Radio, and more.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Oct 5, 2012
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13,582
Codex 2014
Critters: https://www.stardock.com/games/arti...prelude-12-of-13-the-critters-of-star-control

I guess this is the last prelude post before the release.

Star Control: Origins Prelude 12 of 13: The Critters of Star Control

In the previous Prelude, I mentioned that, early on, there was an expectation that a lot more time was going to be spent exploring planets than we ultimately chose to execute on.



Today, let's take a look at the menagerie of creatures we had considered back when we believed that the planets would be where players would spend most of their time.


We had a lot of critters designed for the planets. And I don't doubt that, over time, we will find a way to introduce them. But here are some of the ideas we had:



This guy got pretty far along in design but never made it in.



This guy made it.



Nope.



So cute.



These would have been cool.













Many of these were pretty far along:



Elemental fans may remember the Umberdroth:











Full on ecosystems were envisioned:





And of course, there were flying creatures of various kinds:



You might be wondering: with so much of our art design around planet creatures, what happened?

Ultimately, when we realized that most of the player's time would not be spent on a given planet, we put our focus onto developing the areas of the game that the player would spend time on. Over time, we can increase the number of creatures in the universe as players reach into new areas of the galaxy. But to do so, we will need there to be a game-purpose for these creatures (and not just to shoot in order to sell their meat).

The good news is, we have all the weird alien creature concepts we'll ever need. These are just a sampling of what was put together during the 5-year development of Star Control: Origins.

Let us know in the comments what cool purposes you could imagine alien creatures having on gameplay that you think would be fun and interesting.
 

lophiaspis

Arbiter
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Oct 24, 2012
Messages
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So much work and drama to rehash such a fundamentally flawed and mediocre game design. A twee sci-fi CYOA interspersed with some poorly conceived minigames that quickly wear out their welcome, is that really the best way to simulate the adventures of a starship captain? - I have to grind ANOTHER dumb frogger clone to refuel my ship? Meh, how overrated.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Here goes another series of posts: https://www.stardock.com/games/article/490985/

Star Control: Origins - A Pre-Mortem Part 1

This week, Star Control: Origins will be released. It is, by far, the biggest game we've ever done. It's the first game we've ever made that might qualify as a AAA game in our 25 year history.



The first thing people will notice about Star Control: Origins is that it's unlike any game Stardock's ever made. Not just in terms of genre, but in general production quality.

When you look at Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations, Offworld Trading Company, Ashes of the Singularity, Fallen Enchantress and even Elemental, they all have one thing in common: <$3 million budgets. When you're dealing with such budgets, you are focusing on maximum gameplay per every dollar spent. And it shows. There is a certain level of polish that is a luxury at such budgets.



In part 2, I'll be talking about some of the differences between making a AAA level game and the traditional games we've made here. But suffice to say, Star Control has finally allowed Stardock to show off what it has always been capable of doing but couldn't, because the market size prohibited the time and budget to do so.

The Venn Diagram of Stardock's games

Without data, being told that something is a "niche" game is meaningless. So let me share with you some numbers.

  • The space 4X strategy market is about 2 million players.
  • The space real-time strategy market is about 11 million players.
  • The space action/adventure market is about 60 million players.
From here, it's just a matter of how much of it you can reach. And make no mistake, reach is the key word.



Sales = Reach X Conversion. This is obvious. The marketing folks worry about Reach. The product developers worry about Conversion.

Reach

Your reach isn't exactly market size. It's how much of that market you can get to.

Reach is affected by things like:
  1. Advertising
  2. Partnerships
  3. Brand Awareness
  4. Hardware Requirements
  5. Localization
Stardock has traditionally stuck with the "niche" strategy game market because it is really good at reaching a high percentage of that market. But on the flip side, it was also that we just weren't very well suited for setting up the necessary logistics to reach other markets effectively.



To solve Stardock's reach problem, we were able to bring on Kevin Unganst to head our worldwide marketing efforts. Kevin Unangst was Microsoft's marketing director in charge of launching Halo, Forza, Fable, and Windows XP, to name a few. Building reach is a logistical challenge. Building up an organization and a network of partnerships was a prerequisite for Stardock in order to be able to justify making something as big as Star Control: Origins.



Conversion

Conversion is the other X factor. One bitter lesson many a young software developer learns is that there's no room for second place. In a given market segment, 80% goes to the top game. The remaining 20% goes to everyone else combined. Being the second-best fantasy RPG or the second-best MMO can be very tough.

As game developers, our job is to make sure we make a game that isn't second best. We also pray that the people who selected the market for us to make a game for didn't choose one with entrenched competition (hey! let's make a MOBA/Battle Royale game! What could go wrong?).



In the case of Star Control: Origins, our closest competitors are Mass Effect: Andromeda and maybe No Man's Sky. In some respects, we're a bit of both combined. But Star Control: Origins is practically it's own genre. It's one of the reasons why it's so hard to make -- action / adventure / RPG. Space Diablo? Skyrim in space? Nothing quite fits.





We knew that in order to compete at all, we had to deliver a game that wasn't even in the same league. And that's one of the reasons so many Stardock fans are going to be, I suspect, surprised at the quality of Star Control: Origins. This is a game that was, effectively, completed earlier this year and has been undergoing polish, enhancement, and iteration ever since. You can't come in "hot" in this market. It's too risky.

The Technical Opportunity

I've often liked games with cakes. That is, a game is really just a piece of software cake with a very thin layer of game frosting on top. Its future is heavily dependent on the underlying engine.

Back in 2010, Stardock stumbled pretty hard with Elemental: War of Magic. It was our first attempt at creating a 3rd generation engine. It failed.

From 2011 to now we were kind of in the technological wilderness. We used the money we got from selling Impulse to invest in a series of start-ups including Oxide Interactive to develop the first 4th generation engine (4th gen = CPU core neutral).



Ashes of the Singularity was the first 4th generation game released and it is still, two years later, the go-to game to demonstrate state of the art hardware. In aircraft terms Ashes of the Singularity is the F-117. The first of its generation. Star Control: Origins is more akin to the F-22. The fully realized potential of a 4th generation engine. For us, this is really good news because it means Star Control: Origins in just at the beginning of its life. If it's successful, it'll just get better and better for many years to come (as opposed to the case where a game is "wringing the last juice of its engine").

So now what?

So this week we'll see how we've done. The market will decide whether we did our jobs and how well. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Well as far as Steam top sellers list goes, it's currently at ~200.
 

lophiaspis

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 24, 2012
Messages
379
:lol: Did they really think they are competing with Mass Effect? With something that looks like a Flash game? Oh boy...
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

Filthy Kalinite
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Apr 24, 2015
Messages
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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Bubbles In Memoria
Well as far as Steam top sellers list goes, it's currently at ~200.
Number 58 on GOG.

I think they have made a mistake on not giving the game to youtubers early.
There's not a single recent gameplay video to be found.
 

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