Imagine our local galaxy from the top-down perspective, a bird's eye view if you will. You see Earth, the pale blue dot. To the left you have Mercury and Venus, and of course our star the Sun. To the right you have our moon, Mars, and the rest of our collective "backyard". A playground for possibilities which we will use as our canvas for the game.
Some of the first thoughts are about ways people would move around this space. What would they be doing? Who would own what? This can be a pretty daunting task, especially when you have the void of blackness looking back at you when you start up the map editor at the start of a project.
The only way to combat this void is with planning! This is where things you have probably heard of before like a GDD (Game Design Document) come in handy. The probability this document will remain the same throughout the entire course of the game's development is almost zero. As a project evolves it is natural for things to change, to realize new possibilities, or find better ways of doing a particular task or feature.
The Cold War is something that is a distant memory for most. If you were born in the 80's you might remember your parents talking about the wall coming down or perhaps seeing images of Ronald Reagan on television. Anybody from that era will remember the tension, mutually-assured-destruction, underground shelters, drills in school making you get under your desk in a simulated nuclear attack, and the monthly air-raid siren test always reminded you everything could change at a moment's notice.
When designing a story and lore for it the best way is through the people that lived and worked there. Allowing the player to traverse through this medium with their assigned task while observing and using their imagination to fill in the blanks you intentionally leave. The largest problem in all of this is scale, meaning the complexity of the idea and how much you decide to show and talk about. The below graphic is a layout of every planet and moon in our local galaxy. The size of each moon is taken into consideration, nationality of the country that operates bases there, and other locations like space stations that would be between these locations.
One thing that might become apparent right away is that we have A LOT of locations here. Remember, this is not meaning we will create every single one of these locations but it allows us to build a path through them. In the case of Space Trucker the goal is to travel home to Earth from the distant [s]planet[/s] body Pluto, the mechanics of the game are the grid system used by machines to trigger random events, FPS combat and exploration, and operating your ship to plot a course to the next planet with the intent to continue the main storyline.
Being able to see all of these locations helps us though with the planning process. Now that we can calculate distances between these places based on the distance from the sun in millions of miles. These calculations are used as the basis for an enumeration in the codebase that defines these distances so the ship simulation can calculate things like distance traveled and quantify it as a value to the user, consume resources for X amount of distance traveled, and basically becomes the basis for designing something like a space truck.
Before we get to far ahead of ourselves let's take a look at what a possible space truck might look like. Since it is supposed to be a truck we merge the idea of a cargo container ship and a normal semi truck you would see on the freeway together. The scale is increased to that of a Saturn 5 rocket and then we start to carve out various areas inside of it for people to live and work to get a feel for what it might look like.
Now that we have an idea of the basic requirements for moving around the galaxy, nationalities at play with the Cold War theme, distances to be traveled, a course can be plotted through the system. Early versions of the game allowed you to travel to any location and had randomized quests but this quickly proved to be boring, as operating the space truck quickly became a task with no end, traversing hallways and putting out fires in a desperate attempt to keep the ship alive.
It was part of the original idea that drove us to get this far, however, this is not the type of game that we have in mind it should be more focused and have a straightforward path the player can take. If we can populate this world with enough interesting data points (IE people to talk to, things to do, places to explore) then this open world style of gameplay would be suiting but as a single individual you only have so many hours in the day to complete any given task.
So the problem with these early versions of the space truck proved to be a scale problem, just like having 20+ fully detailed bases can also start to seem daunting when you think about how you are going to have to place every door, switch, light, and thing the player does. Speaking of the player we want them to be able to kill enemies that try and prevent them from reaching their home on Earth so let's design an arsenal for them to use.
Things are starting to look much brighter now. We have a galaxy filled with locations, nationalities, a great war, weapons for the player to use to stop people in their way, a space truck for them to drive. Now we need a purpose. When will all of this take place? In the future? The past? Since the Cold War ended in the 90's and was related to the Space Race we could take a leap of creativity and think about a world where the technological advances of each nation didn't stop at the moon landing.
With this in mind we use the moon landing as a catalyst for further expansion in the galaxy. Furthermore, we need to excuse several activities, explain how so many bases could exist in so many places, and why are you killing people?! How is it OK to teleport into a foreign base and steal their technology?
Under the pretext of war several of these problems cease to be just that, but wars don't just start for no reason we need to have fuel for a fire that will burn hotter than anything the human race has ever created. So we need to create a reason for such technology advancement to take place, and a reason for competition and fear for each other to go well beyond anything a few nuclear warheads could manage here on our own planet to ramp things up a few notches. A basic timeline of events can start to be constructed, starting with the moon landing where it would have normally ended.
- July 20th, 1969 - Neil Armstrong walks on moon.
- May 5th, 1970 - USSR invents fusion reactor.
- June 21st, 1973 - USA invents faster-than-light (FTL) drive.
- August 5th, 1976 - First interplanetary starship constructed.
- March 31st, 1979 - USA establishes first permanent colony on Moon.
- September 3rd, 1983 - USSR begins commercial mining on Mars.
- April 8th, 1985 - Entire solar system claimed by varying factions.
- February 20th, 1987 - First commercial starships for transport, and luxury.
- December 23rd, 1991 - Boris Yeltsin assassinated. World War 3 begins.
- November 5th, 1992 - Earth rendered uninhabitable from nuclear war.
- January 1st, 1993 - Today.
In this version of events we have a long buildup period of 22 years after the creation of the first permanent colony on the moon by the USA. In contrast, the end of the world occurs in less than a year clocking in at 319 days before all of Earth is rendered uninhabitable by nuclear war.
The final version of the game which is currently being showcased and is being worked uses a timeline similar to this with a few key points changed as development continued in this area. Remember, the goal here was to create a sense of time and purpose as the backdrop for the rest of our adventure to take place on.
With all this information at our disposal we can proceed to create more detailed descriptions for each location in the game the master list of them defines. The timeline and nationalities gives us some introspective into who is against what, lots of documentaries and reading about the Cold War will give you TONS of inspiration for interaction between characters and ideas for missions and quests the player can complete. Here is an excerpt from a document showing off detailed information about the facilities orbiting Pluto.
The information from each previous step we have taken feeds into the next one. We use the timeline to establish when a given facility might have been constructed in relation to another. Their sizes are also carried along so that it can be kept in mind while describing the facility. Sometimes you will draw up a blank for a given place, if nothing comes to mind just mark it with a TODO and keep going. Get all those crazy ideas out of your head and into the design document so others can read it!
This is the last article about game development for Space Trucker. It was great to be able to share all of these expeirences with you all.
