Hello, my name is Scarlett Toney.
We’ve recently had a shake up in the team. One for which I assume full responsibility.
When I started Frontiers Reach, I was alone. It was well into the pandemic lock downs, and I was renting a room in my bosses basement after having lost my apartment because I simply couldn’t afford it and did not want to sit around racking up debt under the eviction moratorium.
Much of the core infrastructure you play with in FR was actually built by myself in the 1st three months of development. The AI, while not perfect and definitely in need more work, did the job I needed it to do and a recent tweak has made it even better. I wasn’t too concerned initial as the game was being built for portfolio purposes since my real work is all under NDA.
The initial intention behind Frontiers Reach was to create a story driven sandbox experience that would be near infinitely scale-able. To achieve this I chose a data driven solution that would define simple conditions for a player to achieve within a data model. The system would then check every other frame to see if the player was within or had achieved the conditions defined by the data model. When the condition was met, the objective would be considered complete and the system would then load the next objective in sequence contained within the data model.
This data model is simple enough that it can even be constructed with a 2D interface built right into the game and I plan to eventually build one. And for the record, that kind of work is precisely what I do in the real world. Connect external data to runtime applications and make it do real meaningful things for people on the digital side and vice versa. I’m attempting to take those lessons learned in the corporate world and apply them to Frontiers Reach.
Aside from the story I wanted to tell within it, it would be a completely player driven and expanded retro science fiction sandbox. A library of voice over, music, sandbox style levels, and starships of all classes would be at your finger tips. But this would all have to be built up slowly over time. Especially voice over and my plan originally was to use an AI generated voice over and possibly tie it into the game so players could generate their VO for missions if they wanted(profanity filters applied of course). This AI would be the main narrator and drive you through missions. Almost like the AI was telling the story to someone else.
The biggest reason I chose this structure is because as much as I love a certain science fiction intellectual property now owned by a certain mega media conglomerate, I wish they would approach fan created content differently. And so Frontiers Reach was also born out of a desire to set a different precedent than those who came before. Rather than smacking the fans on the wrist, I want to give them the tools to tell their own stories right in the game.
The team however did not want to do this. They wanted to create a very cinematic experience, with lots of heavily scripted sequences. And the programmer I was working with wanted to abandon the data model I built all together and re-engineer the whole thing to use Unity Editor side tools to setup the missions. Even if we could save the data out to the file format we needed, this would have required we build two sets of tools. One for ourselves, and one for the players, and would have extended our development time and scope well beyond our ability to manage things. We started missing deadlines, voice actors weren’t showing up when we needed, we had a writer just quit all of a sudden. It was already falling apart as we became a chaotic concerto with no conductor.
And this is where my responsibilities as a leader overtook me.
I simply don’t have the experience or the time and focus to manage a team of 10, that should be more like 20, and a project being over taken by scope creep. 3 weeks from what was supposed to be our kickstarter launch and we were adding completely new features and re-engineering existing systems.
So I decided that before we got ourselves into a really sticky situation and owe a whole bunch of people a whole lot of money, that I’d just pull the plug on it as a team venture more or less and go back to my very clearly defined scope where I’m pretty much a dictator about the scope and direction. It was manageable for one person and would have been great if I had been able to get the team on board in the manner I had envisioned with each member being responsible for a section i.e gameplay, creatures, characters. This would have been similar to the “art-house” environment that the founders and I fostered when we were in college together only in a Discord server. And I was paying for a lot of things just to host this space for us to create without having to worry about things like deadlines and investors.
The team will still work together in various capacities but I think the time has come for me to take the reigns again and start unifying and solidifying the experience a bit before adding anything new. I’ve also got a major infrastructure change I’ve been meaning to work on for scenario management that should yield some interesting results and a couple of starfighters that have been neglected. We’ll see what comes in the days/weeks ahead.
Till next time pilots, stay safe and I’ll see you out on the frontier! We'll be back to work on Frontiers Reach after Jan 1st. I've got an apartment to get moved into and would like to spend some time this Holiday with friends and family as much as can remotely.