Hello, Pergonauts! Welcome to another Tuesday dev blog for Dandelion Void.
Last Thursday we got a nice write-up in this io9 piece about the long influence of Green Street Production’s Scavenger’s Reign on a slew of video games, including Dandelion Void. Brian also had a chance to talk about some of our literary influences, and we had so much fun that we decided to expand upon them here.
But before we do, we also have a quick development update! Last week we finished our sprint with an internal playtest with some game industry colleagues. A big part of this build was bugfixes and major usability improvements to our basebuilding / decoration systems, including placing furniture and cleaning grime. We were also able to test the beginnings of our dynamic music system; using FMOD our music now responds to whether you’re standing in vegetation, whether you’re in combat, how near you are to enemies, as well as other factors. It will still be a few weeks before we’re ready to show this off in a dev blog, but we can’t wait for you to hear the spine-tingling sounds of Dandelion Void.
Literary Influences
The narrative of Dandelion Void draws more from sci-fi novels than it does TV, movies, or other games. Part of this is because the idea of a generation ship – a city-sized, self-contained spaceship on which multiple generations live and die over the course of centuries-long voyage – is well-covered on the page but quite rare in other mediums. To capture the spirit of literary influence, Robin has even penned a few unreleased short stories set in the world of Dandelion Void to serve as “narrative concept art.”
Brian and Robin are voracious sci-fi readers, and a few texts in particular have had an outsized impact on how we think about this project:
Non-Stop is set aboard – you guessed it – a derelict generation ship overgrown with plant life! This sci-fi adventure follows a young man from a low-technology hunter-gatherer group who, fed up with the bleakness of life in his settlement, joins an expedition into the jungles of “ponics” and learns the truth about his world.
Non-Stop’s influence on Dandelion Void is best illustrated by our shared shorthand “ponic” for the overgrown hydroponic plants. The story creates a powerful sense of mystery about the environment; the reader knows what a ship is and generally has a lot more information than the protagonist, but you get the sense of how confusing everything must be for someone who has only ever known the inside of a metal world.
Also impressive is the sheer variety of gonzo elements. There are high technology factions, giants who live in the walls, hyper-intelligent civilized rats, and ponic-born changelings who look like humans but wrong. While we don’t intend to adapt these elements literally, we do want to capture the feeling that the Pergola is a huge, dense world full of more mysteries than you might ever be able to unravel.
Paradises Lost follows Hsing and Luis, who are young people from the fifth of seven planned generations aboard the vessel Discovery. In typical Le Guinnian fashion, the novella is a goldmine of little worldbuilding details. The personal domiciles have modular walls that can be rearranged between single units, family households, or entire neighborhoods. Children run around naked in the “kidherd” until age seven to reduce the need for toddler clothing sizes. Hull repair professionals are called “dermatologists,” or “evamen,” and emulate a slightly pathetic proxy of military culture.
Paradises Lost has some of the best descriptions of the “closed economy” of a generation ship. One of our favorite anecdotes is of a single drill, clumsily lost to the void during an EVA operation, which becomes a children’s horror story tale for decades to come – it’s a multi-century voyage, and they only have so many drills!
Paradises Lost is a rich text for us when it comes to fleshing out the society of the Pergola before the collapse turned it into an overgrown derelict. From a political dimension, it also explores in length what it means to leave our only home in the universe, what we gain and what we lose, and how a generation born in the stars might respond to returning to terrestrial life.
Aurora is one of the most recent high-profile generation ship stories, this time from legendary author Kim Stanely Robinson of the Red Mars trilogy. We’ll start by saying that Brian is still reading this one, so our description will be a little more spoiler-light, but let’s just say that Aurora shows us what happens when everything that can go wrong on a generation ship does go wrong.
Like Le Guinn (at one point his teacher), Kim Stanley Robinson is a master of building worlds, and one of the few sci-fi authors who also have a robust political education. Both authors are deeply interested in “ambiguous utopias,” and in our opinion there’s no better staging ground for this idea than a generation ship. Fully self-contained, independent of any old world government, a fresh start: these worlds in a bottle are petri dishes for utopian ideas which either flourish, or fail.
For Robin (and soon to be Brian!) Aurora provides another set of fresh worldbuilding material, and is a thought-provoking thesis for what it means to leave Earth behind.
Back on the Shelf
That’s all for this week! We hope that this write-up has given you something interesting to read to pass the time while you wait to play Dandelion Void! If you have any recommendations for books or other media about generation ships, we would love to hear them – sound off in our Discord!