Enter a laboratory that looks ransacked and all but destroyed. There is blood smeared on the floor and walls, in the corner you notice a dimly lit computer terminal with a blinking cursor that beckons you closer. Looking over your shoulder you don’t sense anybody else as you place your fingers on the keyboard and begin to investigate the secrets the terminal holds. The only sounds in the room that of the idle click and clack of the mechanical keyboard as you navigate the menus on the computers monochromatic display.
Space Trucker makes extensive use of interactive terminals. They take many different shapes and sizes, but overall their functionality is the same. When you interact with the terminal you can use the menu driven commands (or numpad) to enter numbers to your corresponding selection. Other systems that use graphical interfaces have a mouse cursor and let you click buttons to interact instead of the command line interface.
There are variants on this design such as locked terminals that require hacking by your PDA in order to gain access to them. Other terminals can be destroyed in explosions or gunfire. These terminals typically will tell you about research projects taking place on the facility you are on, give you a code to a place you might encounter later in the level, or in a different level later on in the story.
Technology wise this is driven by a file based system that looks inside a specific folder for plain text files which developers can create and drop into sub-folders. The computer is assigned to one of these paths relative to game's data directory; which in turn generates the menu commands, their titles, and numbers them. This can be as deeply nested as required by the developer. Most circumstances this is used to have one menu with several text files in each subdirectory to tell a story about a given location.
Since compiling the game isn’t necessary to use this system it is easy to pass around the text files to get proofreading and feedback on them. Another possibility is multiple developers collaborating on a single level by writing logs separate of the level design process, and then including them and linking to terminal afterwards.
Through exploration the player is able to read about the lives of the people that inhabited these bases, what their ambitions were, their hopes and dreams before it all changed in a moments notice. None of this is required to proceed in the game, but there is lots of lore distributed evenly throughout the game's primary campaign just waiting to be discovered.
Next post I will be talking about how machines talk to each other using a piece of technology made for Space Trucker dubbed the grid network.