By

Brad Wardell
Executive Producer & Designer

February 2018
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 TOPICS

1. Meeting the team

2. Status Report
3. Star Control: The Open Universe Project
4. Scheduling
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 MEET THE TEAM

I’ve been making games for 26 years. My first game, Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 I started programming in 1992. I
literally picked up “Teach Yourself C in 21 days” and learned to program.

For Galactic Civilizations, I programmed it, did all of the in-game art (poorly) via Deluxe Paint with the exception for
the 5 alien portraits that my friend Bill Zalenski did, paid for all of its costs by working multiple jobs including one
that involved me cleaning literal sewage from excavation equipment while attending college. My friend Andy
Arvanitis helped me on some of the more advanced programming parts with occasional visits on weekends. It was a
wonderful time.

I don’t advertise myself as the creator of Galactic Civilizations because there’s no such title. Sure, I owned the
product, source code, title, name, all rights, all authored works, all copyrights, and the company but I tend to stick
with terms that mean something in our industry such as Lead Designer. Lead Developer. Lead Artist. Writer. AI
programmer, etc. Sure. I like words to have specific definitions.

A lot has changed in the past quarter-century. Now games have a ton of people involved because there are so
many more moving parts. For this journal, I will only delve into a few of those people and then later expand later.

DESIGNERS
Star Control: Origins has had a couple of lead designers. The first designer was (and still is) my friend Scott Lewis
who joined us from Mohawk Games. It was through him that many of the alien story backgrounds came in. He
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wasn’t on the project long as he was needed by Mohawk Games (a new studio Soren and I had founded) and so he
moved there to work on Offworld Trading Company.
 The second designer was Andrew Zoboki. A really talented young man who joined us from Petroglyph where he
had designed Grey Goo. He was on the project for over two years. Ultimately, despite his best efforts, we just
weren’t able to put together enough people at the Stardock Towson studio to effectively put together the game
with so many different parts to it. Our Plymouth studio location was the only place we have with enough artists and
engineers to do and so almost exactly a year ago, the project leadership was moved to the Plymouth Michigan
studio and I took up the lead design role.

And that’s where I came in. Each designer has had their own vision for the game. We all agreed that Star Control
should be a story driven action adventure game. No massive procedurally generated universe here. The selling
point would be the adventures. You are the captain. You are going on adventures. You are not exploring space just
to explore space.

When I joined, I did make quite a few changes that some of you know. And so you also blame me if you don’t like
them:

1. I had most of the aliens re-designed to be weirder and less humanoid.

2. I changed the general art style from being an anime-cartoonish style to being more real-ish with Pixar “Inside-
out” inspiration.
3. I renamed Super-Melee to Fleet Battles to support future different modes and made it play more like what it
was in the classic trilogy (top down, arena-style).
4. I insisted on ship design so that each player’s ship will ultimately be unique by the end of the game and allow
players to design their own ships for Fleet Battles.
5. I refocused development around making it easy for players to tell their own stories.

Overall, my emphasis is that Star Control is about telling stories.

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 Since I’ve been making games for over a quarter century, I’ve designed, produced, or worked on a lot of them.

In recent years, I’ve helped design games ranging from Sins of a Solar Empire to Demigod. In neither case was I the
lead designer though. I was not the lead designer on Galactic Civilizations III but was on Galactic Civilizations III:
Crusade. I designed Sorcerer King and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.

In the coming months, we’ll be talking about the men and women who have spent the past four years of their lives
working on Star Control.

The budget on Star Control is larger than Sins of a Solar Empire + Galactic Civilizations III + Ashes of the Singularity
combined. We literally have combined all our teams together to focus on making Star Control the best game we
can.
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 STATUS REPORT

This month we have been focusing almost exclusively on finalizing the planets.

There are 50 different planet classes in Star Control. That doesn’t mean that there are only 50 different planets. Just
50 different planet classes. Every, single, planet is unique. As I write this, there are about 3,563 different planets in
the game.
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 While the game still has a long way to go, we are starting to near the finish line on what planets will look like.

The scan screen isn’t done yet. The landing sequence is part of the game now. When you start the game, your
landing zone calculator will be able to find a single landing zone on a given planet. Eventually you’ll be able to
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upgrade that to have multiple landing zones.

 Different planets will resist your landing based on their atmospheres. The further you miss your landing zone, the
more damage your lander will take.

We also implemented tooltips so you can see how valuable each mineral is. We implemented a color-coding system
so that you can see both on the planet surface, radar and from orbit what type of mineral it is and thus how valuable
it is.

We didn’t implement the entire periodic table but there’s a lot of different types of minerals available on the planet
to get. There are a few missions that require certain rare, exotic minerals.
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 The team also implemented “single universe” location handling. What this means is that there is only one universal
scene in the game. That Jupiter isn’t hard-coded, it is because you’re on a moon of Jupiter. You also can, in some
instances, see your ship, the sun, other stars, other moons, etc. depending on their location relative to your location.
One benefit of this is that there’s no loading screen. It’s instantaneous.
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 THE OPEN UNIVERSE PROJECT
As part of our beta testing of the engine, we will soon be making available to founders who are very technical and
willing the new Star Control engine so that they can begin using it and giving us feedback.

Using Github, participants will be able to assemble together their own map, stories, ships, aliens, etc. Everything you
would need.

We will be contributing to it as well. The purpose of the project is to help stress test the engine while at the same
time, helping us polish and refine the crafting tools.

The goal of the engine is to allow us (and you) to create your own stories and share them with others. To use a
crude analogy, it’s like Space Westworld.

There are no procedurally generated adventures in this game. There are no in-game variables (beyond fuel and
such). It’s not about sorting through a list of “quests” and looking for rewards. Most stories do not have a tangible
reward in Star Control. They simply open up new possibilities.
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 THE SCHEDULE

We are looking at a late Summer release date still. Things are moving faster and faster. Every single day something
noticeably new gets added in. At the rate things are moving, we expect to be “complete” before Summer and spend
the rest of the time polishing and refining and bug fixing.

The Open Universe BETA 1 is currently scheduled for the week of March 12. Once we have that done, we’re going to
return to give the Fleet Battles some love as they are a little buggy right now and we really need to get the custom
arenas and remaining canon ships in.

That’s all for now!

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