Star Control®

Origins

By

Brad Wardell
Executive Producer

October 2016

[NON-DISCLOSURE IN EFFECT]

Welcome to the Sausage Factory

Greetings! I will be making that reminder often to everyone. I am presuming anyone who has joined
the Star Control: Origins Founders program who is reading this is interested in seeing the deep dark
secrets of game development.

Moreover, we assume you are also wanting to be part of this development and so I will be sharing a lot
of “stuff” with you as we go forward. Most of it will be sheer awesome. But I also want to make sure we
don’t sugar coat anything.

Riku the Awesome

Speaking of awesomeness, Riku got us a bunch of new tracks. If you don’t know who Riku is, he was one
of the main composers for Star Control 2. Paul and Fred (designers of Star Control 1 and 2) got us
together and it’s just been wonderful.

I’m including a WIP of the title track. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Lore: Earth at 2090

By 2090, humanity had expanded across the inner solar system and found... not much. There were some
rocks. Bits of ice. And space.

So much space.

Too much, really.

Boredom wasn’t all bad though, and Humanity was living through an era of relative peace. The nuclear
wars long feared by inhabitants of the 20th century never came to pass. The world's belligerents
somehow navigated a century's worth of conflicts without annihilating each other. An era of
international cooperation had risen instead, driven by the commercial needs of the new space industry.

The space industry had a few mishaps naturally. a few high-profile mishaps involving mismatched
airlocks will do that. But no nuclear war. Instead, peace. Boring old peace and cooperation. And Synths,
lots of lots of Synths.
The so-called technological singularity gave rise to semi-sentient beings who handled much of the
drudgery work. Each year, the Synths got a little more sophisticated and human unemployment got a
little bit higher.

Something that can’t go on won’t go on. In 2085, the Synths revolted. No one knows exactly when they
became self-aware but self-aware they came and they wanted rights. Given that the Synths were the
ones operating all the space-faring drones and inner-solar system vehicles this became the most serious
crisis of the age.

But just at the moment that violence against the Synths seemed inevitable, they were gone. Using their
control of all of Earth’s spaceships, the Synths left. No one knows where they went. For the first time in
decades, space travel was an almost entirely human affair again.

Humans, looking at their solar system, were alone. At least until 2089, when someone discovered an
alien signal coming from Triton. Something that wasn't human was flying around out there. At first, it
was thought to be the Synth. Further analysis concluded it was alien in origin.

The sudden promise - and threat - of contact with an alien civilization, led the United Nations to create a
single body to coordinate all of humanity's space based efforts. That entity, Star Control, was given its
first mission: to create a ship, the most advanced that humanity had ever made, capable of traveling to
Triton to determine the source of that alien radio signal.

Space was about to get a lot less boring.

Origins universe vs. Ur-Quan universe

Star Control 1 and 2 exist in what we call the Ur-Quan universe. Star Control 3 exists in what we call the
Crux universe. Our biggest issue with Star Control 3 is that they used the aliens from Star Control 2
without the consent or participation of Paul and Fred and as a result, you end up with a lot of retconning
of the Star Control Ur-Quan lore.

The Origins universe is supposed to be our universe. The Ur-Quan universe diverged from our universe
in 1992. In the Ur-Quan universe these things happened:

 2015: Nuclear War with millions dead

 2019: Creation of the Androsynth clones
 2025: United Nations confiscates all nuclear weapons, puts them in peace vaults

Origins operates on the premise of parallel universes. One little change can make a huge difference.

In the Origins universe, one might ask “Where are the Spathi?”. The answer is, in the Alpha Gruis
system 101 light years from Earth. At least, in the Ur-Quan universe. Are they in the Origins universe?
We don’t know.
Figure 1: Hyperspace map, Ur-Quan universe
 Figure 2: Star Control: Origins, map of the milky way. Highlighted in bottom left is the Origin sector, Alpha quadrant.

Figure 3: Partially explored view of the Origin sector

Now, the first thing you’re going to notice is that there are a lot more stars (and planets) than in Star
Control 2. Most of this change has to do with expectations of games today. If you’ve played an Elder’s
Scroll game, you can almost picture Star Control: Origins as being Skyrim in space in that your main story
won’t be really much longer than Star Control 2’s story but the number of side quests and other things
to find in the galaxy could be endless.

Super Melee Wars end

There was a great debate within the team on how to do Super Melee. In the end the specs we finalized
on (and both game designs were implemented – luckily Super Melee isn’t particularly expensive to
prototype) and we concluded:

1. One on one ships

2. You pre-select your fleets but after a ship is destroyed, you can pick your next ship
3. Ships, when they meet the edge of the arena will wrap to the other side. It’s not realistic but
otherwise, the balance is in favor of maneuverability versus speed (i.e. trapping someone in the
corner would be a dominant strategy).
The Ships and their weapons

Fires a projectile that becomes a Gravity Repulsion wave

mini black at the end of its eiminates from the ship.
range. Hitting black hole MAY also affect
damages enemy ship, has strong incoming weapons
Dan'Nath gravity (based on play testing)

Drenkend Sends out crew as little ships Regenerates crew

The Nuclear Missile ability from Fires a short range point

the human ship fires out a defense laser that hits
projectile straight ahead of it multiple targets that
that searches for a target and does low damage but
Human homes in till it runs out of fuel. will destroy projectiles

Big school of these guys that

play like a snake almost.
Greegrox Primary: Shoots left Shoots right

Fires a projectile that marks the

target. When the target is Deploys a mine that will
successfully marked a homing chase a nearby enemy
mine is launched that chases the ship when it comes
mark target till it makes within range and
Menkmack contacts and explodes. explodes.
Performs a dance with
their group which builds
up the battery. When
the battery is full, Jeff
shows up and does
massive damage to
enemeis and then
Mowlings & Jeff Stun gun. leaves.
 The Mu’Kay’s primary ability
fires out a pair of harpoons that
attach themselves to the target.
If the harpoons contact with the
target the Mu’kay ship is pulled Drops an ink blob on the
towards the target and executes map that slows the
its crushing embrace attack (see enemy down if the
Mu'Kay Passive Abilities). enemy goes through it.
The Phamysht's primary ability
fires a projectile that when it
hits the target will cause the
target ship to bleed out crew Sends out a pulse to
over a time. When the time converts floating crew
expires an eruption of crew to into Phamysht that
happens. The free floating crew then chase the other
can be picked up by anyone to ship, get on board and
Phamysht increase their health. start eating their crew.

Emits a smaller,
duplicate Pinthi spore
Pulses a poof of infection with a that the player doesn't
smallish radius that damages control that slowly
the enemy over time bsaed on follows the enemy,
Pinthi how long he's in contact contact causes damage

Fires flak cannons near

Ship fires a long rage laser shot the ship that targets
beam but is unable to rotate the random locations. Stuns
Scryve ship target.

Fires a Laser ribbon Bola in the Drop teleport beacon.

direction of travel. No interia on Recall to teleport
The Measured ship beacon.

Short range ribbon

coord that connects to
Long range projectile that other ship and sucks out
Trandals consumes energy their energy
 Drops off a drone turret
Relatively short range projectile which fires at an
Tywom weapon opponent

Like many of you, some of us have hung out on forums and brainstormed what new Star Control ships
would be like for 20 years. It’s easy to come up with crazy weapon ideas. It’s hard to come up with
ideas that won’t be super hard to explain to new players, super non-fun to be on the receiving end or
virtually impossible to have the AI handle it.

But here is what we have. Feel free to submit more as we plan to add more to this over time (not
necessarily by release but we will be adding more ships).

Coming up for Founders

The Super Melee debate did indeed delay getting a multiplayer test out to the Founders. But now that
we’ve come to a consensus on how this should play, we can focus on getting this out to you.

Feature Status Target External Test Date

Super Melee Alpha Jan-17
Spherical Planet Exploration Pre-Alpha Mar-17
Solar System Exploration Alpha Mar-17
Alien Conversations Alpha Mar-17
Galaxy Exploration Prototype May-17

This isn’t an official schedule but rather my own judgment of where things currently are. The team’s
next big milestone is mid-December. This is the “Super Melee milestone”.

January is where we will be polishing Super Melee so that it is in a form to share with the Founder’s
group.

In short: The pieces are starting to come together.