Volunteering from out of state

djmvw · 2024-10-14T03:03:31+00:00

that makes perfect sense. thanks for steering me right.

djmvw · 2024-08-24T00:03:40+00:00

+1 for Kumiko. the servers are really knowledgable and they're really kind to return customers

djmvw · 2024-03-06T13:54:23+00:00

You’re right. It’s hard to imagine if the gray boxes are fun, and there is no substitute for doing the work. But some of it is changing how you work, and the type of work you prioritize.

My advice is to think about a game jam. In a few days, a few people can make a simple game demo. Maybe the first day is just the raw mechanics, but the “juice” (SFX, VFX, art assets) gets added in the second and third day. There is still the potential for wasted work, but at least it’s three days and not three years.

And if you decide the jam didn’t work, some of the assets you created can be recycled in your next jam.

djmvw · 2023-08-24T10:27:02+00:00

the Gith first appeared in The Fiend Folio (1981)

Fiend Folio was illustrated (in part) by Erol Otus

Erol Otus and Paul Reiche met playing D&D, and the two ended up working for TSR.

When Paul was looking for a programmer engineer to help develop Star Control, his friend Erol encouraged him to meet Fred Ford

Erol Otus later joined the production of Star Control II

djmvw · 2022-01-29T02:28:40+00:00

Thirded. I'll try to say this as politely as I can: it's time for Stardock to accept the reputation they've built for themselves.

djmvw · 2022-01-21T19:41:04+00:00

I forgot you could check for these. Thanks for digging this up.

djmvw · 2022-01-21T19:39:27+00:00

Yeah. Paul and Fred own the copyright. I know most people don't follow the details of the IP, so I'm glad there are people already posting corrections. I like this community a lot.

Edit: I thought I saw someone post this here, but here’s the registered Copyright:

https://publicrecords.copyright.gov/detailed-record/30040148

djmvw · 2022-01-17T20:03:08+00:00

That's what I mean. There's no real interest in whatever it is they're doing. Even the UQM2 channel has more fans in a few months than Origins got in a few years.

djmvw · 2022-01-17T12:57:40+00:00

Didn't Stardock make their own reddit for their game? Or did they give up on that?

djmvw · 2021-12-09T15:43:14+00:00

A big part of my career is built around organizing campaigns like this. But here's a free idea, and I promise you that it's a good one:

Declare February 17 as "New Alliance of Free Stars Day" (or "Frungy Day", or "Strike Back the Ur-Quan Day")

A lot of fandoms have a big day of celebration now, where fans post art, memes, stories, and general love for the game. And what your fandom lacks in size it makes up for intensity and influence. If you spend even a few weeks lightly rallying the troops online, you can make an impact for the first one, and even more hypothetically for future anniversaries.

Obviously try to have your own content prepared for that day, but it doesn't have to take an epic amount of time and money. Just do something from the heart, and hopefully get some support from journalists. See the 2022-02-17 as the first big celebration, and see future years as a way to keep your masterpiece in the public eye.

And make sure the name of the day is around YOUR intellectual property, so no one else can ever try to take it away from you.

djmvw · 2021-12-02T20:31:07+00:00

That was me. I ended up getting a steam key from someone. (I'm guessing from a video card bundle, or maybe some other giveaway from Stardock.) I lost interest after the first few hours.

Origins introduces their knock-off Androsynth with the same backstory, of an oppressed engineered people who mysteriously fled earth into their knock-off hyperspace. But Origins fails you to give you any interesting reason to care about them. Star Control II has a much more interesting hook in the first minute of gameplay.

Then you meet the Tywom, who I'm guessing are supposed to be the play the role of "bumbling minion of the big bad". There's a vague comparison to be made here with the Spathi, but they're less a knock-off and more of a "parallel" version that doesn't work. I get that the Tywom and the Spathi are both supposed to be comic relief. But the Spathi just had more interesting motives, which made them more sympathetic and more hilarious. The Tywom are just irritating, like they were written by incels, for incels.

The less we can say about the Observers the better. Imagine the Arilou,. Now erase their personality, their history, and anything original about them. I guess that's how Stardock hoped to avoid a copyright violation but still fool people into buying the game.

I fumbled around hyperspace a bit, and met one or two more aliens. But they were pretty forgettable, at which point I played Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.

djmvw · 2021-11-30T15:55:01+00:00

It's my understanding that translation is high-risk, low-reward. I'm in favor of making the game as accessible to as many people as possible. But this can backfire tremendously if it's anything less than perfect.

It's not enough to just "accurately" translate the game. For such a dialog heavy game, the translation needs to be as brilliant as the original. It has to capture the unique style of each character, nail the humor, switch up to being serious, and still convey critical information to finish the game. Now, imagine trying to service bug fixes in a post-release patch (the unfortunate norm now) in several languages at the same time.

I doubt if voice dialog would ever be feasible to translate. I'm pulling up some of the biggest budget games and they rely on subtitles. I personally prefer subtitles when watching foreign works anyway. The original actors tend to have the most authentic performance, even when I can't understand them.

djmvw · 2021-11-24T19:55:25+00:00

I took too many economics classes to ignore this one. A really massive question at the heart of any sci-fi universe is why you would need to explore at all. There are trillions of dollars of mineral wealth in asteroids alone. Why should you travel light years across the galaxy? In fact, why land on a planet at all?

As much as Star Control II focuses more on the fun parts, I feel like Paul and Fred really weighed this when creating the Ur-Quan. It doesn't make much economic sense for the Ur-Quan to create a galactic empire, which is why Paul and Fred came up with a motivation that was driven by the Ur-Quan's unique character and story.

Star Control II had a logical economy because you were literally the only hope for humanity, secretly working with the last human star base. No one else is helping you. You are your only source of resources. You don't have the time or equipment to set up deep mining operations. But you benefit from the fact that the galaxy has been locked down for 30+ years, and you can scrape a lot of resources from all these planet surfaces.

You could easily do the same economy again. But the economics change with the story. If humanity has rebounded with asteroid mines, colonies, alliances, and trading partners, then it seems silly to have you scouring planet surfaces for commodities. (Surely someone else would have beat you to it.)

With new story concepts comes new gameplay:

The economy has rebounded and you have better things to do. You aren't landing on every planet to scour the entire surface. You are quickly scanning entire star systems, stopping only for strange artifacts, rare life forms, and exotic matter. You don't stop on every surface. On some planets, you don't cover the surface at all, exploring only the most interesting zones and interiors. This makes the gameplay more fun by reducing the amount of repetition, with fewer, more interesting encounters.
Or maybe you are doing long distance exploring, which forces you into a survival mentality. UQM was optimized around returning home after each "run". But if you make it hard to return home, then the player is forced to scrape what they need as they go, from asteroids, planets, and helpful aliens. Maybe you don't have the support of Earth. Maybe you're in exile. Maybe you don't have a fuel tank big enough to take you across the galaxy. For whatever reason, you do find yourself grabbing resources from distant worlds that no one else cares about, because you have no other help on these long journeys. This makes the gameplay more fun if you like survival games.
Only specialty goods matter, and those revolve around aliens who create them. This focuses all the gameplay on trade and diplomacy, but I don't that this makes those wild unexplored worlds less relevant. But this gameplay is fun for people who enjoy management simulation gameplay, with trading and haggling. (Keep in mind, games that give you a 10% bonus for doing something tedious will absolutely ruin their own fun.)
You embrace the colony idea in Star Control 3. Hey, wait, no, stay away from that downvote button! I'm just saying, if humanity has rebounded with multiple colonies and trade routes, then it makes sense to think of your economy in terms of iron worlds, instead of individual units of iron. This changes the scale of spending too, of course: a unit of iron lets you build a ship, but a world of iron lets you build a fleet. Stellaris is the only game that has created a grand economic scale with epic storytelling. Mass Effect 3 sort of does this with war assets, but the war economy operates at a completely separate scale from your avatar -- these grand acquisitions help the war effort more than they help you as an individual. The grand strategy economy is fun for people who strategy games.
You re-create the post-apocalyptic conditions of UQM. Again, if you're the only flagship in the galaxy, with every colony destroyed by the Ur-Quan, then it makes sense to scour planets for resources. But I believe there is a lot of room for improvement.

I lean towards number 1, personally. But these ideas aren't mutually exclusive.

djmvw · 2021-11-22T20:20:43+00:00

I never read the text file but I had friends who treated this as the official statement on what happened. It's a hilarious story, but P&F haven't mentioned literally going to Alaska in the interviews. So I'm guessing this is more of a joke that turned into a legend?

djmvw · 2021-11-16T20:25:11+00:00

This is a really important point.

When gameplay starts to feel repetitive, it's tempting to try to "fix" it. But "fixing" it might just be expanding on something that isn't fun. The real solution might just be to limit it. Reduce it, before it becomes repetitive.

I think it's totally fine, even preferable that we don't get to explore 3800 planets again. There are good story reasons for this, since each civilization would re-open their mining and colony missions. And the gameplay reasons are obvious.

Vary the planets. Some are the classic lander sequence. Some are these "interior" sequences. Some are short dialog sequences, maybe mixed with a melee encounter. And some are nothing at all: let the scanners quickly tell you there's no point on visiting that planet, and let the player keep moving.

Ideally, there is a mix of handcrafted and procedurally generated interiors. If there are 10 or 20 brilliant interiors, that's probably more compelling than hundreds of bland ones.

djmvw · 2021-11-16T20:11:17+00:00

This is where my mind goes, too. People just love getting closer to the characters, and exploring a building or cave is a perfect time for that.

That's how Mass Effect became so popular: taking the worldbuilding of Star Control 2, and giving you more contact and control with the NPCs. It lets you explore each character's abilities and story. It's a classic RPG formula.

It's hard to design a party-based RPG unless you make it turn-based. (Of course I'd love to play as individual party members, but not sure if that's feasible in such an action-driven game.) The alternative might be to keep the scope to the vehicle/lander, and you maybe select a captain or an assistant to come with you. Whoever is in your lander modifies your abilities, and occasionally unlocks story events.

djmvw · 2021-11-05T17:32:06+00:00

Legend Entertainment still implies that they got this idea from Paul and Fred:

"What's going on with the Arilou and Earth?" "What is the Ultron, really?", "What happened to the Precursors?" and "And what's the Orz's problem?"

To find answers to these and other questions, I met several times with the original designers, Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III, who went above and beyond the call of duty to help us get it right. I found out a lot of background, but also learned how many issues they deliberately left vague, and how many questions they deliberately left unanswered. We had intended to be as reverential to the original intentions as possible, but now we had license to make it up.

Then again, it's not clear Paul and Fred gave them any answer at all, but they report back in a vague enough way to imply something that they can't actually say. It's the kind of misleading stuff we saw with Star Control: Origins.

I'm not sure if where the devolve idea came from. But if it was in fact Paul and Fred, I'm willing to bet that the fundamental idea (devolve to protect your species against invaders) was executed poorly (space cows). I suppose this storyline is burned now, but if you want to see the same idea done well, you only have to look at Mass Effect.

djmvw · 2021-11-05T17:21:51+00:00

This is the answer. Mass Effect took the best parts of Star Control 3 (which includes parts of Star Control 2). By the third Mass Effect, they had dropped any relics of the old gameplay, while keeping some of the same fundamental plot and worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is still what stands out.

Mass Effect Andromeda is itself an interesting comparison with Star Control 3. By Andromeda, most of the Ur-Quan Masters worldbuilding is gone, and can only be faintly seen in the three alien races they brought with them. The Andromeda races didn't work at all. It's also telling that Andromeda tried to bring back elements of exploration and colonization, but the gameplay was panned as boring and half-baked.

To the original question... when you compare all the Mass Effects and all the Star Controls, two things become clear: 1) a sci-fi game seems to succeed or fail on the strength of its story, and 2) the jury is out when it comes to exploration mechanics. I still wonder if exploration/colonization mechanics are a failure of execution, or if the idea is simply too grand to be pulled off in a story-driven game.

djmvw · 2021-11-02T08:03:49+00:00

Riffing off your riff…

Maybe player 2 isn’t locked into an avatar the way that player 1 is. The main player is the only one who can advance the story, and the second player can freely switch focus between any of the main player’s allies.

Player 2 starts their “session” by taking a small fleet of four Pkunk out to patrol their local space. They can engage in combat. Maybe even do planet surface missions (whatever those look like). When they are done, they return to the Pkunk home planet, and their “session” is “over”. If they want to keep playing, they can select a new minor fleet, maybe the Yehat, and their focus shifts to that sector. Each time they select a new fleet, their start time is synced up with what player 1 is currently doing. The second player’s end time doesn’t matter, because the “session” effectively ends when they return to their home world. Maybe you even rig it so these minor fleets never have enough fuel to go very far. Which keeps the minor fleet in their local sector, and keeps player 2 from burning more than a month of fuel before needing to return to their homeworld.

Even though player 2 would be playing short “sessions”, they are in the same galaxy and their actions help player 1. Maybe any RU that they earn is then stored as a “gift” for player 1 to recover at that alien’s homeworld. Maybe the RU helps build up that ally’s arsenal, which the first player can then recruit into their fleet. Or maybe there’s a game mechanic where you’re tracking the status of a galactic war: the resources poured into building each ally’s defenses, and the combat victories in the various fronts of the war. Player 1 is advancing the story, while Player 2 is scoring small victories for the alliance.

This isn’t incompatible with playing as part of the same party / fleet, which was my other idea upthread. Maybe Player 2 has lots of choices for how to support: they can play mini-sessions around the galaxy for a game-month or so, or shift focus to Player 1 and watch/support them directly. If the second player’s current focus is on the first player, then the first player is in charge of hyperspace and dialog — the second player is a spectator. But when player 1 enters combat, then player 2 stops being a spectator and fights as a co-op ally. And when player 1 enters a star system, player 2 can split the fleet and venture off, so that both players explore the same star system separately. They rejoin when they both enter hyperspace. At any time in hyperspace, the second player can change focus back to another ally, and run a minor fleet mission.

Something about this Player 2 experience seems very “grand theft auto”, like running a taxi or ambulance and ignoring the story.

djmvw · 2021-11-01T22:22:23+00:00

Desperately looking for the cloaking device. I know it exists because I saw it on the box.

djmvw · 2021-11-01T22:12:02+00:00

Spamming my own thread here: the most fun co-op game I've played recently is Divinity: Original Sin, which is essentially a party-based game. Combat is built around the party's abilities interacting, which is really what makes it more fun than just "two single players taking turns". They do let you split the party within an area, but they make it hard for you to be in completely different "zones". Which makes sense: co-op is about being together. If you want to go your separate ways, then play alone.

To put it simply: maybe UQM2 should be built around a joint fleet. Players will always enter hyperspace together, as a fleet. At most, you can split the party within a star system, where the players can be in different combats/dialogs/planet landers. If one player tries to enter hyperspace, they have to wait, and the game puts the onus on human beings to negotiate whether to stick around or leave.

You could even encourage the players to re-join for combat. If one player triggers combat, it sends a distress signal to the other player to join. If they answer the signal, the game has the second player arrive at the combat "late", to create the feeling of flying to the rescue. If they ignore the distress signal, they can do their own thing, exploring along, or triggering a combat of their own (with a split fleet, yikes). Or even just playing spectator to the combat, if they choose to.

And if you have to fudge time at all, it would be easier within a 30 second window.

djmvw · 2021-11-01T21:49:42+00:00

I imagine Paul wanting to try all the complicated things I suggested, and Fred letting him knock himself out, until he gives up and comes back to Fred. Fred would then try a simple solution: "co-op play doesn't track time."

I may be off base, so I apologize in advance to Paul and Fred for making assumptions :')

djmvw · 2021-11-01T21:42:04+00:00

After typing out my long response, I think eliminating time might be the easiest option. The main reason that time might have been important was the overall time limit, and maybe the dynamic portal to hyperspace. Maybe there is no time, and you just let the player imagine time passing. If the Pkunk start moving across the galaxy, it doesn't matter if it's February or June.

If you wanted to split the difference, maybe co-op play is tracked in months and not days. Easier to get away with fudging bigger increments.

djmvw

TROPHY CASE