indiegraze.com

on January 15, 2020

An open world single player space combat game, Starsector blends tactical 2D battles with trade, exploration, and fleet customization; as a project with a lot going on under the hood, I chatted with dev Alexander Mosolov of Fractal Softworks regarding the variety of player experiences in his work and the design goals driving the title.

Erik Meyer: Starsector gives players a lot of choice regarding roles – hot-shot pilot, a smuggler, a stern admiral, an industrial magnate – in addition to different ships and overall play styles, so as you’ve added options and elements to the game, have you felt a need to keep things balanced, or do you focus more on options that would be interesting for different archetypes?

Alexander Mosolov: One of the things about it being a single-player game is that balance – while definitely still important – doesn’t have to walk the same razor’s edge as it does for a multiplayer game. The different available options should all be appealing and viable, but they don’t need to be precisely balanced. How could you even balance something that, say, takes more player time vs something that’s more dangerous vs something that takes more in-game time? Generally speaking, if something is riskier or more difficult in some way, it should be more rewarding, but I don’t think it’s possible to quantify it precisely. And, thankfully, it doesn’t need to be.

EM: In the history of the game, humanity has been fractured, scattered about the universe following the events of the great Collapse, a cataclysm that destroys the formerly stable space-faring society. With regard to in-game storytelling, how do you see past revelations and present calamities coming across best, given the play style of your game? What tools and mechanics (dialog, lore, ancient transmissions) do you employ as you reveal the larger forces at work?

AM: Right now, most of the story in the game is backstory – the player encounters it in the various colony (and other) descriptions, bits of dialog at the portside bar, and so on. There are also a couple of missions, and that’s the aspect that’s going to get built out more for the next release.

EM: One critique of the ships in Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica involves the ships coming across as boats in space, from a design standpoint. Bear in mind, I like boats in space, but from a function/technology/mobility standpoint, what have you seen as important in styles of spacecraft, especially with varied styles of play in mind?

AM: Oh, it’s definitely boats in space! “World War II ships in space” was an explicit starting point for the design. I’m not familiar with any critique of Star Wars or BSG on those grounds, so I can’t really speak to that. As far as having a variety of styles, though, there’s quite a bit, especially depending on how far one wants to dig down.

First of all, smaller ships are a lot faster, while larger ships can be pretty ponderous. What this means is that for small ships, a lot of piloting skill is second-to-second – dodge incoming fire, get around an enemy’s shield arc to get a shot at the engines, and so on. It has a more arcade-like feel. For larger ships, it’s a matter of planning much further in advance – what will what you do now mean for your tactical position 10 or 20 seconds later? Large ships have a much harder time getting out of trouble, so a mistake can be really costly.

Additionally, you have higher-tech ships, which generally focus on mobility and shields to keep them out of trouble. Lower-tech ships also have shields but must rely on armor to supplement them, so a lot of the gameplay decisions revolve around when to take hits on armor. Armor is a limited resource and is only repaired between battles, but using it wisely can tip the fight in your favor.

You’ve also got phase ships – very loosely inspired by submarines – that are primarily about uncloaking at the right moment, doing a lot of damage, and getting out. They don’t have shields and are potentially very vulnerable, and often work well in supporting other ships that keep the enemy’s attention. They also have a time acceleration mechanic – time passes more quickly for them while they’re cloaked, making them faster relative to uncloaked ships – so there’s a lot you can do with that, for example tactically re-cloaking to reload weapons more quickly.

There are also carriers, where the focus is on combining different types of fighters effectively – and, for combat carriers, also combining them with the armaments of the carrier itself.

Another playstyle-defining option is the Safety Overrides hullmod. It makes a ship a lot faster and more powerful, but also severely limits both its weapon range and the time this ship can spend on the battlefield and still be effective. A ship with this hullmod needs to go for a high-risk, high-reward style – closing in on enemies and finishing them off quickly in the limited time it has, but also exposing itself to greater risk.

There are of course many other, smaller considerations – the specifics of individual ships, their systems (roughly, “special abilities”), types of weapons, ship loadouts that emphasize strengths or shore up weaknesses, and so on. For example, ships with the “Burn Drive” system can close on the enemy quickly, but it doesn’t help them disengage at all. Having this option available is a huge factor in how a specific ship plays, and it can combine with all the other considerations in various ways.

EM: Freedom of play includes options like strengthening supply line security and helping encourage trade or weakening said supply lines to make piracy easier; given the use of procedural generation within the game, what kinds of influences and effects do these actions at specific locations have on the overall game universe? If I start looting every ship that passes through a given star system, will colonists/traders begin avoiding that route? Will my reputation as a scourge in one area influence interactions elsewhere?

AM: The game will respond to this, yeah – patrols will get stronger, while the colonies in that system will suffer from reduced accessibility, which will in turn cause other problems like shortages. The latter can also then be exploited for your profit, but can ultimately cause the colonies to become decivilized.

EM: Starsector has enjoyed a long development cycle and gone through a number of permutations (on the website, posts go back to November of 2010); with so many games being cranked out and tossed into the online game space these days, how do you see your work benefiting from the time you’ve invested in it? What mechanics and additions have come from the benefit of not being rushed?

AM: I think – perhaps obviously – more time gives you more of an opportunity to tune things until they feel right. One older example of this is the collision mechanics in combat. When one ship collides with another, the feel of that is, I think, extremely important in establishing how the player perceives the ships, making them feel like they have real weight. Fine-tuning that took a long time, and the result is something I’m happy with and that I think means a lot to the game – probably more than one might assume at first glance.

Plus, of course, the scope of the game is pretty large, so a key benefit of investing the time is being able to do it at all! I feel rushed pretty often (there’s just so much to do!); I just try not to let that interfere with how I approach the work. But to ship anything, concessions have to be made somewhere now and again.

EM: All games have to strike a balance between tasks asked of players, so can you give a breakdown regarding ship management, locations (like planets or space station) management, NPCs, equipment, battle, etc? Optimally, what do people spend most of their time doing, and how does this change throughout the game experience?

AM: Overall, the goal is to steer the player towards combat – the things you do outside combat give it context and consequences (which makes it feel meaningful), but then also steer you into combat, so it’s a cycle. For example, when you establish a colony, you’ll likely have to fight to keep it safe. When you accept a delivery contract, it’ll likely point you to an area where there’s pirate activity. And so on.

But for a lot of things, it’s up to the player. For example, you can spend a lot of time outfitting ships, perfecting your loadouts and running multiple simulations to test them. Or you can use the “autofit” feature to create something that, while not optimal, will certainly do the job. Colonies in particular don’t require a lot of management – you make high-level decisions (which industries and structures to build, or where to even build the colony in the first place) but you don’t need to worry about their execution planetside.

EM: You’re including mod support as a visible part of your work, and I’m interested in your view of user-created content. Some games in recent history, like Shadowrun Returns, spawned a huge level of interest from an enthusiastic community using the level editor tools, and other games have been fairly closed to such endeavors. How do you see games like yours benefiting from mods, and when does a project transition from being a game to being a story creation tool?

AM: Mod support was important to me from the beginning – it’s something I really enjoyed as a player (especially for the TES games), so it was and is a priority. I think it’s hugely beneficial, too – the time between updates can get a bit long, and mods help fill in the gaps. Plus, I don’t think the community around the game would be anywhere near what it is if it wasn’t for the amazing efforts of modders.

It’s kind of like… if you look at Minecraft, why is it popular? Pretty much because it lets people be creative, and of course people want to talk about and share their creations, and it keeps the game going. Of course the bar is higher for modding, but I think there’s the same kind of effect. I’m just thankful that some tremendously talented people have decided to use Starsector to express their creativity.

The game is still the game first and story creation tool second, but when one gets into the right mindset, it’s possible to build a lot of flexibility into the game engine… not for free, exactly, but without a huge amount of effort. I think I’ve gotten better about it over the years – some of the things that are tougher to mod involve older code, while the newer stuff is much more flexible out of the gate.

EM: The game is currently available for preorder, with alpha versions available; given the current status of the project, what kinds of requests have you been getting from players and fans? Do people simply clamor for more content, or are people digging into lore, focused on mechanics, rare bugs, etc?

AM: It’s a mix of everything, but the most common one is for more story content, missions, and so on. Which makes sense, since that’s the least-developed part of the game right now! But now most of the groundwork has been laid, and work on precisely that is in progress right now. I’m excited about finally moving forward on the story elements, as it’s something I’ve literally been looking forward to for many years.

In case you missed it, here’s the trailer: