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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle  (Read 7041 times)

David

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Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« on: January 19, 2022, 10:08:51 AM »

Blog post here.
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SpaceDrake

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #1 on: January 19, 2022, 12:10:38 PM »

Sweet mother of Jiminy Christmas, I managed to kick off A Blog Post.

So first, I guess I should say:



God, what a mood.

Anyway, this was a great look at the creative process behind Starsector, and shed light on what the art collective could have been (and funnily enough, when I read your tweets, I figured the art collective had been cut entirely - I hadn't connected it to the spot on Fikenhild, despite my first full clear of the "MSQ" taking the diplomatic route. Which says a lot about just how much got cut, perhaps!) I will say that I think I'm one of those folks having mild palpitations and vapors at the idea that you just work via the .csv; you don't have any tool to visualize how the entire convo tree unfolds? No way to rapid-prototype how dialogue will work in the client itself without booting the entire client and dev-moding over to the specific place and setting the specific trigger? Yep, I am definitely involuntarily fanning myself. (This in spite of me having to work via similar processes for multiple years at a time on multiple massive game projects...)

I will say that I am definitely one of the folks who enjoys when Starsector is willing to get wordy. It's really about pacing; it helps for there to be "breaks" in between the action and for there to be emotional highs and lows in the journey you take through the Sector. The best science fiction - the best storytelling, really - knows that pace is utterly critical, and while I do love the sandbox nature of SS, I think just cruising around can sometimes lead to the game becoming a bit one-note. So it's good to have the game go different directions or present you with different challenges; it's one of the things that made Star Control 2 (one of the more obvious points of comparison/antecedents of SS) the memorable experience it is, with the "real" game in a number of ways being in the dialogue scenes, despite so much development time having gone into the exploration and Super Melee combat modes.

I also like the look at how planet-siders see spacers; that's been on my mind lately, and how even some "poor" guy who owns one (1) Cerberus privately is still probably wealthier than a good 95% of the Sector, along with discussions of The Value Of A Credit™. If you own even a single cruiser or capital ship, you are solidly a minority of the 1%. If anything, I think it'd be nice to see this explored more; you talked about it in your first post in this vein, but for all the player is mostly a Han Solo-type, the player will on average be wildly more successful than Han. Especially since, over the course of the story, you obtain a [REDACTED] that is player-unique, and I'm not even talking about the end reward of the current Galatia line. The one [REDACTED] makes you potentially space-rich beyond compare. I do sort of feel like stratification between spacers, and between space and those on planets, could be something worth exploring, but I also see how it could feel like it's distracting from the thrust of the game (tho maybe making the player sweat over their choices a bit isn't a bad thing, either).

Also:

Quote
The multiple solutions point can be difficult to aim for, but I did my best. Starsector has a limited number of “verbs”, and the most developed verb is “fight a fleet battle”. You kinda gotta work with the tools you have and within the terms of the game you’re making rather than pulling in weirdo mechanics that relate to nothing else going on. (… Unless?)

Oh be still my little dorky heart.

I've thought, over the course of .95 and .95.1 (which is when I really got "into" SS and thought about it critically) that it's straining the bounds of its current layers to a degree. The game is really almost begging for some form of personal-scale ground layer, both for Fightans™ and just for experiencing the places in the universe in more depth. That isn't what the game's initial design focus was, and in a lot of ways that way lies madness and endless development hell (I'm sure we can all name multiple examples here), but in some of the .95 and .95.1 content, you can practically hear the edges of the box creaking as the game desperately wants to get more of the experience across. It's been the struggle of "space games" forever; most other stellar-focused, "space opera"-type fiction features a rich interplay between what might be called the Space Layer and the Ground Layer, and it's bedeviled game developers for nigh on four decades that this is so much harder to do in a satisfying way in game format. We've even had our own Histidine take up the cause to some degree with the new invasion layer in Nexerelin, but even that's a separate layer again from what we're talking about here; which is the player's personal experience with the world beyond their fleet. The Event in .95.1 was neat, and I'm really curious to see if you guys can do more in future patches as we approach 1.0 and what shape that takes within the bounds of what's reasonably possible.

I could probably go on and on about half a dozen other things in this post, but that's probably enough waffle from me for now. Thank you for taking the time to put this together and answer my silly little Twitter question! And I really can't wait to see what the next major patch brings...

Spoiler
Especially with all this hinting, both from your Twitter and from some of the new things in the game files, that suggest "part 2" is going to focus more heavily on the Luddics and good Brother Cotton's warnings about the Zig and the Janus Device. Oh, the places we'll go...
[close]
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SCC

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #2 on: January 19, 2022, 12:49:00 PM »

I can confirm that you can, indeed, just keep on mashing 1 to get through the dialogues.
The rest I will read tomorrow, I'm no good at combinatorics and I'm spent for today.

Quote
The multiple solutions point can be difficult to aim for, but I did my best. Starsector has a limited number of “verbs”, and the most developed verb is “fight a fleet battle”. You kinda gotta work with the tools you have and within the terms of the game you’re making rather than pulling in weirdo mechanics that relate to nothing else going on. (… Unless?)
I don't remember any quests being resolved through combat. Most often combat just happens to be the obstacle, which you can skip start to finish (I know, I did that).

David

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #3 on: January 19, 2022, 01:01:59 PM »

Sweet mother of Jiminy Christmas, I managed to kick off A Blog Post.

In the best way! You asked an interesting question that set my brain goin'.

I figured the art collective had been cut entirely - I hadn't connected it to the spot on Fikenhild, despite my first full clear of the "MSQ" taking the diplomatic route.

It's pretty lightly implied, I suppose. "Militant consciousness happening" is maybe a joke that requires going to a certain type of art school to really appreciate...

I will say that I think I'm one of those folks having mild palpitations and vapors at the idea that you just work via the .csv; you don't have any tool to visualize how the entire convo tree unfolds? No way to rapid-prototype how dialogue will work in the client itself without booting the entire client and dev-moding over to the specific place and setting the specific trigger?

Rules.csv will hot-reload if you change the file with the game running. (... In dev mode at least?) You can't easily send yourself back in a dialog tree, but with a well-timed save and a fake dev-trigger to set memory flags, it's not supremely hard to set up a test situation which isn't too laborious.

And as for visualization... yeah, I guess I could see situations where that might be nice. But I always find these visualizations so clunky to use.


I will say that I am definitely one of the folks who enjoys when Starsector is willing to get wordy.

Excellent, me too! :D

I've thought, over the course of .95 and .95.1 (which is when I really got "into" SS and thought about it critically) that it's straining the bounds of its current layers to a degree. The game is really almost begging for some form of personal-scale ground layer, both for Fightans™ and just for experiencing the places in the universe in more depth. That isn't what the game's initial design focus was, and in a lot of ways that way lies madness and endless development hell

Well. The asset requirements for any such a thing are... staggering. To say nothing of the design and playtesting iteration it'd require. I certainly know what a death-march failed project looks like and never want to repeat the experience. So, hopefully I didn't imply anything too "exciting" along those lines.

What's great about text is text is cheap. It's easy to take risks with it, see if they work, iterate, and/or just make boatloads of it.

... most other stellar-focused, "space opera"-type fiction features a rich interplay between what might be called the Space Layer and the Ground Layer, and it's bedeviled game developers for nigh on four decades that this is so much harder to do in a satisfying way in game format. We've even had our own Histidine take up the cause to some degree with the new invasion layer in Nexerelin...

Yeah, splitting a game into two or more pieces is a very dangerous move. I'd say even what Master of Orion did when it moved from 1 to 2 was a mistake in terms of design. Starsector navigates this well enough by not being a 4x (or, uh, with apologies to Nexerelin: mostly not; I do not envy the challenges Histidine takes on) -- right, but Starsector focuses perspective on the player as a character rather than an abstracted nation/faction, and it makes sure the two game modes - campaign and combat - are complementary.
 
Thank you for taking the time to put this together and answer my silly little Twitter question! And I really can't wait to see what the next major patch brings...

No problem, and I can't wait either! :D

Spoiler
Especially with all this hinting, both from your Twitter and from some of the new things in the game files, that suggest "part 2" is going to focus more heavily on the Luddics and good Brother Cotton's warnings about the Zig and the Janus Device. Oh, the places we'll go...
[close]

 Huh neat, who could say! Not me! :-X

I don't remember any quests being resolved through combat. Most often combat just happens to be the obstacle, which you can skip start to finish (I know, I did that).

Bounties, for sure. And you can resolve certain objectives of the story missions via combat rather than dialog, though not literally the entire mission. It tends not to be signposted in the UI but we do try to make sure there is fallback logic for "what if the player just shoots X".
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SCC

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #4 on: January 19, 2022, 01:07:55 PM »

Bounties, for sure. And you can resolve certain objectives of the story missions via combat rather than dialog, though not literally the entire mission. It tends not to be signposted in the UI but we do try to make sure there is fallback logic for "what if the player just shoots X".
That sounds like sanity checks for murderhobo players, rather than being able to advance the quest by fighting. Which is to say, I don't remember any situation where fighting was a better solution than others, besides some random generic fleets occupying certain spots you need to clear or coming after you when you get the generic quest item, where it might be better on the basis that you may supplies and fuel from fighting that fleet...

Megas

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #5 on: January 19, 2022, 01:32:08 PM »

I remember doing some of the missions causes obstacles to spawn that I rather destroy for getting in the way, not unlike monsters teleporting in after you pick up an item in a FPS game.  I advance the story a bit, and where did all of these fleets that normally do not exist come from?  It all feels kind of cheesy.
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SafariJohn

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #6 on: January 19, 2022, 01:45:28 PM »

I don't think Starsector would really benefit from adding some sort of "ground" mode. I believe you could get most of that experience if fleets sizes were much smaller, particularly the player's - a Hound with some Talons clamped on (Roider Union fighter clamps ftw!) is a whole different ball game than flying around with a system defense fleet at your beck and call.
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AcaMetis

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #7 on: January 19, 2022, 01:56:26 PM »

Quote
What's great about text is text is cheap. It's easy to take risks with it, see if they work, iterate, and/or just make boatloads of it.
I'm so guilty of that it hurts...

I've no complaints about the game's writing, but the number of times a main quest (main mission arc mission?) ends with "and then a random death fleet appears out of nowhere to try and kill the player" is kinda silly, not going to lie. Likewise silly is, as the blog put it, "G-rated Drug Trading & Terror Bombing". I'll be sure to refer to the Pathers as uncouth meanies the next time I raid one of their planets and murder several patrols out of spite after one of their number shakes me down for what I like to call "a short term loan" ::)
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Harmful Mechanic

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #8 on: January 19, 2022, 02:08:37 PM »

A lot of really savage periods in human history had comparatively 'genteel' language by modern standards - thinking particularly about one of the writers for Deadwood explaining that they had to make the dialogue vastly more profane than it would have been in the period, because when they used period-accurate 1870s slang, it undercut the tone of the show for a modern audience; you had people going around raping and murdering each other, and then they cursed like they were on The Howdy-Doody Show.

So it's not that weird, really - and if you think about it, this is far enough in the future that 'modern English' is probably interpretive (a cool example case) rather than literal as a rendition of what the characters in the setting would actually be saying to each other.
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SpaceDrake

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #9 on: January 19, 2022, 02:25:55 PM »

Well. The asset requirements for any such a thing are... staggering. To say nothing of the design and playtesting iteration it'd require. I certainly know what a death-march failed project looks like and never want to repeat the experience. So, hopefully I didn't imply anything too "exciting" along those lines.

What's great about text is text is cheap. It's easy to take risks with it, see if they work, iterate, and/or just make boatloads of it.

Oh, yeah, like, mind that I'm not even implying that you and Alex should even attempt it (though I did have an "unless...?" moment reading the blog, even with tempered expectations). This is just something I've thought about as a games-interested person (and later a games-working person) for decades, how the demands of Recreating The Raygun Gothic Star TreksWars™ in full, to the extent that people really imagine with the freedom to go around as you wish and do stuff in ground and space, requires so much more development work than any other format of video game. Everyone, everyone who's attempted to implement a multiple-gameplay-layer system for this genre has fallen short to some degree or another, and everyone else has wisely kept their gameplay specifically layered so as to minimize the "limitations" the player will notice (again, SC2 feels like a good comparison/antecedent for Starsector here, and Escape Velocity did similar).

Yeah, splitting a game into two or more pieces is a very dangerous move. I'd say even what Master of Orion did when it moved from 1 to 2 was a mistake in terms of design. Starsector navigates this well enough by not being a 4x (or, uh, with apologies to Nexerelin: mostly not; I do not envy the challenges Histidine takes on) -- right, but Starsector focuses perspective on the player as a character rather than an abstracted nation/faction, and it makes sure the two game modes - campaign and combat - are complementary.

I'm a little unsure I'd go that far; I thought the MoO2 ground system was fine for what it was. I always yearned for a little more but as a kid I understood there were computer limits (and as an adult, I understand that the team likely didn't have the budget for anything more involved).

Certainly what Starsector does works well for it (and what Histidine does is pretty legendary). It's just that eternal curse of the genre, of mental desires, saying somewhere deep down that the game should be even bigger. Space is vast, says our unbridled imaginings and desires, and surely the game must expand to fill it, surely...?

Still, Starsector does what it does well, and above all I'd want the game to remain playable and true to itself. :D

So it's not that weird, really - and if you think about it, this is far enough in the future that 'modern English' is probably interpretive (a cool example case) rather than literal as a rendition of what the characters in the setting would actually be saying to each other.

As a language professional, I have often wondered what exactly is being spoken as Sector standard. Initially, one would think that, partly due to the game's release language that it's shaped somewhat like English (though perhaps that's just Anglophone arrogance talking?) but one can't help but notice that very few of the extant systems in vanilla Starsector use specifically Anglic nomenclature and how prominent the Nahuatl names are in the Hegemony (and not just in a few planets, either) and League use of a gens system, and you begin to wonder. We do know from the Timeline that, pre-collapse, the Domain encouraged and/or mandated a common language (another point the proto-Luddics considered sinful ala Babel) so there was certainly a common language for all the abandoned worlds in the Sector come c. +1, but has there been linguistic drift since then, and just how much drift happened between our current time and the height of the Domain (still about a thousand years, going by the oldest lore posts)? We do encounter Pathers who have had their language "flattened toward the Sector mean", but what exactly does that entail? How many languages are spoken in the Sector at present? Questions and questions...
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Gustafssonz

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #10 on: January 19, 2022, 02:55:52 PM »

I love to write stories myself and I know my way around code (a little).
It would be amazing to have some kind of tutorial/guide in how to navigate the API to do these kind of quests/mission arcs :)
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Dziurkacz

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #11 on: January 19, 2022, 03:19:27 PM »

Thank you for the update. I would like to share a handful of thoughts that came to me while reading this. I am interested in the storytelling aspect in general and I appreciate what Starsector has to offer in that area.
  • Multiple solutions to a quest - I think that the right solution is for combat to be hardly avoidable as the game revolves around it a lot. I would not "reward" a player with skipping an interesting encounter, but rather allow them to influence the initial state of the engagement. For example, a good diplomat can arrange for a supporting army (maybe some room for commissioning benefits?) to join the battle or perhaps weaken the enemies by lowering their CR or DP pool, or even affect the composition of the enemy fleet (will we fight the Hammers of Ludd or the [REDACTED]?).
  • Unconventional solutions - Troika writers have mentioned that they always try to prepare for all personas that their game already supports - for Arcanum that has been a murderhobo, a diplomat and a thief approach because they believed that if their game facilitates such approaches, the quests should entertain such playstyles as well. I think that in Starsector terms this would probably translate to, at least a few different approaches: frontal assault, going dark with marines, and using the favors accrued thus far. What I would like to stress is for those diverse approaches to work out the rewards have to remain similar. Everyone will go murderhobo it the combat encounter will contain something worth capturing unless other approaches entail comparable rewards.
    For example: if the main reward is a unique variant of an Apogee starship, capturing it without exposing it to combat rewards the player for using a sneaky or diplomatic approach, but does not make the frontal assault option comparatively unviable.
  • Parallel objectives - although I do not fully endorse this idea, parallel objectives do offer an option of opportunity cost, i.e. choosing to do one thing entails the cost of not being able to do others. There is also a soft version of it, where doing a thing 1st affects the difficulty or reward of the 2nd, 3rd etc.
    This could allow the game to offer not only different missions but entirely different playthroughs. If, for example, there would be 3 unique capital superships in the game and the gameplay would be structured so we can only obtain one of those, subsequent playthroughs would have much more to offer.
  • [Offtop] Regarding the "Game of Thrones" section - I keep thinking how one can do something for 6+ years and fail at it so miserably as soon as they are told "ok, now you try it". It's as if showrunners were riding a bicycle for the 1st time without training wheels, fell flat immediately and had the bicycle burst in flames. This is also why I keep scratching my head about "Witcher" on Netflix - the books are done, the world is done, but they choose to go against that. Good luck with that.
Once again thank you for the post. It was an interesting read.
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ishiggydiggydowop

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #12 on: January 19, 2022, 05:24:17 PM »

This was an awesome deep dive into your workflow and some content. And yeah, as the guys on the Reddit thread have said, I would have loved to have those crusty old Anarchists on the bridge of my ship as we completely harass every power structure in the Sector, but alas, the cutting room floor is harsh. And I also can't believe that I've always chosen the exploration path for the Westernesse situation - if I'd known that there was so much good writing hidden there then I would have never chosen the exploration route.

Honestly, really impressed with the quality and overall story that's been given to us in 0.95. It reminds me of the type of writing that propelled games like Sunless Seas/Skies into the limelight - there's a sense to the writing that's almost poetic, and it flows so well that it's genuinely a joy to read. Is this just your own writing style, or are you influenced by other games/media and this is the style that "fits" Starsector? Are you effectively the sole writer at this point, despite the collaboration between you and Alex? I feel like I read these answers before but quite frankly, I've forgotten.

Overall, I can't wait to see what y'all do with the story and the sector. Every element of the game has been knocked out of the park as it is right now, IMO.
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Wyvern

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #13 on: January 19, 2022, 06:43:49 PM »

I did the exploration path once. I've done the talking path every time since then - it's just so much more satisfying to be able to show up with that little food gift courtesy of Elissa Zal.

(Though I do kindof miss whatever-it-was I pulled off that first time that let me pre-empt Baird, a bit later on, with 'it's about the gates, of course'.)
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

David

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Re: Writing Starsector 2: Westernesse Boondoggle
« Reply #14 on: January 19, 2022, 06:47:26 PM »

    So it's not that weird, really - and if you think about it, this is far enough in the future that 'modern English' is probably interpretive (a cool example case) rather than literal as a rendition of what the characters in the setting would actually be saying to each other.

    That linked article is really fascinating. (And I gotta learn that whacky linguist typography one of these days.)

    Like so many aspects of Starsector, trying to project a realistic take on linguistics in the world of the year ????? would result in something too alien to be anything near relatable, so as you observe, Compromises Must Be Made.

    I'm a little unsure I'd go that far; I thought the MoO2 ground system was fine for what it was. I always yearned for a little more but as a kid I understood there were computer limits (and as an adult, I understand that the team likely didn't have the budget for anything more involved).

    Ah, to clarify: The ground combat was fine - it was adding the civ-style planet management that really made the game drag in later stages. Late game city slog is not something the Civilization series ever really overcame (though maybe Old World has? Haven't played it though.)

    Stellaris now, speaking of ground combat, ... man. (I'll leave it at that.)

    ... Anyway, unless I'm misremembering, I'm pretty sure Alex & I discussed ground combat like a decade ago and decided that it was probably a bad idea for Starsector. I don't know how it couldn't come off as bloat at this point in time, given everything else in the game. It's also slightly out of scope - I mean, it definitely is in terms of project scope, but in terms of the scope of the player's activities in Starsector, managing ground combat just isn't the character's job. (- And I say this with all respect for mods that push this boundary. Mods have different requirements than commercial games and can go off in all kinda of whacky directions.)

    Certainly what Starsector does works well for it (and what Histidine does is pretty legendary). It's just that eternal curse of the genre, of mental desires, saying somewhere deep down that the game should be even bigger. Space is vast, says our unbridled imaginings and desires, and surely the game must expand to fill it, surely...?

    Hah, exactly! It is the siren call that wrecks space-game devs on the shoals of, uh, hubris?

    I love to write stories myself and I know my way around code (a little).
    It would be amazing to have some kind of tutorial/guide in how to navigate the API to do these kind of quests/mission arcs :)

    .. oh uh, uh. There's a mod wiki for this, isn't there? Ah, there is here. But I bet there are some good posts on this in the modding forum.

    (Honestly, what I do is copy the code from existing missions and swap everything around to make a new one. Alex can worry about the implementation details, I just worry about what I need to do to make it work.)

    I would not "reward" a player with skipping an interesting encounter, but rather allow them to influence the initial state of the engagement. For example, a good diplomat can arrange for a supporting army (maybe some room for commissioning benefits?) to join the battle or perhaps weaken the enemies by lowering their CR or DP pool, or even affect the composition of the enemy fleet (will we fight the Hammers of Ludd or the [REDACTED]?).

    Not a bad idea...

    [Offtop] Regarding the "Game of Thrones" section - I keep thinking how one can do something for 6+ years and fail at it so miserably as soon as they are told "ok, now you try it". It's as if showrunners were riding a bicycle for the 1st time without training wheels, fell flat immediately and had the bicycle burst in flames. This is also why I keep scratching my head about "Witcher" on Netflix - the books are done, the world is done, but they choose to go against that. Good luck with that.[/li][/list]

    (I imagine the GoT showrunners being from extremely rich, well-connected families may have had something to do with their ability to get put in charge of major media productions, cough.)
    (Also, admission: Never played the Witcher games or books, but I'm enjoying the show as "hot fantasy garbage". The GoT nosedive vastly lowered my expectations for everything, I think.)

    This was an awesome deep dive into your workflow and some content. And yeah, as the guys on the Reddit thread have said, I would have loved to have those crusty old Anarchists on the bridge of my ship as we completely harass every power structure in the Sector, but alas, the cutting room floor is harsh.

    Hah! Well, thank you. I don't know if that game would be Starsector, but it sounds fun.

    Honestly, really impressed with the quality and overall story that's been given to us in 0.95. It reminds me of the type of writing that propelled games like Sunless Seas/Skies into the limelight - there's a sense to the writing that's almost poetic, and it flows so well that it's genuinely a joy to read. Is this just your own writing style, or are you influenced by other games/media and this is the style that "fits" Starsector? Are you effectively the sole writer at this point, despite the collaboration between you and Alex? I feel like I read these answers before but quite frankly, I've forgotten.

    Overall, I can't wait to see what y'all do with the story and the sector. Every element of the game has been knocked out of the park as it is right now, IMO.

    Ah jeez, thank you again. My imposter syndrome really appreciates your kind words.

    To answer your questions:

    Yeah, I'm pretty much the writer on Starsector. Alex will write text as he implements features and encounters, so there's some of him in there. I will do an edit pass on his stuff, but pretty much always keep the core idea intact because I think he has a good instinct on how to approach it. Also, as noted in the blog post, he's a good sanity check on my weirder impulses and too-obscure jokes. And yeah, I do basically all of the quest and description writing at this point.

    As for style, I kinda write by the seat of my pants. There's just a sense of what feels right in my head, probably hardcoded by reading an absolute ton of scifi and fantasy at an impressionable age. Now that said, my primary conscious style goal is probably Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series - you'll see a lot of Starsector in those. I'm also really into the likes of Iain M. Banks, China Mieville, Kim Stanley Robinson, etc. Relevant blog post on the Starsector reading list here.

    In terms of games writing, hmm. Disco Elysium was astoundingly good. Not sure about any other game really impressing me by just the writing; as the cheeky line goes, "If you think [any game] has good writing, wait 'til you read a book; It'll blow your mind." (I'll note, I haven't actually played the Sunless Seas/Skies games.)

    Edit: Wait, no: Loved the writing in Brigador. I spent all my merc-bux on unlocking lore instead of useful things.
    « Last Edit: January 19, 2022, 06:51:57 PM by David »
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