In an earlier post, I’d talked about terrain. An astute observer might have noticed that the terrain discussed there is all more or less normal stuff – nebluas, asteroids, etc. Nothing that’s a good fit for hyperspace, which has more of a “weird” feel.

The first question is, what’s the goal of adding terrain to hyperspace? Obviously not having any terrain there would be a bit boring; spicing things up with some variety is not a bad goal, but something more specific would help guide the design better. So: “make hyperspace travel something that can be done well or poorly by the player”. This fits with the overarching goal of terrain making travel more interesting. Unlike normal terrain – which generally makes things interesting by impacting your interactions with other fleets, i.e. hiding from someone inside a nebula – the goal for hyperspace terrain is to be interesting by itself. This fits nicely with the primary role of hyperspace as a travel medium. Read the rest of this entry »