Shadow Covenant

Everybody that knows me know that from time to time I get this urge of making a space opera game… The actual form of that space opera varies, from “Star Control 3 type”, to “Geometry Wars in real space”, to strategy combat, to more action-oriented, sometimes going on planets, other times in outer space only… All of them feature wandering about space, giving it a sandbox feel.

I usually spend some time day-dreaming about it, designing it in my head, etc… then some other more feasible project comes along and I forget it.

But one thing I always tend to get stuck in my head is a big problem: space is empty… Real space is boring,

it’s basically this:

If you’re lucky, it can be:

But even that is boring, because the “Alpha Centauri” system has this background, and the “Betelgeuse” system has this one tinted red or something like that…

Space is huge and it’s mostly empty space… if we consider the scales involved, we get other problems; it would be highly unlikely wandering out and finding other ships to attack, etc.

Of course, there’s solutions to these problems… limit the wandering, make the interesting places more confined, give the players/enemies some reason to be around specific places. That works pretty well, but I wonder if there’s a better way!

Thinking about the “better way” has led me to World of Warcraft… The game world there is “huge”, but that’s just a matter of perception… the world seems big, but it’s not that large; cities only have space for 100 people tops, you can trek a “huge” plain in some minutes, but still the game retains an aura of “largeness”. If the game world was indeed of the correct size, it would take days walking from one end of the Barrens to the other… and it would be boring; the world would be barren, devoid of interesting landmarks that make the world recognizable and that lead itself to lore and history.

From what I can gather, the game does this by playing with the viewing distance… from most points of interest, you can’t see any other, but as soon as you walk in one direction and lose clear sight of the place you were just now, you have something interesting in your view, effectively making the world feel big, but at the same time playing with distances so it is in fact small (and more interesting).

So, can we adapt this to space games in general? It’s a harder endeavor, since space is orders of magnitude bigger than a continent (even if we play it small!). The “simple” way is to play with the concept of hyperspace, making it almost impossible for the player to wander off without boring itself to tears… this way, the player will probably use the hyperspace lanes to travel, specially if we do something I’ve never seen done: give control to the player during hyperspace. In most games (if not all), the player selects a destination and presses the hyperspace button, or jumps into an hyperspace gate and ends up in that destination.
If hyperspace would be a different “dimension” that the player could navigate at will, that had some holes for the player to drop into normal space, where space was shortened to make for quicker navigation, the player might feel a sense of wandering, while still keeping him into the confines of the game world.

Then we reach the second problem: making interesting stuff in space.
Generally speaking, space has space stations, asteroids, planets, stars, and space ships… and that’s it… that’s all you can play with to make interesting settings…

Well, planets and stars are so big, they either aren’t the correct proportion or you don’t see anything of them except the general shapes from space… and from that perspective, they’re not that interesting. Even if you allow for planet landing, we’re talking again of huge areas that aren’t that interesting, except you have an army of designers, or procedural generated, which aren’t that interesting after a bit.

Asteroids are… well, brown and grey… not that interesting as well…

Space stations and ships are the main points of interest, so that can be used as basis for “interesting” areas, but even that it is not enough to make really interesting places, compared to what you can do on a “ground based” game.

Of course, I’m talking in relative terms… if you had alien races that have giant space bases around space, each of them with different looks and functionality, you can offset some of these problems, but I’m talking about the “general” idea of space, not special cases… You can also have space whales, but that’s not what most people expect in a space game (not that they aren’t cool)…

Space is a curious beast, both drawing us with its sense of adventure and repelling us with its nothingness… I think the the role of the game designer when building a “space game” is mainly to create an interesting environment where people won’t get bored to tears from looking at screens and screens of blackness with some stars…

For example, I like what Cliff Harris (of Gratuitous Space Battles fame) has done with the backgrounds on his game:

Space is interesting in these screenshots, not just because of the brutal action on top (which might help a lot… space games usually suffer for the placid (lack of) action around space stations, etc), but because there’s some “texture” to the background, to space itself…

Anyway, one of these days I’ll be ready to make my space opera dream a reality… I’ve always loved space operas, from Star Wars to Stargate, from Star Trek to Babylon 5, from Firefly to Mass Effect…

A final note is that most of the great Space Operas aren’t about space, as they are about the Universe, and more importantly, the Conflict and the Characters… this would be enough material to fill up another blog post (which I might do in the future)…