13 minutes, 48 seconds.  That’s how long it took the Curiosity rover’s signal to reach Earth from Mars - and Mars is in our own solar system.

Intrigue is the name of the upcoming expansion pack to our best-selling space strategy game, Galactic Civilizations III.  It’s not called “Government” or “Politics”. It’s Intrigue.  13 minutes, 48 seconds between responses for radio signals in our own solar system leaves a lot of time for uncertainty, for doubt, for fear…for intrigue.

Let’s walk through how colonization might actually work.  Let’s presume humans get to Mars in the 2030s.  Let’s also presume that at some point in the not so distant future, we actually plant a colony on Mars.  Are those colonists citizens of Mars? Or are they citizens of their respective, Earthbound, nation states?  How long would that work? How many generations would that work for? Would it survive the first crisis?  Would humans, born and raised on Mars, care about the political maneuverings in Washington DC? Berlin? Beijing? London? I suspect that there would be point where the government would need to change in order to deal with large populations of people living off world.

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Good afternoon.  Below is the captain's log from the recent Jupiter test of the prototype Emdrive MK I.  As a reminder, all information concerning the Emdrive remains classified.  Please return your Aug glasses to the front counter when you have finished this briefing.

Captain's Log: March 2, 2086…

There are 69 known moons of Jupiter. 

Jupiter is the first planet we’re sending Star Control’s prototype ship to visit. Powered by the Darius Robotics Emdrive MK I, the prototype can get from Star Control command to Jupiter in a matter of days, rather than months.  It is ironic that the prototype is powered by a drive made by Darius Robotics, given that Darius Erdmann is now gone, lost to the Lexites.

The prototype closes in on Jupiter, March 2086.

Some people have speculated that Jupiter was meant to be Sol’s twin in a binary star system.  In reality, Jupiter is not even close to having enough mass to be a star.  You would need at least 80 Jupiters to have a chance. Jupiter was chosen as our first test because of the various types of moons that will allow for a good measure of the lander’s capabilities.

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Version 3 will let players see the overall settings and recommended hardware needed.

We live in an age where developers actually brag about creating random quests as if that’s a good thing.

In an age of gigabytes of memory the challenge isn’t in how many worlds you have, it is how to make those worlds compelling.

In Star Control: Origins, there are no random missions. 

No episode of Star Trek ever ended with Captain Kirk receiving 14 Dilithium crystals for his troubles.  Star Control is about telling stories in which you are the central character.

Each mission is designed to tell a story.  While we don’t forbid missions from giving the player some sort of tangible reward, most of them simply alter the universe in some, subtle way.  It is the journey, not the destination we care about.

Consider the popular HBO series, Westworld®.   In that series, guests travel to Westworld and interact with “hosts” that are AI-driven beings with scripts.  In no episode is it suggested that guests leave with some sort of monetary benefit.  Instead, the world is designed for visitors to learn a little bit more about themselves.

While the central narrative (spoiler alert – not really) is that you must save the human race from certain annihilation, there is one way to accomplish that task.  Far be it from us to get in the way of a voyage of self discovery. You have a goal (save all life on Earth from terrible murder aliens).  How you do that is none of our business.  We just hope you do it. You know, so that we don’t…well…die. Living is our favorite state of existence.

Building a rich, living universe

So you might ask yourself, if you’re not going to resort to randomly generated quests where the player does X to get Y, how are you going to have enough content to make the world feel truly alive?

The answer, my friends, is that you make it easy for creators to tell stories.

Consider for a moment the user interface presented in Westworld:

Now, to be fair, this system is far too complex for the authors we are seeking out to use.   Our answer is Adventure Studo, a new major application we are working on.  This app alone is as big as one of our major software projects.  Its purpose is to make it possible for us to recruit Sci-Fi authors to easily create their own stories in Star Control.

Like many of you, we love to tell stories.  Stories that don’t necessarily end with the protagonist gaining 5 quadroons of space-gold.   And the way you make that happen is to make it easy for creators to do their thing.

At GDC, we’ll be showing off Adventure Studio.  To my knowledge, no one has ever tried to do something like this (though I want to give props to the Never Winter Nights team for doing a lot of pioneering in this area). 

Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

The new government system combined with dramas are super compelling.

You really do feel like yiur running an entire civilization.

The galactic market is a game changer for the AI on higher levels as there is a way to buy and sell resources (if you have enough money).

The existence of another income source a,so let’s us tighten up the economic system.

The new Star Control is moving swiftly!  We expect to release Fleet Battles Beta 2 within the next several weeks as most of our work is focused on the adventure game.

We have been listening to feedback from the fans and incorporated that feedback into the project.

For example, below is a screenshot which shows the updated home solar system:

Our home solar system

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Every few months I write something that incites a twitter mob.  There are people out there are compelled to right the smallest of wrongs by hurling days of abuse at the villain.

As the said villain, I’ve developed many different strategies for dealing with these mobs.

This week’s outrage: A pronoun joke (someone demanding to be referred to as "they" instead of "he" or "she" while referring to the other person as "honey" and siccing her (sorry their) followers on him in which he sub-tweeted the exchange which is where it came onto my timeline where I always enjoy tweaking rude people who are conversely easily offended. 

But there is always something for the outrage miners to whip themselves into hurling abuse at someone.

Here are a few examples.

(me and Nikki discussing the bravery of SJWs)

It’s not that I intentionally try to offend.  I just don’t put in any effort not to offend.  Maybe I should.  But as I wrote 10 years ago: I’m going to do what I’m going to do.

"More" to come.

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