What is Star Control?

Star Control is an action/adventure game with strong RPG elements in which you are the captain of a ship that travels across the known galaxy. Along the way, you will meet strange new aliens, explore fantastic worlds, fight starship battles, upgrade your ships with exciting new components. The galaxy is an open world sandbox but there is also a larger story to take part in as well. 

The History

In the late 80s and early 90s, the Star Control trilogy was published by Accolade. The two two in the series were developed by Toys for Bob with the third developed by Legend Entertainment.  It is considered by many to one of the best games of all time.  The closest thing it’s gotten to a modern day sequel is probably Mass Effect.  If not for Star Control, there probably wouldn’t have been a Mass Effect.

So if Star Control was such a great series, where are the sequels? Ah, there you get into unstable world of the games industry.  Accolade, the publisher, went out of business in 1999 and the Star Control rights went to Infogrames and then Atari. toys for Bob was ultimately acquired by Activison where they make Skylanders. Legend Entertainment went on to make Unreal expansions before closings its doors in 2004.

None of this would have stopped someone from making a Star Control style game.  Bioware made Mass Effect. There was also Space Rangers II. But the primary obstacle is technology and budget.  Star Control is 3 games in one – a planet exploration game, a ship combat game and a space questing game.  Each part being substantially different from the other.  There is no single game engine that is designed to handle all three elements without compromising.

Star Control: Alien dialog (1992)

Star Control combat (1992)

Star Control planet exploration (1992)

Star Control questing (1992)

Stardock’s involvement

When Atari filed for bankruptcy, Stardock the developer and/or publisher of space games like Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire acquired the publishing rights to the existing series and associated trademarks.  The stage was set for a new Star Control game but building such a game from scratch would take time.

Development

Stardock began by building a new studio in Towson Maryland.  Recruiting veterans from around the industry, the design required a careful balance between the old and the new.  The team wanted to avoid the game coming across as a retro game but at the same time, didn’t want to make something that didn’t capture the gameplay we loved.

The Star Control team

During the design, a lot of ideas were considered.  How should the planet be handled? How about ship combat? Internet multiplayer? How should the aliens be handled in face to face discussions? What would be the minimum hardware requirements?

We got some lucky breaks during all this.  Stardock Towson has roommates.  Namely, Mohawk Games and Oxide Games.   A large percentage of the teams were veterans of the Civilization IV and V franchises which brought unique visual and technical skills to the project.

Rather than pre-rendered aliens, the aliens would lip-sync and react in-real time in engine ala Civilization V/VI.

Early prototype of the planet lander. Planets would be relatively “small” and be designed to be quick and fun to play on.

Exploration and combat could be handled in the solar system.

Alien conversations would be in-engine, real-time animation

But many touches can only be solved with a lot of iteration.  That’s where the Founder’s Program comes in

The Founders: Precursors

When you make a high profile game, you can either listen to criticism in a controlled environment before the game ships or…you can wish you had done so after your game ships.  For Stardock, that’s where the Founder’s Program come in. 

The purpose of the Star Control Founder’s program is two-fold. 

The primary purpose is to make sure we’re on the right track.  Everything from readability of text (see screenshots above) to game pacing to story and lore handling gets feedback from the Founders.  On a game like Star Control: Origins, this is paramount.  Getting one game done right is hard.  Getting three games right simultaneously and have them work together is extremely difficult.  Moreover, Star Control is a unique franchise in that each developer has brought their own lore to the table and that can be quite delicate.

The secondary purpose is straight-out funding.  Star Control: Origins is the biggest game we’ve ever done.  Its budget is greater than Sins of a Solar Empire + Galactic Civilizations III + Ashes of the Singularity + Offworld Trading Company combined.  This isn’t the kind of game where you can just reuse code from your other games. It’s all has to be made from scratch. 

The underlying engine: Nitrous

Star Control is immensely important to us. It is very important to me personally. My game development hero is Paul Reiche. You may not know him but he may be the greatest game designer you haven’t heard of. His game designs are unique beyond comparison.  He worked on Mail Order Monsters, Archon 1 and Archon 2 and more recently Skylanders.  If it weren’t for him, I doubt I’d have gone into game development.  So Star Control has to be done just right.  So when it came to an engine for it, we needed something that was both powerful and battle tested.  That engine is Oxide’s Nitrous engine. Ashes of the Singularity used it.  Now it’s ready for Star Control.  With Nitrous, we can deliver lighting effects (see the gameplay teaser) that you’d normally see in movies but still do it on relatively modest hardware.  You won’t need a monster machine to run Star Control: Origins.

The Founders: Phase II

On October 18th, we’re opening up the Founder’s Program to the fans.  Those who join will get access to the Founder’s Vault and Founder’s forum which will outline just how big a difference the handful of Founders we started with have had already.

Where the Precursor Founders helped us with dealing with the lore conflicts between Star Control 1/2 vs. 3 vs. Origins, how Super Melee should be handled, what place the planet exploration should have in the new game the Phase II founders will be directly involved in the Origins Story, Super Melee play testing. Making sure our hardware requirements stay low (i.e. if you have a crummy machine, as long as it has at least 1GB of video memory, we want you), pacing and more pacing. 

Our target release date is in time for the 25th anniversary of Star Control 2.  But that isn’t a promise. If necessary, we will push that date out if the Founders don’t think it’s ready yet.  People will forgive delays. They won’t forgive games released before they’re ready.

So visit us at www.starcontrol.com.  Join the adventure!

Greetings!  We have some news regarding Soren Johnson’s Offworld Trading Company we wanted to share.

## The Steam Sale ##

Civilization IV designer, Soren Johnson’s popular new economic strategy game, Offworld Trading Company, is on sale this weeked on Steam for 66% off!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/271240/

Offworld Trading Company (OTC) is based on the premise that we do get to Mars in the not so distant future and set up a colony and now a handful of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs have been invited to set up companies on Mars to help provides products and services both to Mars and back to Earth.  You, naturally, are one of those invited.

OTC is a real-time strategy game. Instead of winning through armies and tanks, your weapons are market forces and shrewd business tactics.  I know that may not sound exciting on paper but in practice, it’s pretty pulse pounding fun and has built a growing and dedicated fan base thanks to things like daily challenges, a strong multiplayer community and honestly, because there turns out to be a lot of people who have wanted to see a game take on business warfare as a setting.

## New DLC is coming ##

We are also going to be announcing a new DLC shortly.  Please contact us if you’re interested in covering Offworld Trading Company in more detail.  Soren Johnson is also available for interviews regarding his plans for Offworld Trading Company, Mars, and more.

## Screenshots ##

(you can link to these or use them locally as you see fit)

Offworld Trading Company: The Ceres Initiative, brings the game to the asteroid field between Mars and Jupiter

Offworld Trading Company thrives on its randomly generated maps and replayability but also includes a campaign

ESCALATE ON NOVEMBER 3

On November 3, Ashes of the Singularity gets its first expansion pack: Escalation.  It’s a stand-alone expansion which means that if you don’t already have Ashes of the Singularity, you can just buy Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and get everything that’s in the base game too.

TOTAL ANNIHILATION vs. SUPREME COMMANDER

There are a lot of reasons we decided to separate the base game from Escalation.  Much of this came from how the game developed during the beta period.  For those of you who weren’t part of the early access program, we had very heated debates regarding the direction the game should go....

Continue Reading...

Right now, Galactic Civilizations III supports:

1. English
2. French
3. German
4. Russian

Because of the way we made Galactic Civilizations III, translation is very expensive.  There are a lot of words.  But nearly all of it is in the technology descriptions.

In this screenshot you see the short-description.

And this one shows the long description.

Translation costs by the word.  That long description has 38 words and each civilization has their own tech tree and each tech tree has hundreds of potential techs.  Thus, translating to the other languages we want to translate to costs tens of thousands of dollars.

Now, in the bigger scheme of things, this isn’t that much money.  But there are definitely languages where we won’t make that back.  So we have to put some thought into it.

So which languages should you translate to?  There’s a lot of data on that so I won’t bore you with the details.  But let’s look at what some other games translate to.

Here’s Stellaris:

1. English
2. French
3. German
4. Spanish
5. Polish
6. Portuguese
7. Russian

Here’s the new Master of Orion:

1. English
2. Russian
3. French
4. German
5. Czech
6. Japanese
7. Portuguese
8. Turkish
9. Polish
10. Korean

Here’s Rocket League:

1. English
2. French
3. Italian
4. German
5. Spanish
6. Dutch
7. Portuguese
8. Japanese
9. Korean
10. Russian
11. Turkish

And it would be insane not to include Civilization VI:

1. English
2. French
3. Italian
4. German
5. Spanish
6. Japanese
7. Korean
8. Polish
9. Portuguese
10. Russian
11. Chinese

Meanwhile, Ark? It supports 21 languages, all with full audio.

But none of that can hold a candle to Counterstrike: 25 languages.

Steam page translated

MOO: Steam page in other languages

GalCiv III: page translated

What to support and how much?

For one thing, the largely redundant long tech description is not something that really needs to be translated.  It could just use the normal description. This is what most games do (as in, nearly all games).  We just tend to be a lot wordier.  We’d continue to support the 4 languages we have but then add:

1. Italian
2. Spanish
3. Polish
4. Portuguese
5. Japanese
6. Korean
7. Chinese

We’d do the first 4 soon and the last 3 later since those would require some changes to our UI system to fit.

We live in a world of many languages and that’s a good thing.  Language is the key to culture and makes our world a richer place.  I just wish it was less expensive to translate it all.

Screenshots of the week:

by starmac45

by Radaney

by 41ndigo

If you are like me you are probably the guy that people call for help on their computer.  Recently, I discovered the Intel Device Advisor.

It’s as brilliant in its concept as it is straight-forward in its implementation.

Here’s how it works:

You download it and run it.  It stays in the background for a long while (as in, days).  It then reports to you, based on your uses, things you might need and where you can get them.  This is something Windows should, frankly, come with.  It’s still relatively early in its development – not on the tech side but on the offerings side. But for example,  imagine if a relative is complaining that they’re always running out of disk space.  This app, itself, won’t fix that.  But instead, would promote a series of disk space optimizers (hint, hint, Intel <g>) or alternatively detect that your motherboard has an M.2 slot and recommend a compatible M.2 drive that even casual users can probably handle putting in (terrible name, M.2, it’s basically a tiny little drive you plug into the motherboard).

My next PC

Where it really shines though is handling the #1 question I get asked: What should I get for my next computer?  This app will literally configure one for them from various third parties for them. It seems almost like magic. Seeing iBuyPower and Asus with really specific configurations on an Intel page is a bit surreal.

This app is still early but I am pretty excited that Intel’s hardware knowledge paired with third party vendors could make dealing with the giant PC ecosystem a lot easier.

Hi gang!

Any thoughts on the October issue of Stardock Magazine that will be going out around 10/10/2016 go ahead and post here.

The Australian Gamer takes a first look at Ashes of the Singularity.

Greetings!

Fall is here in the northern hemisphere. Time to migrate to Australia!

Here's what's new…

## Version 1.5 ##

I am hoping that version 1.5 will arrive before Halloween. It's going to be tight. Lots of work going on. I'll outline below some of the focus.

## UI ##

According to the Steam data, 28% of our players are playing at below 1920x1080 and the text and such looks awful. Unreadable imo. We are updating how the the game is displayed which should, we hope, result in a dramatic improvement to how the text, UI and really the game itself looks.

## Balance update ##

The Substrate are going to get a bit more love on the building destruction side. The PHC is going to get a bit of a nerf. We are also looking at porting back some of the work we've done in Escalation for the Substrate economy which should make them a bit different.

## Performance ##

Hopefully some of you noticed the significant performance boost in the September update. We are continuing down that path with version 1.5.

## Keyboard ##

High on our list is getting WASD keyboard support options in. I don't know if they'll make it into 1.5 or not. But it is coming.

## Vulkan ##

This is now working in our internal builds! This might show up in 1.5. AMD is providing a lot of assistance to us in getting Vulkan support so please be sure to give some kudos and credit to AMD for Vulkan in PC gaming. It'll run great on any GPU that supports Vulkan.

## Replays ##

This won't happen until after the Escalation expansion. We wanted to get this into 1.5 but it's a pretty big job. But it is coming.

## Scenario Creator & Steam Workhop ##

While probably not for 1.5, we are putting the final touches on a GUI Scenario editor. Lucky you guys. I had to make scenarios in a text editor. This will be in a free update that will include Steam Workshop support.

## Names Names Names ##

The mobile orbital nullifiers for PHC and Substrate need names. Put your suggestions in the comments.

## Reviews ##

We really could use your help on the reviews. We took a pretty big hit when people started down voting Ashes because they thought Escalation was a replacement to Ashes (it's not).

We are talking to Valve as to whether it'll be possible to turn Escalation into DLC so that it eliminates any confusion and we develop a game launcher that lets you pick the base game or Escalation. We prefer being able to use the Steam client as the launcher but given the backlast against expandalones, we're willing to spend the time and budget on writing our own launcher if that makes people happy.

Anyway, if you haven't reviewed the game on Steam, your review will absolutely make a difference.

That's all for now!

-brad

I had the opportunity to get a saved game from a player who was experiencing long turn times.  This was extremely useful because it’s one of those things you “hear” about sometimes but it “never happens on my machine”.

I was able to reproduce it and the results were fascinating.

A huge part of the cost was recalculating those zones of control.  This is something that has always been in there (going all the way back to Elemental) but over time, it appears to have got more and more expensive as we have added more “stuff” such as the ruffians getting to have their own ZOC.

People sending me their saved games is like giving me gold.

I really enjoy seeing how other people play and it does more than anything to help us make the game better.  I think you’ll be impressed with the improvements we’ve made to Rivals.

I do plan to backport these changes to base Sorcerer King in the future.

PC gaming, at some point in the past year or two, has changed from expecting expansion packs to be offered as an integrated product to demanding they be released as DLC.  Sorcerer King: Rivals stumbled into this brave new world.

Our story so far:

Last year, we released a fantasy 4X/RPG game called Sorcerer King.  It takes place in our Elemental game universe and is a combination of a 4X strategy game with RPG elements.  It’s a really fun game. In that game, you start with a village in a world that has already been conquered by the title character.  Seeing that the Sorcerer King now wants to become a god, you must raise up an army, gather allies and confront the Sorcerer King at his fortress.  And, like I said, it was fun.

But, it had one big issue: Replayability.  This wouldn’t have been a problem if it were a $15 game but in a $40 game that wasn’t a dedicated RPG, it was a problem.  So over the past year, we thought about what we could do to address that.  The solution came in 3 parts:

1. We needed to add more races to the game to play as
2. We needed to to make the neutral factions more relevant
3. We needed to give the player agency in the game: let them be able to win the game through their civilization

Ultimately, we combined this together into Rivals, an expansion pack. 

Rivals

We’re very happy with how the game has turned out.  There are a number of things on my wish list I’d like to add (in particular, I’d like to make the neutrals into major factions so that they too can try to become gods).  But like all things, it depends on sales.

Mmm. Dungeons.

The first update

Today we released the first update to the game that fixes some typos and game balance stuff.  I also made a few AI tweaks to make the neutrals more intelligent.   I am hopeful that players will like what we’ve done with Sorcerer King: Rivals though the jury is out on that of course.

Let me know what your thoughts Sorcerer King: Rivals and what you’d like to see next.