Design Pillars

The design of Stars Reach is guided by three primary game pillars. Each pillar is supported by three goals, which provide design rules that the game has to follow. It's core to managing a complex project and keeps everyone aligned toward the same goals.

These are the defining philosophies that animate everything in the game design.

First Set: Alive Online World

(Source)

"Alive" includes both what the players do, and what the world does (and how they interact).

The idea here is to make the game behave and react in believable ways. Water runs down a hill, snow can pile up, dry sand is soft and will not hold a shape, hard rock can be carved, things can be molten, frozen, set on fire, collapsed, washed away, and so on.

The game will run off simulation

Most games typically rely on scripted events, hand-crafted cut-scenes, carefully prepared set-pieces and pre-written dialogue to show what is happening in the world. Every player gets to see exactly the same happenings, whenever they are at the right place in the storyline and trigger them happening. Or in classical themepark MMOs you often don't even see it happening - but rather an NPCs just tells players what happened. Sometimes you get branching paths - where the player can decide to do either A or B - and the game will then play out accordingly.

In Stars Reach, happenings actually emerge from interactions. The underlying world simulation is operated by simple rules that roughly approximate physical and chemical effects, plant growth and animal behavior. The economic simulation operates on simple rules like limited supply (raw materials on a planet run out eventually), transport costs, production costs, player demand (item degradation causes regular need for replacements) and other things. And on top of that sits a layer of real social interactions (not simulated ones) of real people, that's supported through social structures like friends-lists, player organisations, player cities and planet governments.

And these simple systems and rules can interact with each other in very complicated ways - and that leads to complex, emergent behavior. An oft mentioned example for complex player behavior emerging from very simple rules (a single infectious debuff), is the Corrupted Blood incident in WoW, which was caused by an unintended bug - but led to observed player behavior that actually sparked academic scientific interest.

Stars Reach isn't trying for such drastic, shocking effects - but using the same underlying principles to have layers of many smaller, more subtle things going on constantly and influencing each other. This can result in complex, dynamic behavior - and since the underlying rules are meant to mimic the real world, the resulting behavior should appear logical and natural. Predators hunting prey, prices going up when demand soars and supply dwindles - and going down again, when the marked gets flooded with a new material found on a new planet. Animals becoming friendly (or even tame), when you feed them and tread them well. Fire spreading to nearby flammable materials. Water dousing the fire. A break in a dam causing the water level to drop, and the downstream area to flood. And so on, and so forth.

And while the simulation rules will mimic the real world in order to create intuitive results - they will be tweaked to be fun and interesting, rather than realistic and scientifically accurate. The main goal is to simulate things that are interesting for the players to interact with - and anything that does not result in providing gameplay, is probably not worth simulating in the first place.

The game will be a true persistent state world

A persistent (state) world is a virtual world which - as defined by Richard Bartle - "continues to exist and develop internally even when there are no people interacting with it."

In the case of Stars Reach the simulation on planets will actually be paused when no players are there - but as soon as a player arrives, the simulation will secretly fast-forward through everything that would have happened in the player's absence - and thus the world will appear to the players as if it just had kept on going during all that time.

The internal state of the game world will always be saved and advanced forward in time. It will never be reset, nor be static. The world will change and evolve according to the game rules - and how the players interact with them.

This pillar does overlap quite a bit with the previous one. The Simulation is what makes the game continue to exist and develop internally even without players, and the persistent state of the world, is the data which that simulation operates upon. Obviously the Corrupted Blood incidence did not rely on a persistent state world (which WoW doesn't have) - but it did attach to persistent character states instead (or character pet state, in this case).

The game will be driven by player community and interdependence

This pillar ties strongly into what has been explained in a previous 'Riffs by Raph' article: Designing for Social Play.

The friendships, feeling of community and social ties that we experience in a game, are some of the biggest reasons that we keep coming back and playing more. And Stars Reach wants to support and foster that, through various means, like for example allowing players to be members of multiple different guilds/clans/organizations at once.

But interdependence between players is what ties it all together, and even makes solo players part of the fold. In Stars Reach, everyone is going to depend on others, in some form or fashion. Every crafter is going to have a chain of suppliers, every player is going to have their favorite playershops to buy their items and get them repaired, everyone is gonna have their favorite watering hole/saloon/cantina/whatever to get their buffs, everyone is gonna have their favorite planet or city for gearing up before as well as regrouping after a fight. Every one is gonna have their buyers and fences for the materials they loot/mine/farm/harvest/extract...

Players are going to depend on each other for goods, services and support. Some more, some less - but nobody is going to be an island. Everyone will at least partake in the economy, which is entirely player-driven. There are no NPC vendors that will turn crap into credits, or sell basic items at an unchanging base-price. To sell your stuff, some other player has to actually want to buy it. And that also means, that there probably wont be any trash loot in the game - everything will have a purpose and be useful to someone.