#playableworlds

We have a new post up on the Stars Reach website about movement and camera... and as usual, here's a "director's commentary" post to go with it!

Long-time blog readers may recall that I have posted about my standard “vision exercise” before. It’s a simple four question exercise you can use to think through what your game is about: What is the game system about? What is the game’s experience about? What is the player’s goal (in the system)? What is the player’s goal (in the experience)? The point of this little exercise is to clarify…

The third post in the series on the game pillars for Stars Reach is up. This one is all about the vibe of the world, and the thematic goals for the game… and how those things then reflect into the game mechanics. Stars Reach is a game about hope and optimism. The real world is grimdark enough. We want to capture that sense of possibility that was present in Golden Age sci-fi, that sensawunda…

Over the years, I’ve tried many ways of making living worlds. This video here explains how we are doing it on Stars Reach. Which you can now wishlist on Steam. The Living World of Stars Reach As you can see if you watch the video, we’re already pulling off something a bit unusual: modelling a world at MMO scale using cellular automata. What that means: we know the humidity, the temperature, the…

It’s been years of work, and we are far from done, but I am super happy to finally reveal what I have been working on at Playable Worlds: Stars Reach. This is the game I have wanted to make for nearly thirty years. It is the spiritual sequel to Ultima Online and to Star Wars Galaxies. It has in it all the lessons of all these decades of online game development — and it looks forward, not back,…