The best laid plans...

Let's talk about the environments of Star Control...

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Back in part 9, I touched briefly on the art style with the debate we had on having a "mobile" style UI vs. an immersive style UI. Today, I want to walk you through how the art style itself evolved during the five year development of Star Control: Origins.

Let's jump right in..

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Experience a massive living universe in Star Control: Origins! Check out our trailer featuring all-new gameplay footage of diverse aliens, unique planets, and exciting quests here.

Plymouth, MI. August 28, 2018 – Today Stardock Entertainment announced the extension of their technology and gaming partnership with AMD (NASDAQ: AMD). As part of the ongoing partnership, Stardock will optimize the upcoming Star Control: Origins for AMD technologies including AMD Ryzen™ processors and Radeon FreeSync™ 2 technology, as well as update the game post-launch with support for the Vulkan™ Graphics API. Learn more here.

One of the most difficult challenges we've had in developing a new Star Control game has been the delicate balance between the need to start fresh and the desire to satisfy hard-core fans of the classic DOS games.

Today we will look at our solution to that conundrum.

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The Gamescom trailer features all new in-game footage!

Saving Earth - not to mention the rest of the galaxy - from a race of murderous aliens is no easy task. Your orders from Star Control are to save humanity - with no requirements about the choices involved. Will you make friends, or will you make enemies? Will you save other alien species during your travels, or will you obliterate them? Will you hug the Tywom, or will you shun them? ...No one will blame you for that choice. Learn more and see the trailer.

Most fans of our previous games know that we make a lot of strategy games. Strategy games are all about having as much data on-screen at one time as possible.

But Star Control isn't a strategy game, it's an action RPG.  It took us a very...very long time to nail down the user interface we wanted for Star Control: Origins, mostly due to having to quit trying to make a strategy game UI for an RPG. 

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Today, Stardock Entertainment announced that international star Adam Baldwin is joining the voice cast of the highly anticipated science-fiction adventure game, Star Control: Origins. Learn more here.

In one of our other dev journals, we showed the pipeline of how aliens came to be in Star Control: Origins.  The process started with the artists and the writers working in parallel.  The artists would sketch up lots and lots of alien shapes, and the writers would design the history and lore and roles of the aliens. From there, the process would begin to merge to ensure that the final alien visual expression matched up with the lore for them.

Today we're going to begin walking you through how the Star Control aliens that appear in Star Control: Origins were developed.

Do you have enough Jeff in your life?

We first have to separate the difference between a character and a species.  In the classic Star Control series, there was Fwiffo, the character and Spathi, the species.  For the most part, Star Control: Origins focuses on species but there are also a few characters and one of our favorites is Jeff.

Ironically, as far as I know, Jeff's species is not revealed in Star Control: Origins.  I won't spoil Jeff's personality but you can get an idea of what he looks like and how he evolved.

First, you have the inkblots:

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Not all ships are created equally.  This is particularly true for the ships of Star Control itself.  In the year 2088, the United Earth Advanced Space Vehicle Program (UEASV) had done its best given the politics involved.  But ultimately, what Star Control starts out with is a ship with very much the capabilities that a ship in 2088 would have, which is to say: it can... turtle around the solar system.

The first long-range ship program - the Vindicator program - was designed to allow the ship to be frequently updated with new modules.  Because the ship was designed to handle technology from different nations such as the United States, China, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Brazil, etc. the interfaces are remarkably flexible.

Ironically, this need for flexibility has also made the Vindicator class well suited for plugging into alien technology that arrives...

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