![]() Meier said that an early version of Starships was even real-time, but the idea had to be scrapped. Other features of the game came and went during the development cycle. "Who's having the most fun in this world, and what are they doing?" You can kind of invent whatever you want." That’s the great thing about science fiction. "But the asteroids are an invention of ours. "Maybe the asteroids can move sometimes, or maybe there are passages that are sometimes open and sometimes closed, and maybe there are these jump gates where if you go in one you’re going to randomly pop out at a different one! What we were looking for was all the cool stuff that maps bring to tactics, while combining that with some things you can only do in a space-themed game. ![]() ![]() That creative leap opened up many more design possibilities for his team than they had initially expected, and contributed to the game's unique tactical encounters. What in space would kind of create this feeling of having to find paths and places to hide and things like that? We said, well what about a bunch of asteroids?" Maps just bring so much automatically to your game a sense of space, a sense of having to find a path, a sense of cover and lurking and danger, and being able to be aggressive or being able to be cautious in a very intuitive way. "There was a problem because there’s no maps in space," Meier said. Think Darth Vader's massive battleship chasing the Millenium Falcon away from Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back.īy invoking that image of asteroids, Meier and his team at Firaxis are cleverly leaning on what their audience thinks it knows about asteroids to solve a specific design problem in their game. These asteroids don't behave the same way that real asteroids do in our galaxy, but they do tend to behave the way science fiction fans expect them to from their experience with other space operas they're rocky bits hurtling through space that get in the way of big spaceships. Take for instance one of Starships' biggest features, the asteroid fields that make up the game's tactical maps. But the rules aren’t ones that are hard to understand. I think the game we tried to make was about fairly intuitive gameplay, and then you can project your own strategy and tactics onto those rules. you can play without having to absorb a bunch of non-intuitive rules. Instead, he aimed for a more populist kind of science fiction, one that was more Star Wars than Interstellar, less Vernor Vinge than Captain Kirk. So in designing his upcoming game Starships, a tactical space combat game for iOS, Mac and Windows PC set in the same universe as Civilization: Beyond Earth, Meier steered clear of "hard" science fiction and "weird" science fiction, two branches which more than ever seem to be growing together. 'Well, in my game there's eight dimensions, light travels in a curved path,' and oh jeez, it's painful." ![]() "The danger with a space game," Meier told Polygon last week during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, "is that you kind of have to learn a whole new set of rules that don't make any sense to you until the designer tries to explain them. The trouble is, not all of those branches are easy for the average player to understand. There are many different branches on the science fiction tree, a fact that famed game designer Sid Meier knows just as well as anyone.
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