Raph Koster's Blog

I’ve been remiss in posting updates on Stars Reach here. I mean, the Kickstarter finished back in March (late pledges still accepted)! Today, though, I want to brag about our awesome AI and proc gen driven worlds.

Over the last few releases, we have been rolling out yet another series of improvements to the look of the worlds. And we’re getting to the point where I think the alien worlds are starting to look like the covers of sci-fi novels (especially with some player help building weird structures):

Uh oh, the monolithI could swear I own this paperback

Remember, our worlds are effectively created on the fly. They’re run by AIs in every cubic meter. Everything you see is malleable and changes around you, and players can resculpt every inch of it. Heck, every tree and every bush is a mob.

Recently, we have done huge updates to lighting, flora seeding and propagation, and generation of distinct alien subspecies on each planet. We did a pass on material adhesion, so everything slumps or holds together more realistically. You can now fly through a wild wormhole, and in every play session, the planet on the other side will be unique… and gone by the next play session. And the look is really starting to click together, I think. I mean, just compare to the shots from my last post in early March!

Alien cacti on ZaraxaNight on a lost wild wormhole worldA wintry landscape with deerWatch out for panthersHmm, that seaweed is misplacedLooking out from the cave over the canyonFlying over the jungleThickets!Hunting by nightMore flora density!Meteors falling in the background

That’s not all, though. Players have invented ice rinks and heat pumps and most recently, even an elevator, using the in-game physics. They’re building crazy stuff. It’s awesome to see. All of this stuff is player built, using one of the three building methods (or all three!): terraforming, block building a la Minecraft, and tile building.

In the next few updates, we’ll be doing big performance updates alongside major visual updates to flora and other in-game objects, plus adding a whole bunch of features to get us closer to our current goal: keeping the servers up 24/7 by the end of the summer. It’ll be tight, but we’re making good progress.

So there’s yet another few quantum leaps coming on the game look!

Oh, there’s game stuff to talk about too. Combat has taken leaps and bounds, and there’s a huge update to that coming soon too. But right now, I just wanted to show off the visuals a bit.

Wow, it has been an intense six days.

We launched on Tuesday, which feels like an eternity ago. It’s a mad scramble to get everything done, make sure you have all the content ready, to answer the huge inflow of questions, find all the spots where you weren’t quite clear enough… but you just survive on little sleep and keep pushing. And sometimes you get a good result!

Last night we hit the $500k mark on the Stars Reach Kickstarter. This also unlocked our third stretch goal, the Hyugon playable species that you see animating over here. (There’s a blog post up on the website if you want to learn more about them!).

But that’s far from all. We also hit a stretch goal for the Hansians, an aquatic species that is one of my favorites. There’s a blog post up about them as well. We’re dropping bits of their lore into these behind the scenes posts, as well as sharing their visual evolution through art iterations and market testing.

There’s also a series on our audio design posted up there, as well as other material. Lots of info coming out about the game now, so keep an eye on the News section for it. We will try to be good about reposting this content on Reddit and Steam as well.

We’ve also ramped up our YouTube presence quite a bit! There have been six videos on the Stars Reach channel in just the last week, including several livestreams. Some of these are part of a new series called “Q&Raph” in which our community manager Thomas interview me for a half hour at a time. These dive deep into technical stuff, the background of the project, and more.

We also have done sneak peeks of upcoming features, sessions with other devs on the team, and more. Worth checking out, if you want to have something to play in the background while you work!

All in all, this has been an exhausting week, but it has been amazing to see the support from the community. We will be keeping up this content drumbeat throughout the campaign, of course, so there’s weeks left of this grueling pace.

Lastly, I wanted to share some images from recent playtests, because, wow, players have dazzled us with their creations.

Spread the word — we know there are lots of people who have still never heard of us!

I can’t tell you how much of a rollercoaster yesterday was. We hoped to see a strong Kickstarter but reaching our goal is less than one hour is just amazing, and a real expression of support from the community. Thank you all so much. (You can check out the Kickstarter here!)

We’re not stopping here. As I write this, we are on track to double our initial goal today! We hit our first stretch goal, for the Hansian species, overnight. Hansians were first mentioned in our lore in the short story “Interdicted,” which we posted up on the website a couple of weeks ago.

Last night I did a 90 minute stream where I showed video of upcoming features ranging from the small (inventory search) to glimpses of improved rendering. You can check out the VOD of the stream here.

We will continue to do streams, releasing info, and of course, letting people in to try out the game.

There is loads of coverage:

“Stars Reach: A Living Galaxy Sandbox MMORPG” Raises Over $200k on Kickstarter In 1 Hour – MMOs.comUltima Online and Star Wars Galaxies’ “spiritual sequel” smashed its $200k Kickstarter target in under an hour, and the sci-fi fantasy MMORPG is now on track to double its goalStars Reach Aims to Revive the Sandbox MMO Glory of Star Wars GalaxiesStars Reach Looks To Fill The Star Wars Galaxies-Sized Hole In The MMO SpaceThe Stars Reach Kickstarter Just Went Live And It Already Met Its Funding Goal Of $200K

We still need your help to keep our velocity up. Even if you don’t feel comfortable pledging, tossing in $1 helps increase our backer count and show momentum. Please check out the Kickstarter here!

Today we are launching the Kickstarter for Stars Reach.

Why a Kickstarter? Well, the funding climate is rough. But we have seen that players love what we are making.

So we want to prove to the industry that people want a modern sandbox. An alternate world that feels alive, not like a static cardboard set. A game where different sorts of playstyles come together to make an immersive and dynamic galaxy. Where you can play the way you want, and the game values it, and the other players value it because you matter to the game’s economy.

I’ve been dreaming of making this game for thirty years. It’s what I wanted to do right after Ultima Online. It’s what I hoped Privateer Online could become. I cannibalized ideas from it for Star Wars Galaxies. The tech stack is inspired by what we did with Metaplace. It’s the culmination of all those years of design work and dreams.

If you also share the dream of getting online worlds back on track from a multi-decade detour into pellet-gathering themeparks, please consider backing, even if it’s only at the $1 tier. Every backer helps show momentum and interest. Do it as a favor to me.

You can back the Kickstarter here.

A true story of what happened in the pre-alpha testing last night in Stars Reach.

It began as an upwelling under a basement.

Oh, ever since the crater lake next door had overheated and spewed a geyser far into the sky, water was everywhere… condensing on every surface. But this was something more. It bubbled up from under Leric’s house, right there by the fountain in the middle of the settlement on Gaiamar.

The geyser erupting. Sabotage using the chronophaser to superheat the water is suspected.

Mayor BeanstalkHead was not pleased. Sinkholes were appearing in the expensively constructed cobblestone walkways. One had collapsed into a home under construction, leaving the foundation exposed.

We couldn’t find a source. All we could think was that as the lake had been emptied, water was forced into the soil and was now just welling up under there. Plus, we had an unsightly pit where the lake had been. We had to resort to requesting Servitor assistance to remove the water (and a stray ammonia dump that was contaminating it). But we were worried it would happen again.

Ammonia pouring down. It’s toxic, it gets everywhere, and it mixes with the water and makes it harder to clean up.

So I carefully set about lining the entirety of the pit with nice black brick. Each side, and a floor, underneath where the dirt was. I source nice big boulders of granite and breccia to conceal what I hoped was a waterproof lining. Added in gravel and sand and made a lovely lake bed under there. By the time I was done, you couldn’t tell that it was an artificial lake now.

Even better, two citizens donated some of their land grant to make the refreshed lake private property! Until we formally claim the planet, we won’t have public spaces protected by Servitor suppression fields so this was a useful workaround to prevent someone else from superheating the lake and once again sending a mile-high column of steam into the air.

A aerial view of the incipient city and the brand new artificial lake.

Then I grabbed the hose and started filling the lake — nanotech enabling instant fill up to a waterline. What I hadn’t noticed was the tree growing in the corner. The roots… right through the lining wall.

This is the story of how I accidentally put all of Beanstalk City under a meter of water and collapsed every basement into a mudpit.

Water flooding into the homes under construction.

The water flooded all of downtown, completely submerging the water fountain near city hall. It utterly filled a couple of basements that were in-progress homes, open pits vulnerable to the weather.

Mrgoshdarn’s famed bamboo grove house, with its interior underground walls made solely of compacted dirt and living bamboo trees, had its walls collapse and its pristine marble interior completely slimed with mud.

Mrgoshdarn’s famed bamboo wall basement. The compacted dirt walls collapsed shortly after this picture was taken.

We set up water vacuums to clear the worst of it, and watched the dirty water whirlpool away. But the real issue was the erosion. The empty fields destined for parks by city hall became sticky muddy flats, slowing people when they trudged through. Sidewalks gave way and fell into caverns below.

Draining away water from a home’s foundation.

A lot of recent construction had to be removed due to water damage. Beanstalk City survives, however, and we will endure.

You can see the muddy flats to the right by the city hall.

All of this happened in the testing last night, and I haven’t actually embellished it much! We released homestead claims last week, and players promptly started collaborating on building a city. The geyser, the ammonia spill, and the flood all happened as described. The land ownership features, water erosion, and the rest, all actual stuff in the game.

It’s really cool to see this sort of emergence happening, and players diving in (no pun intended) and really exploring what a living virtual world can be.

When it comes to interim stages of game dev, I am a bit of a packrat. I have paper maps from when I was doing Ultima Online, and UI sketches for Star Wars Galaxies… of course, for my current thing, Stars Reach, I have a whole pile of images and videos going back to the very earliest days of the project.

I mention this because we just posted up a little article about movement and the camera in the game, which has pictures from some of the prototypes that we did to test out moving around. Just for fun as I was writing the blog post, I actually located the last version of the prototype and played around in it!

Some of the things you can see in these shots:

We had platforms set up with varying jump distances so that we could test how mixing up jump distances and inertia felt.

The squiggle paths were actually navigation challenges to test camera sensitivity and movement rate. You were supposed to move along them without falling off.

The varying staircases tested differing angles and collision methods to see what worked best. We also had those big pointy structures which were made of ramps of differing angles, so we could see what slopes felt natural to run up and which felt like they should stop you because they were too steep.

There are two buildings in the background — one was basically a climbing challenge, with overhangs and interior rooms and so on. The other was open platforms with stairs, but also had moving platforms.

You can see a hovering green ring in one of the shots… that was the start point for a time trial. Go through it and another ring would appear — you had to go through all of them and it recorded your time. We used this to measure whether the control schemes we were landing at were making it easier or harder to drive the avatar.

There was much more — caves, a battle arena so we could test free cursor versus mouselook controls, a giant loop de loop for testing climbing, rough surfaces so we could keep ourselves honest since the actual map would not be smooth like this… and much more.

Even this was actually our second jungle gym. We had an earlier one where we did nothing but work out camera and how aiming our wide array of weapon and tool types was going to work. This image is from a video from July of 2021!

Don’t forget you can wishlist the game on Steam, sign up to test, or just hang out on the game’s Discord!

[image error]GIF courtesy of hooby, showing sunrise on the test map

This past weekend was a huge milestone for us — the very first regular players landed on an alien world in Stars Reach and ran around and had some fun!

This was a pre-alpha test aimed mostly at testing our login systems, infrastructure, bug reporting, and a few other plumbing items like that. We turned off most all of the game systems we already have, in favor of getting baseline metrics with only movement and chat enabled.

But our movement and chat are fairly robust, so it turned out that players had fun anyway! We allow players to fly with a gravmesh, to grapple, to climb, dodge roll, and more; and we have a moods system like Star Wars Galaxies, with chat bubbles that change based on how the player expresses themselves. So we saw spontaneous dance parties, people competing to climb the tallest mountain, a few corpses at the bottom of said mountain when they lost their grip, and so on.

…the extensive moods and emotes were a welcome surprise, with actual altered chat bubbles, the movement was very smooth and fun to utilize, no map (yet) allowed us to explore and focus on landmarks to orient ourselves, I even got chased by some of the mobs when they got spawned, and got to see one giant ball hog that i didnt get to screenshot in time, the real time sunrise and sunsets were a treat to watch, and the live showing of digging and simulation gameplay (grass growing, water freezing, clay forming, etc…) was a joy…

–Musse

The weird clone army — no character customization in this first test, so lots of clones!

I was totally impressed. Everything seemed to work as advertised. I absolutely LOVED grapple and gravmesh – what a way to get around. My ability to get lost was strong, but I was guided to the cenote – what an amazing place! And the range of moods and emotes – outstanding! Could have spent the whole time trying them all out.

— Asclepius

Check out the article on the SR website for a selection of anecdotes and screenshots taken by the first testers. We’ll be moving on to re-run this test with some bugs fixed, followed by gradually turning on more and more features and letting more and more players in. If you want to join in, you need to go sign up! And of course, wishlist the game.

I also wanted to mention that there is now a player-created wiki with a ton of info on the game, gleaned from articles and leaks from our Discord and more.

I’ve been doing MMOs and online worlds a long time. And that means that I’ve written and said a lot of things on the Internet over the years, about designing them.

One of the funny things about reactions to the various vision blogs for Stars Reach is the number of people who have popped up on various MMO forums whose entire impression of me and my design approaches is formed by their experience getting playerkilled in Ultima Online twenty-five years ago. They are often quite confident that I have not adjusted or updated my opinions on griefing at all in the intervening time, despite the fact that Star Wars Galaxies did not have a playerkilling problem like UO’s — and I designed that PvP system personally.

There is something jarring about getting confronted repeatedly with this. Of course, in my mind, I made a pretty definitive statement on playerkilling back in like 2001 or 2002, in an article for the SWG community called “A Philosophical Statement on Playerkilling.”  The key takeaway:

I do not want to ever disappoint people in that way again. People will come to SWG for those things, and I do not want them to discover that they cannot stay and enjoy them because the very freedoms which allow those cool, innovative, exciting features, also allow d00dspeaking giggly jerks to dance roughshod jigs on their virtual corpses.

More recently, as part of putting together Postmortems, I wrote a bunch of new retrospective material on Ultima Online, and most of the lengthy chapter on its playerkilling problems was excerpted and published separately on Game Developer. The quote from that which always sticks in my mind is

In the name of player freedoms, I had put them through a slow-drip torture of two years of experiments with slowly tightening behavior rules, trying to save the emergence while tamping down the bad behavior. The cost was the loss of many hundreds of thousands of players. Ultima Online had churned through more than twice as many players who quit than EverQuest even got as subscribers that year.

Now, none of the above means that I don’t still believe in player freedoms. To my mind, the missed opportunity in UO wasn’t just in moving too slowly on fixing the PKing problem. It was also in giving up on solving the issues of devolved governance.

Probably the best example I can use today is to point at Reddit or Discord. Both of those system use “player governance.” They do it by chopping up the service into smaller areas, and then giving the users a very high degree of control over their areas. And this method has been shown to work pretty well — certainly better than centrally managing all moderation.

MMOs never took this step, though social worlds did. Instead, they pursued the “PK switch” solution: the admins serving as the cops for all the possible forms of bad behavior.

I was completely wrong about this solution not scaling in EverQuest.

But I was completely right about it not scaling to the size of World of Warcraft, XBox Live, or today’s larger games.

The above excerpt ends by pointing out that

…[moderating] was now the admin’s job.


Within five years, they wouldn’t bother.


Where once LegendMUD would have kicked you out for cursing, we got Xbox Live chat with rampant sexism and homophobia.


Where once Ultima Online would have tracked your behavior to try to warn other players of bad apples, we eventually got Twitter, where Nazis can post freely and spam others off the Net.


By giving up on solving the hard problem of freedom co-existing with civility, I fear that the result is that on today’s Internet, we have neither.

Today’s Internet is so much worse in terms of behavior, absolutely everywhere, that people do not realize how bad it has gotten compared to what we once had. And the effect in the virtual worlds has been to instead remove freedoms, remove the ability to interact, even, in order to try to provide safety.

Anyway… that’s what today’s Stars Reach post is largely about, along with the larger question of what the game is and is not. It’s unabashedly an MMO that is about other people, and not one that will cocoon you away from other players entirely.

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 what the fantasy that you are trying to fulfill in your game narrative is, clarify what the mechanics in your game point towards, and see whether they line up well.

I’ve got a blog post up over on the Stars Reach website that walks through applying this to that game — check it out if you are curious to learn how SR is essentially a climate change metaphor!

Remember, you can always wishlist on Steam, sign up for the Discord, or even to playtest — tests start this summer, and if you have noticed, summer is ending pretty soon so that means testing must be pretty soon too!

 

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 (“sense of wonder”) that it evoked.

That doesn’t mean we have to shy away from serious themes or dark elements in the storylines. We need a world that can encompass many sorts of stories. But it should be presented in an overall spirit of optimism.

The blog post shares a few of the items from our “mood board” — this is a collection of imagery that represents some of the feelings and aesthetics that we were aiming at. In the blog post, I spend a lot of time talking about the optimism of old Golden Age science fiction, but that’s not the only source of the aesthetic we are aiming for.

The mood board also has in it stuff like screenshots from old arcade games, because they offer that sense of instant comprehensible fun that we are after — and because space spiders sound like something fun to encounter boiling out of an asteroid. We pull inspiration from the sheer wacky inventiveness of some of these older games, and translating a few of their mechanics into modern 3d has felt like a fun design challenge that ends up feeling fresh.

It’s also got plenty of Ghibli background art in it. It’s almost a cliche these days, I suppose, given how pervasive the influence has become. But we do really want to capture not just the pastoralism but also some of the weird. We look to some of the backgrounds from Bakshi’s animated films as well.

But overall, one of the bigger influences for me on this game is actually the original Valérian et Laureline comic albums, which first started getting published in 1967. This comic has had a big influence on media SF depictions of technology and the alien. There’s a strong claim for it having influenced a very large amount of the look of Star Wars, and of course, the artist, Jean-Claude Mézières, also worked directly on The Fifth Element.

I grew up reading these in the early 80’s, while living overseas. And, for that matter, watching early work by Miyazaki, such as his work on World Masterpiece Theater.

Sometimes creativity is just about recapturing the sense of wonder we had when we were ten years old.

Someday, we’ll do a blog post that is a much deeper dive on the mood board, influences, and so on. In the meantime, you can read this post, argue about it on Discord, and maybe if you want, sign up for testing or wishlist the game on Steam!