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!