Welcome to the very first part of a not-very-short story tracking the exploits of Eve Walter in the Pleiades system, the system we'll shortly be opening up in the alpha.
If you like what you've read, don't forget to checkout the previous short stories over in the Story category by John Harper, author of the licensed Elite: Dangerous novel 'And Here the Wheel.'
Eve Walters burst through the tavern doors. Heart pounding, mouth dry, she saw the heads turn toward her and she knew she’d make a mistake:
No one would forget her entrance, forget her face. She might as well have danced into the bar covered in neon.
Lungs screaming for air she calmly walked to the bar and sat on a stool. She spent two minutes releasing the built up desperation for air – obvious to anyone watching her, then caught the barkeep’s eye. “What’ll it be miss?” The bartender’s drone spoke of boredom and monotony. Eve wasn’t sure if that would help him forget her or not. She decided to order the most common drink, undo the damage of her entrance. She glanced to her right. A man was drinking Brown.
“House Brown please.”
The ‘keep reached under the bar, his hands together and still, his eyes down – a secret communicator? - then placed a full handle of Brown before her. “Seventeen all up.”
Eve flicked through her billfold. Her cards could be traced. Did she have any Pleiades cash? Her mind was a jumble, adrenaline and fear crushing any cogent thought that dared rise to the surface. She put some bills on the bar. They were PLC currency. Too much though, dammit. She pulled a twenty back. The ‘keeps hand enveloped the cash and slid back under the bar, the cash gone with it, then he moved to the rack of empty jugs. Perfect change, obviously.
She watched the bubbles roll up the glass of her Brown. Her heart had slowed to a reasonable craziness now, Slow enough to engage in understandable conversation. She swallowed a mouthful of the Brown though her stomach felt cramped from adrenaline.
She half turned on her stool to survey the clientele. The place was reasonably bright, a far cry from the spacer bar near the Corporate Centre starport. Men in those weird three piece suits all the rage in the Pleiades system. Two women, both short hair, braided back to the skull to give the hair a strange curl. Business people, and most of them off-worlders trying to blend in. Which was a smart move, considering the Xenophobes that ran the system. None of them fitted the profile of the person she wanted however. A guy, probably. Mid-thirties, a swagger about him, but with a veneer of professionalism. Someone who didn’t quite belong amongst a group of people trying to fit in because a part of him didn’t want to.
She found him in the fifth booth. Short brown hair, a five day beard. He was wearing a two piece suit only, straining across his shoulders.
She pushed her glass of Brown away then stood. She passed a couple sharing a drink, then two men discussing import rates and stopped before her mark.
“You work at Soyuz Logistics and Exports?” she asked, too rushed for an intro.
The man was sitting on her right side, a glass of red wine in front. He didn’t flinch, didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge her presence in any way. Eve decided he was an asshole.
He grabbed the stem of his glass and Eve placed her palm over the top. “Excuse me,” she said.
“Oh, hello,” said the man, turning to her suddenly. His smile made her take a step back. “Gosh, I didn’t see you there. My deepest apologies.”
She narrowed her eyes. A wise guy. Fantastic. “Do you work for Soyuz or not?”
The man stared up at her, not checking her out, but measuring her maybe. Trying to figure out where she fitted in the scheme of things. She was dressed in a single layer of loose Terran clothing. Her blouse would have been called ‘work-casual’ back home. Here it was rags that even the lowest Corporate employee wouldn’t wear. So he’d know she wasn’t local, which would hopefully minimise his suspicion.
His gaze finished its appraisal and settled on Eve’s outstretched hand. “Is that clean?”
Eve pulled her hand back. “It’s a simple enough question.”
“On the contrary, dear lady. The possible permutations of purpose behind the question makes it very complicated indeed.”
Eve stared at this man, his sheer disinterest and aloofness proving to her she’d chosen right. She sat down opposite and leant forward.
“I need to transport something back to Terra.”
The man leant back, swallowed a mouthful of wine. “Then come by the office tomorrow morning.”
“It’s urgent.”
“So is this glass of Pinot.”
Eve frowned. “That doesn’t even make any sense. Look I need to transport a package – six feet long, 140 pounds. I need it out of here tonight.”
The man returned the glass to the table and slid it aside. “Interesting dimensions for your package, my lady, unless of course you specialise in high end turn-key coffin manufacture.
Eve leant further forward. She had to break through this guy’s exterior BS. “Look, my name is Eve Walters. My father is Nathaniel. He taught me a few things that made it easy for me to figure you out. You own Soyuz Logistics and Exports. The company is a respectable front for your smuggling operation. You-,”
The man’s hand shot forward, too quickly for Eve, and grabbed her wrist. “Now what is this talk for? I’m just an honest business man trying to get through his days in peace and you come in here talking in tongues putting all kinds of strange thoughts in people’s heads?”
Eve tried to pull back but his grip was strong, stronger than she’d given him credit for. “Don’t worry,” she said. I’m not with the police. Like I said, I’m from Terra.” The man’s face was caught between an expression of incredulity and suspicion, an edgey, questioning look.
“The clues weren’t obvious,” she continued. “Besides, it takes one to know one.” She paused. “Sort of.”
The man let go of her. “Good night Eve.” He retrieved his glass and took another swallow.
Eve watched him. “Excuse me?”
“We’re done here. Scram, or I’ll call the Corporate Politsiya.
Eve stared at him, unsure if it was a bluff, or whether she had gotten it so completely wrong.
She turned in her seat toward the door. They’d be looking for her on the streets now. She wasn’t safe out there. Unwelcome attention from an episode here could kill her just as fast however. She had to stay invisible and starting a fight here wouldn’t do that. She stood and marched away, hoping like hell she thought of a Plan B before the police got her.
Stay tuned for Part 2, landing in the coming week!
Open-world Overhaul: Zones and UI
So I guess you’re all wondering how the overhaul is going and we’re happy to say progress is still strong. As we mentioned there’s some big changes ahead and we have a few glimpses for you.
The first thing we’d like to point out are the changes to the UI, much of it has been redesigned to fit the new scale and we examined the old elements and made them more enticing to interact with. The abilities panel is a prime example, the icons are now enlarged and at the center of the screen – a little reminder to use them.
The fleet panel gets a makeover too with a lower density ship list; those larger fleet icons will also house the status icons (such as movement slowed, surprised, etc.) which previously adorned the side of the ship target box, so we’re taking the clutter away from the play area granting better access to the glorious visuals. It’s important to remember that the UI elements depicted will change as we progress.
A new UI piece hogs the right side of the screen if fully expanded taking the form of the ‘Situation Panel’, which is how we’ll present the gritty details of the game-world to you. It has a collapsible accordion layout so you can drill down to the information you need. It’ll be comprehensive, meaning it’ll likely act as an interface to your ships inventories and trade, as well as providing information on scans of other ships, immoveables and celestial bodies.
The immediate worry here is the clutter, but adding behavior to the situation panel highlighting and isolating the pertinent info should help and we always have the option to split it out into separate windows if need be. But given that the game is now sitting on a 4X backbone, masses of information comes with the territory and at this stage we feel accessibility of that information is more important than presentation.
But the best piece of work done over the last week or so has been integrating the zone system. A ‘zone’ in short is a tactical play area, pretty much the same as a map in the current Shallow Space alpha. But why zones? Well there are inherent technical issues making a true open world space game, we found that the usable play area really falls far short of the epic proportions of space, in fact, it’s probably only around 10,000 cubic 'units' before things start getting glitchy!
Games like KSP work around the issue by moving the whole galaxy around the player (rather than the player moving,) but that trick alone isn’t suitable for an RTS with multiple units. Other games like Sins of a Solar Empire (SoaSE) and Eve Online use tricks of the camera to present such big play areas and with a combination of the two methods we’ll be able to generate massive arenas for you to cultivate and control your forces.
SoaSE is a great comparison to the zone system actually, because in that game each planet was in itself a zone with ships jumping between them. Changing between zones in SoaSE and zooming out to the ‘solar’ map was as smooth as silk. Some lessons to be learnt there mechanically but back to Shallow Space, rather than having a zone per planet, each planet will have any number of zones and we’ve even managed to get that SoaSE sort of interactivity with zero loading times and screen fades which really does wonders for immersion.
It feels a little bit like 3D chess flipping between the zones and we’re soooo looking forward to populating them with traffic. Enabling concurrent activity between the zones is an exciting challenge also and completely necessary bringing the whole thing to life and naturally being added as part of the overhaul.
We’ll put together a video real soon, but in truth we’re just busy steaming ahead with it so we can push it out to you! In the meantime, the author has put together a not-so-short story that we’ll be posting in the coming week, set in the very system that we’ll be modeling in the alpha and we’ve got more juicy ships coming too, awesome stuff.
Thanks as usual for the support lots of awesome comments on the last Steam article – so from all the team, cheers!
Core Mechanics Overhaul (Open world)
If you’ve been following the twitter you’ll know we’ve been hinting at big changes to come in the Shallow Space alpha. We’ve been getting a lot of feedback from various sources, mostly positive but the negative criticism underlines a gut feeling that we’ve had for a while now, there are a couple of issues with the design of the game as it stands and we have enough feedback from Early Access now to warrant pulling apart some of the core mechanics and asking if they are good enough for the game.
So pull up a chair, in this article we’ll explain why that is required and what to expect.
We're remaking Shallow Space so that the ships individual characteristics have more influence over the gameplay.
The Problem
The first is the rigid Flotillas/Wings system, originally invented to make larger group of ships easier to manage and position, bizarrely it has the opposite effect making control cumbersome and the battles rigid and not particularly engaging once you get over the graphics. The crux of the problem is an issue with scale; we’ve modeled these ships, given them the ability to be granularly configured but then put them in a situation where those individual characteristics can’t be realised (what’s the point of painstakingly choosing weapons when it ultimately turns into a DPS-fest .)
Another problem is this whole linear maps system, it’s the year 2016 – we look at all the games being released and see open ended games everywhere. I myself don’t like to just play games anymore, I live in them and scrolling through my own library if isn’t open world – I probably don’t own it. Open world was in the original design (along with more Nexus style gameplay) but we shelved it temporarily so we could get our heads round some of the more basic game concepts (in terms of how they are actually coded.) Thankfully with your help, that stuff is now pretty solid and we’ve been advancing a multiplayer open world prototype in the background which is now ready to be built on.
So what happened with the design then? Well we had an original vision and then people join the team and the vocal audience step forward with their own designs and keep pushing for incompatible ideas (control of greater numbers of ships being the one.) You have to allow some of these ideas in or people see you as inflexible and the team get disenfranchised, plus we have to try these things to see if they work. Alas this mismatched marriage of gameplay concepts isn’t a happy one and we’re well on our way to creating something mediocre which we’re not happy about.
The Solution
So I can imagine some of you sitting there with a sinking feeling but fear not, this isn’t as big a job as it might seem. Plus we kinda went a little mental over the last two weeks porting everything across and introducing new clean mechanics so we’re not coming to you quivering with worry, we’re actually halfway there already and have added some of the stuff you asked for as it now fits:
Physics based movement
Redesigned movement and waypoint system (single click to move)
Ability to take direct control of ships (FPS controller)
Open world style gameplay, player free to jump ships around planetary systems (instance based, like Freelancer)
Immediately playing the prototype it’s a vast difference, the smaller ships become much more fun especially the Markab destroyer which was previously little more than cannon fodder. The directional shielding system makes positioning units much more important making you feel more invested in what’s happening on screen. With the ability to target subsystems rolled in we imagine the game will feel much more like Nexus: The Jupiter Incident with the battles being slower paced and dripping with detail.
Directional shields add a VERY different edge to combat.
But the combat is something we’d focused on for a long time now, porting it across was cake. The real eye opener will be the open world system we have planned which we have been prototyping for some time. Completely the opposite to how it is now, the player will start the game with a handful of ships and need to build up his forces to complete the main storyline RTS missions spread across the host planetary system. But to get to that point they’ll need to complete FPS missions, trade, mine, escort and build up their modular player base. Important to note that we’re not going to cap the maximum size of the fleet, but these new concepts will place greater focus on creating a nimble and agile force rather than having hundreds of ships – of course though ultimately, the way you play is up to you.
We’ll be better leveraging the nature of the factions we’ve designed also, so if you want to be a trader with a fleet of trading vessels you can be, or a miner focusing on stripping rocks, refining materials and defending the effort – also possible.
UPDATE 8.1 Live!
So we've pushed out another incremental update, couple of major fixes one which was a little bit nasty causing Player ship database corruption, and boy we're happy to squash that juicy bug!
The options menu previously had fallen into disrepair, it was only when we cleared out our preferences and played the game as a new player when we realised that quite a few of the options didn't actually work or they lied to us that they were on but they weren't. Beside we needed something we could more easily add to, so we've rewritten it from scratch.
One of the most annoying things about the game was the notification system, pausing or slowing the game forcefully when you might not have wanted it. Well you can now configure all of that in the new options menu along with another 15+ other options including the much need camera speed controls. Also some of the older ships are getting remade starting with the Cambridge, so there's a new ship for you to play with also!
Thanks to everyone who took the time to report bugs and suggest features, we enjoy implementing them and you can look forward to another incremental update in the short term which will add volumetric explosions, the Nottingham remake, addition options and the ability to import/export the internals databases (for you wiki-makers and modders out there!)
This update will wipe your Player Ship DB (sorry, need to make sure there are no corrupt databases out there)
(In other news, I bought XCOM 2 - so I think I might be distracted for a little while - i'll try to code and eat, promise!)
