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Stars Reach doesn't look like you remember

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One week of Stars Reach Kickstarter

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…

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STARS REACH Kickstarter funded in 1 hour

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,…

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STARS REACH Kickstarter is live now

Today we are launching the Kickstarter for Stars Reach. I've been dreaming of making this game for thirty years. Please consider backing it. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starsreach/stars-reach

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…

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Flooding Gaiamar

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…

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Old movement stuff for STARS REACH

We have a new post up on the Stars Reach website about movement and camera... and as usual, here's a "director's commentary" post to go with it!

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The neverending griefing discussion

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…

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Using a vision exercise to define what Stars Reach is about

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…

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SR Pillars three: the vibe!

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…

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SR Pillars Part 2: Easy Surface, Much Depth

Yup, another week so I wrote another long post about the design pillars we are using for designing Stars Reach. (If you missed last week’s, it’s here, and I expanded on it on the blog here.) This week, it’s all about the second set: The Ease of Nintendo Meets the Depth of the Sandbox MMO The game will be deep: a set of proven game mechanics brought together in one universe. Controls and…

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Wishlist STARS REACH and its living world

Over the years, I’ve tried many ways of making living worlds. This video here explains how we are doing it on Stars Reach. Which you can now wishlist on Steam. The Living World of Stars Reach As you can see if you watch the video, we’re already pulling off something a bit unusual: modelling a world at MMO scale using cellular automata. What that means: we know the humidity, the temperature, the…

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Announcing Stars Reach

It’s been years of work, and we are far from done, but I am super happy to finally reveal what I have been working on at Playable Worlds: Stars Reach. This is the game I have wanted to make for nearly thirty years. It is the spiritual sequel to Ultima Online and to Star Wars Galaxies. It has in it all the lessons of all these decades of online game development — and it looks forward, not back,…

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GDC talk: Revisiting Fun

My GDC 2024 talk Revisiting Fun: 20 Years of a Theory of Fun is now posted here. Once again, I had a lot of fun drawing cartoon heads of lots of people who feature in the talk. The talk really is a direct sequel to the one from a decade ago, Ten Years Later. Unlike last time, there is no updated edition just yet, though I was asked by lots of people if there was! Continue reading GDC talk:…

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Why NYT's Connections makes you feel bad

Connections The new daily game at the New York Times is called Connections, and I’ve seen a few people comment that they just don’t like it as much as Wordle or Spelling Bee. That the difficulty is inconsistent and it often makes you just feel stupid. I thought it would be interesting to contrast this to Word Dad, a puzzle game made by my friend, master game designer John Cutter. A brief aside…

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Ultima Online's 25th anniversary

Ultima Online’s 25th anniversary

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Sandbox vs themepark

Here's why sandbox online worlds are the evolution of static themepark games -- and also how we often get them wrong. Come take a stroll through the history of where the terms came from, starting in primordial MUD and up through today. :)

I just watched a couple of videos about sandbox vs themepark games (in particular one by NerdSlayer and another by Josh “Strife” Hayes)… One thing that struck me about the ways players often talk about this (because at this point the history is so old) is that people think of sandbox as the older version of MMOs, and themeparks as newer. But that’s not right – sandbox is not the older…

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New paper applies predictive processing to "what is fun?"

Trying to be better about putting long tweet threads on the blog. :)

This paper on “Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play” is very worth a read if you are interested in the frontiers of figuring out what “fun” is. Luckily for me, it doesn’t say I’ve been on the wrong track for decades. It does raise interesting questions given its framework — I’d love to see slot machines explained — though there…