Founder’s Journal

Brad Wardell
Executive Producer & Lead Designer

June 2018
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 TOPICS

1. Release Date Set!

2. A Personal Message
3. Status Report
4. Star Control: Origins – Chapter 1 Beta
5. Scheduling
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 RELEASE DATE SET!
Good news everyone!

We now have an official release date: September 20, 2018. That’s only weeks away from now!

Everyone reading this should have voluntary access to the “First Chapter” beta. If you don’t, please comment on the founders forum post.
https://forums.starcontrol.com/489819/star-control-founders-vault-june-2018

On August 9, we will be making available to a select few who are willing to get the game “spoiled” for them early on to play test the full game start
to finish. This will give us nearly a month and a half of tweaking pacing, finding any minor story bugs, adding additional minor quests and respond
to feedback.

Even with just the Chapter 1 beta, we have gotten a lot of actionable feedback. After release, presuming it’s a success, we will do our best to make
sure your contributions are hailed far and wide.

If you are interested in being part of the August 9 FULL GAME BETA. You will need to be in the Founder’s channel on Discord and be reasonable
active as we will need people who are real-time active so that we can ask them questions and quickly respond to their suggestions.
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 A PERSONAL MESSAGE

With Star Control: Origins almost completed, I wanted to share some personal experiences with you.

For many of you, if you’re interacting with Stardock you’re either talking to me or one of our Community Managers. As a result, we often get a
dipropionate amount of credit on the hard work that has gone into this game.

Stardock Plymouth: Star Control Team

And over in Maryland the Stardock Towson Star Control team.

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 Over the past four years we’ve been working on this game, people have come and gone. I’m not even the first Brad Wardell and this isn’t even my
final form! Four years is a long time and we originally had intended to release it in November 2017 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Star
Control II.

Four years. That’s longer than Star Control 1 and 2 took combined to develop.

In those four years, new children have arrived to families of Stardockians. We’re a tight group, many of whom have worked together for decades.
We’re very passionate about Star Control itself and it has (mostly) been a delight to develop.

Stardock, Oxide and Mohawk teams having some fun together.

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 Eric Undersander, Chris Bucholz, Brad Wardell and Andrew Zoboki brainstorm. Meanwhile, at the Stardock Café…

Many late days were put in to bring you Star Control: Origins. Meanwhile, Stardock/Oxide/Mohawk leads brainstorm on engine features.

Let’s look back at the past four years…

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 2013
Stardock acquired the Star Control IP back in 2013 from Atari who, in turn, had acquired it
when they purchased Accolade. We were very excited to bring one of our favorite game
franchises back to left.

There were some challenges in bringing Star Control back not the least being some
contradictions in plotting and lore that occurred between Star Control 2 and 3 (two different
developers).

The solution we ultimately came up with was to treat Star Control 1 and 2 as one universe and
Star Control 3 as a different universe. Then, to keep us from having to try to continue a story
from 25 years ago, we decided to make Star Control X (as we referred to it back then) as its own
universe.

As a way to connect the Star Control universe, we came upon the idea of a Precursor device known as an Origin that would allow players to visit
other universes (either ones we develop and/or licensed from others or ones created by fans). The name, Star Control: Origins was born.

Stardock Townson (in Maryland) was formed along with Oxide® Interactive and Mohawk™ Games. Stardock Towson
is in charge of the Star Control project which would being developing a new engine called Cider™ that would be built
on top of Oxide’s radical new engine called Nitrous™.

This was pre-pre-production. Here are the alien concepts I wrote up before we began hiring up for the project.
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 So at this stage, the bad guys were the Kryloks (who eventually became the Scryve). Others were adapted and still others disappeared entirely.

My initial role on the project was executive producer.

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 2014
The early Star Control team was made up mostly of Firaxis alumni (located just down the street). Much early lore is
created during this time for the new Star Control. Since it was going to occur in a new universe, we needed to begin
thinking of the story of this universe.

Being comic book fans, we tried to think of some of the interesting ways the characters were were creating could be
used in other mediums. For example, the Post-Humans, which became to be known as the Lexites, have made great
use of the Origins to travel to many different realities.

During this time, many different ideas were explored for aliens.
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 REQUIREMENTS

STRONG REQUIREMENTS
15 alien races + 1 human character
The plot must be substantially different from Star Control 2.
The player is the captain of a special ship that they can upgrade and modify during the
game.
There are conversations with aliens when you encounter them in their ships or at their
homeworld. There needs to be a close 1:1 relationship between the characters and races.
There is a strong reason to go explore space and visit other planets.
There is a reason to gather resources from planets.
The player must be the chosen one in some regard. They must be the only individual that
can do what’s needed to save the galaxy.
There is a reason for the player to get into combat with a number of different alien ships. The
player should be able to get into battle with 10 different ships during the game. (Not all
those need to be bad guys, they can just be misunderstood initially.)
There is a reason to have team space battles. (2v2, 1v1, etc.)
There is a way for the player to get new alien ships to join their armada.
Many of the alien races can be “solved” in some way, that provides you with access to their
ships and/or plot devices.
The main bad guys of the story have a reason why they’re bad that makes them
sympathetic. (They don’t have to be likeable and the player should not feel any moral
ambiguity about the bad guys.)
The aliens have a history with each other and have done things to each other in the past that
they talk about and reference.
The end of the game includes something cool getting blown up in a Space Battle.

WEAK REQUIREMENTS
Explanation of why the Star Control 2 & 3 races aren’t in the game.

TONE
The story can have dark moments, but overall it is optimistic about humanity and other
alien life.
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1960-80’s enthusiasm and optimism about space exploration.

Humanity has solved most of its problems and now looks outward toward the stars. (Like
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Star Trek.
 All throughout 2014 different ideas were sketched out and different designs were evaluated.
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 2015
By 2015 we are starting to get the engine into line.
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 Development has reached full production at this stage.

In 2015, different ideas started to really take shape.

Production Designer, Andrew Zoboki looked for inspiration from a lost of sources. One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYql98tL-t4
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 2016
At this stage, the Towson team had made substantial progress. Though, with the 25th anniversary of Star Control II looming, we were definitely
coming in hot.

The Founders feedback started to have an impact as well as some of the aliens and design choices were receiving constructive criticism.

The races at the top (full in game models) are: Menkmack, Drakend, Tywom, Jeff, Trandals, Scryve, MuKay, and Greegrox.
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 The most ambitious new feature, the planet lander, was also proving very difficult to get right. Spherical worlds are hard. How do you do the
horizon?
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 The Super-Melee part of the game was the furthest along, complete with multiplayer, but we were having pipeline problems getting content in.

Other challenges the team was facing was the rate in which visual iteration was able to make it into the game. In October 2016, Stardock released
the teaser trailer for Star Control: Origins which showed what the final game would look like by the time of its scheduled release.

The team had set a pretty high bar and once made public, Stardock Systems was adamant that the games unit deliver on those expectations.

vs.

The question was, could Stardock Towson deliver the above visual in a year when at the time the game was looking like what was on the right?
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 2017
Let me start this by pointing out the obvious: Star Control is a really really hard game to make.

There’s a reason why you don’t see games like this and it’s not because there isn’t a market demand for games that allow players to take command
of a starship to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life..etc. If you’ve followed the challenges of No Man’s Sky has had, you get an inkling of
just how hard these types of games are (and Star Control is a story driven game, it doesn’t’ have the luxury of a procedurally generated universe of
procedurally generated content).

At this stage, we needed to see where we were at. 2017 was the 25th anniversary of Star Control II and we really wanted the game to come out that
year.

For the January 2017 evaluation we were here:

To ensure that the game got all the resources it needed we added the Stardock Plymouth studio to the mix. This is where I switched from being the
executive producer to the lead designer.

STAR CONTROL COURSE CORRECTIONS

Every game project is filled with choices that, by their nature, mean other choices aren’t made. Every designer brings their own unique talents and
skills to the table.
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In my case, the changes I asked for included:

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 1. Less cartoony alien designs (which required throwing out fully completed assets such as the Menkmack, Geegrox, Measured, Trandals,
Phamyst and others, a very expensive decision).
2. Solar System views and Super-Melee views (later rebranded Fleet Battles) to be top down instead of isometric.
3. Upgrading Cider tools to be accessible by consumers so that they could create their own stories and adventures.
4. Release date changed to “when we can deliver on what was promised” regardless of cost and time.
5. Engine upgrade to be based on Nitrous 1.1 (Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation) which would require a lot of engine work.

Then…I left to go work on Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade...

The benefit of working with amazingly talented people for many years is that they “do stuff” without a lot of oversight. With the primary game team
at Stardock Plymouth on the game, I moved to secondary team at Plymouth to work on GalCiv III: Crusade.

Months later, after GalCiv III: Crusade shipped we had a bit milestone review to see where things stood.

JULY 2017
With GalCiv III: Crusade completed, it was time to look at where things stood. The team had made
excellent technical progress but the visual presentation was still struggling. The challenge of working
with a brand new engine (as opposed to say Unity or Unreal) is that getting your art pipeline down is
a challenge.

At this stage, we put together a rough sketch of what the next Galactic Civilizations expansion would
be “Intrigue” and began moving to Star Control.
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 In Summer of 2017 a strict battle plan had been put together:

1. Focus on Super-Melee. ONLY Super-Melee for a November 2017 beta to coincide with the 25th anniversary.
2. THEN focus on the rest of the game after.
3. Release in September 2018.

By October 2017, we were starting to feel pretty good about the game. Fleet battles was fun. Really fun.
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 2018
With the engine largely completed and the gameplay iterating nicely, it was time to begin moving towards release.

WINTER

SPRING
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 LATE SPRING
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 We were starting to get very close. The fun was there. Now it was a matter to make sure that the polish and first experiences into the game came
into play.

Which brings us to…

The Status report!

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 STATUS REPORT
Greetings! Counting this entry, I expect there to only be five more of these before release.

Please make sure you visit us at the exclusive Founder’s Starbase:

https://forums.starcontrol.com/forum/1145

Also we have started the Facebook group:

https://www.facebook.com/officialstarcontrol/

So let’s walk through the entire game…

A gazillion years ago we discussed that for us, Star Control is a space RPG made up of the following features:

1. Solar System exploration

2. Planetary exploration
3. Hyperspace navigation
4. Ship upgrading
5. Alien Communication
6. Ship Combat
7. An over-arching deep story

What makes Star Control so tough to do is that if you fail at any of those 6 things, the entire game fails. And many of these features are so different
than the others that it’s like making multiple games in one.

So how we doing?
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 SOLAR SYSTEM

This month’s big addition was that you can now binary, trinary, quadinary, etc. star systems. So solar systems within solar systems. This adds a lot
of fun little plot points for us to play with as we can now have various pre-FTL civilizations fighting each other.
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 PLANET EXPLORATION

May 2018 (left) vs. June 2018 (right)

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 HYPERSPACE NAVIGATION

One modest but useful change is that the planet types can now be seen from Hyperspace. This will continue to get iterated.
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 SHIP UPGRADING
In Star Control, your ship is your character. And we made a number of major visual changes to this over just last month.

May 2018 on Left, June 2018 on right.

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 ALIEN COMMUNICATION
We have quite a cast of characters for Star Control: Origins. However, this part of the game is not yet quite done.

Without getting into spoiler territory here is our cast of major species in Star Control: Origins

Character June Status May Status

Commander Hayes (Human) Complete Complete
Wymdoo (Tywom) Complete Complete
Grist (Drakend) Complete Complete
Drakend Troooper Complete Complete
Pinthi (species) Complete Complete
Bloa (Mukay) Complete Complete
Mukay (species) Complete Complete
Mowlings (species) Complete Almost…done..
Dr. Varroa (Pinthi) Complete Complete
Phamyst (species) Complete Almost done…
Menkmack (species) Complete Complete
Engineer Slyder (Menkmack) In progress In progress
Trandals (species) Almost…done… In progress
Scryve (species) Complete Almost…done…
Xraki (species) Almost…done… In progress
Tywom Scout (generic Tywom guy) Complete Complete
Tywom Councilman Complete Complete
Jeff Complete In progress
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Precursor AI Complete Complete

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At this stage, it’s mostly art and presentation.

 May 2018 (left) and June 2018 (right)

We made some UI changes so that it is clear that you are talking to these aliens through your ship’s view screen.
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 SHIP COMBAT
For the adventure game, you will occasionally encounter situations where you need to take out a truly massive ship or to defend a starbase (or even
Star Control itself depending on who you aggravate). We haven’t decided whether this will become a separate feature of Fleet Battles or not as
there’s still quite a bit of work to do in this area.
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 THE CHAPTER 1 BETA

The Chapter 1 BETA is available now to Founders who wish to try it. We released Beta 1C to Founders shortly before we closed for Summer vacation
but our Community Managers on Discord can still hook you up.

Those who want to get into it early can join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/2wchz7m and make sure you are part of the Founder’s group there.
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 THE SCHEDULE

Below is our current tentative schedule for you to know what to expect!

Month Milestone Status

March GDC Complete
April Fleet Battles Beta 2 Complete
May Open Universe for Founders / Chapter 1 Complete
June E3 Complete
July Fleet Battles Beta 3 On Schedule
August Founders select full Beta On Schedule
September 20 RELEASE On Schedule
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