I just published some fairly extensive history on the Bushraki, from whom we get wetwiring and mindsims both. Once tools of the Sa’hak-ren Hierarchy, and later unwittingly duped by the Ishvana, they’re a tragic, broken race of unstable, cybernetically-enhanced, drug-addicted humanoids whose genes indicate that they’re an incredibly old race, though they only reached spaceflight a couple thousand years ago. A real fun bunch to party with, right up until one of them, all hopped up on whisper dust or glitter decides to it’d be fun to see what kind of sound you make if she reaches down and slices your achilles tendon or decides to make you dance, Goodfellas-style.
Head on over to the NPC Races page to read about them, and the important role they’ve played in Starmourn history. You’ll also learn where wetwiring and mindsim tech came from!
A male Bushraki.
Seen the new trailer? I love Mass Effect! I love the lore, the setting, the tone, the storytelling, and the gameplay. It hits all the right buttons in sci-fi for me.
I just added an entry on the Y’saari, whose currency – the Covenant Mark – underlies the economy of Starmourn, to the NPC Races page. Enjoy!
Y’saari concept sketches.
As you can see from the final, he pretty much nailed what I wanted right away.
Final Y’saari concept.
Also, I talked about hacking in my last post and I’m pleased to say I figured out something that I think is going to be really, really cool. There’ll actually be three different types of hacking, from the near-instant to methods that are more involved and will actually be pretty hard to fully script (that is a good thing). Really psyched about it!
Having some kind of hacking in Starmourn is important to us, mainly because a lot of people have mentioned wanting something involving it. It is, however, much tougher than it may sound like to pull off well in an open-world multiplayer game. There are a few problems, from my perspective:
- We need a hacking system that doesn't require custom work on our end for everything that can be hacked. Functionally, this means that it's going to be pretty easily scriptable. Therefore, there's not much point in a complicated system when players will just download a script, hit a button, and either succeed or fail. I think doing this well is so complex that to achieve any kind of 'true' hacking feeling, you need to go the direction of something like Hackmud, which is literally all about hacking.
- Along those same lines, the system can't impose a lot of extra content creation. We don't have the bandwidth to do lots of content creation for a single type of activity in the game.
- It can't allow you to do material damage to other players who don't consent to it. That includes things like reading someone's private messages, where info might exist that is very private indeed, or hacking into someone's currency account and draining it (trivial amounts might be another story....the sci-fi equivalent of minor pickpocketing.)
- It can't require players to constantly hack to open doors (a common suggestion, actually). That will get annoying in about 10 minutes. It's the kind of thing that has to be used only occasionally, and mostly for flavor or as part of quests.
I think I've got some interesting possibilities though (keep in mind: possibilities only right now), including things like hacking into surveillance systems, allowing you to locate everybody in an area or on a planet, alarm systems that have to be hacked into and shut down before they summon reinforcements, automated defense systems that have to be hacked into before they blow your group to bits, bots that can be hacked to help you in combat, NPC spacecraft that can be boarded and hacked into to take control, and so on. There are a couple other interesting uses for them, but they involve spilling the details on some combat systems we're not ready to do that with yet.
One thing we're probably not going to do is make hacker a class, much as I know some of you would love that. It's likely to be something everybody can learn how to do, just because of the realities of the population sizes of our games. Things like doors that need hacking into are annoying if you can't find a hacker online that has the skill to get into the system controlling access to the door, as an example. What we may do instead is have some kind of regular 'hacking' be something anyone can learn to a medium level, while some particularly powerful combat-appropriate applications could be reserved for a tech-oriented class.
Anyway, just wanted to make a quick post about hacking as I've been working on the design problems around it this afternoon. Feel free to leave suggestions for how you'd like to hacking implemented in the comments!
(Note: Since then I've designed a hacking system that's fits the above requirements!)
Just finished setting up a page on the Song Dominion, the second of the player-inhabited civilizations we’ve announced!
You’re probably wondering what a player-inhabited civilization means in practical terms. If you’ve played our existing MUDs, they all have some version of player civilizations, usually expressed as cities or city-states. These are initially admin-created areas with player-run governments that exercise control over those areas. They’re the most important of the types of player organizations in our fantasy MUDs, and there are only a handful in any single game, since we want some player density in them.
Obviously, we’re going to have player civs in Starmourn (see the first line of this post!), but how they’ll be expressed will differ a bit from our existing games. You’re going to have to wait to find out how, but one thing we’re going to be experimenting with is a civilization that is basically for people who don’t want to deal with other players telling them what to do. In other words, though it – Scatterhome – will be a player civilization, it won’t really be ‘run’ by players, since that entails having control over your fellow players, which has both pluses and minuses.
I suspect it’ll end up either being an immensely popular option or a big failure, without much room in between. We’ll have to wait and see, though of course if the experiment is a failure it’s not too hard to fix.
Song City.
Here’s a composite of our various player races for use as desktop/laptop backgrounds. Enjoy!
Just right-click (Windows) or click-and-hold (Mac) then save the image. If you’re not sure which one to use, just try the first one.
For 1920×1080, 1368×768, and other 16:9 aspect ratios.
For 1920×1200, 1280×800, and other 1.6 aspect ratio monitors.
For 4k monitors.
Think we're pretty cool? Tell your friends!
