You may have seen last week that we have started the limited pre-alpha testing for Stars Reach. It’s exciting times – we’ve had outsiders play the game before, of course, but it was mostly investors and partners of the company. This is the first time that real players have gotten to play!
(Yay!)
We had most of the game turned off though.
(Boo!)
That’s because in these early stages of testing, we are really looking at two separate but equally valid purposes. For us internally, it’s a chance to baseline look at a lot of basic systems. Like, can you log in? Does it run at all? When does it keel over? Did our Steam key invite process work?
We couldn’t just have players log in, see an empty screen, and leave bored, though. So we gave them just two of the most fundamental systems to play with: movement and chat. Both of these are things that players spend enormous amounts of time doing. Any friction or lack of polish is something that they will run into over and over again, and it will be like coarse sandpaper on their play experience. So it’s really important to spend a lot of time polishing them.
I thought that today I’d spend time talking about movement and the camera.
CAMERA
We have been working on basic movement for a very long time. And you can’t really work on movement without also tackling the game camera.
We support two camera modes, which our research showed were both widely used by MMO players.
Free cursor: In one of them you can move your cursor freely around the screen, aim anywhere, or click on interface elements on your HUD. If you want to move the camera, you hold down the right mouse button and drag it around. Using WASD to move moves you relative to the camera.
Fixed reticle: In the other, you use mouselook. There is a reticle slightly offset from your right shoulder (so you can see what you are aiming at). WASD moves you just like it does in a typical first or 3rd person shooter.
When we say that we are partly inspired by twin stick shooters, what we mean is that you can be moving in one direction while actively firing in another, with the camera parked somewhere that isn’t directly behind you.
In both, we let you zoom in and out quite a lot. We wanted to avoid having different camera modes for when you were building versus fighting and so on, and instead give players the choice to put the camera where it suits them for the specific thing they are engaging in. Some things you do in the game definitely lend themselves to being zoomed out, and in free cursor mode – like building, and some climbing scenarios. Others, like aiming a weapon precisely, really do better at closer zooms with mouselook on.
You currently toggle unholstering using the G key. The behavior of WASD actually changes a bit based on whether or not you have a tool out. We automatically change you from a “strafing” style behavior to running around more freely. It’s the kind of little thing that you want players to not really even notice, and instead take for granted that it “just works.”
Even on our team, we find that different teammates have pretty strong preferences about these two camera modes and how much time they spend in one versus another.
MOVEMENT
We tested out movement pretty extensively using a custom built “jungle gym” level that had a wide array of jumping, flying, and climbing challenges. It offered a range of slopes, a series of jumping puzzles, moving platforms, and two timed challenges we built in so that we could make tweaks to the systems, and then try running the obstacle courses. One of them was for ground locomotion, and the other was for jetpack usage.
We had a lot of customizable movement options in this prototype. We tried out camera modes, we tried strafing variations, and so on. Every parameter was tweakable, and we just tried everything until we converged in on what we liked.
We used this testbed to try out both camera modes, basic combat, how the camera handled enclosed spaces, and much more. Spending many hours in here paid off when our testers first tried out the game.
We always knew we would want to support fun traversal. Our planets are generated using procedural techniques, and they are also modifiable in runtime. This means that the tricks you use for statically created terrain just won’t work. We also can’t guarantee that the map is all navigable – just like the real world isn’t all walkable. So we decided pretty early on we had to support climbing and flying, so that players could get themselves out of trouble.
Every time we improved the visuals of the terrain, we would find ourselves wrestling with challenges around the avatar poking through the ground, or actually managing to fall through the world. To be honest, we are still wrestling with this last problem, because we keep adding ways to change the world on the fly!
At first flying was more like straight up antigrav flight, but we kept going back to the idea that it ought to feel more like Joust and jetpacks, so that there was more of a skill ceiling to it.
We supported hanging for a really long time. But the more we played with it, the less we liked it. It was very challenging to get it to work well when we went around vertical edges. And then every time we jumped in a cave, or flew in a tight space, we found ourselves dangling from the ceiling. Finally, we cut it in frustration, because it was more annoying than useful. Maybe someday it will make a comeback.
We also tested having movement affected by terrain really early on. Just simple slowing you down as you moved up slopes. This is still in there. But as we made the environment more realistic, we came to realize that we would need to handle far more cases than we had originally expected. Moving through muddy ground can affect your movement, for example. Even moving through taller grass versus terrains that are more barren can have varying effects. And some of these can add real gameplay. There’s value in having tall grass affect your movement if it means players are therefore incentivized to build roads to move goods across the map.
One of our favorites was that icy terrains become slippery. We promptly added a new sliding animation that we hadn’t originally planned for.
Speaking of slippery – we did have sliding down slopes too, but we have turned it off for now, as frankly, we kept dying when we got too close to the edge of cliffs and slid off! You do take falling damage in Stars Reach, you see. Flying requires stamina, so does climbing, and falling from a great height is most definitely fatal. For a little while, you left a crater when you hit…
Movement modifiers on varying terrain are also something that we can have affected by skills – hiking, climbing, and the like can affect your footing. We haven’t yet done swimming, but wading in the water does affect your movement already. When we get to doing underwater movement, we will be drawing a lot of lessons from how we did spaceflight, and probably even share a lot of the controls.
One of the things that our testers responded to most positively in the test was grappling. This was a relatively late addition to the movement system, and one that we have had to be very careful about not feature creeping into something huge. After all, entire games have been built out of basically just a grappling mechanic.
It’s taken a lot of work to make grappling work cleanly, and we continue to tweak it now, but it’s pretty fun to repeat grapple while in mid air, getting tugged to one cliff wall versus another. Originally, we had grappling work only when you used a grapple gun. But it was so fun it is currently a base movement capability that all avatars get.
There’s lots more I haven’t touched on. You can press a key to go into walking. I know, nobody does that, everyone wants to run everywhere. Well, there’s sprinting too. It costs stamina. So do dodge rolls, which you can do in any direction, mostly to evade enemy fire in combat. I will skip talking about movement in space, since it’s its own whole topic.
We made a few tweaks after the first test, and are about to run more or less the same test again with more people this weekend. If you’re interested in testing, do sign up on the site! We let in another cohort just yesterday, for this weekend’s test. We are also sharing tidbits like sneak peeks of our upcoming visual upgrades, and regular leaks of game features, over on the Discord.