Spaceships
My background in creating video games goes back to sketchbooks as a kid, exploring a side-scrolling platform adventure featuring my pet cats growing up. This was, perhaps, inspired by Claw, a 2D side scrolling platform adventure game.
Having not really learned any programming yet, it was beyond my ability to execute.
From there, I dabbled in developing games, including getting a map started for a game titled The Fall of Abaddon. I was more stringing together stuff I thought was cool, lacking any real cohesive good taste.
At about the same time, I interned at Wahoo Studios, a tiny development shop that had picked up a Mac Mini and wanted to port an XBox & PC game, Outpost Kaloki, to the Mac.
I'd never done any C++ before, never mind using SVN for version control. It was a "thrown in the deep water" situation for sure. I didn't have a license yet, so I biked there during the summer months.
I hacked and slashed my way through the code base, running the compiler and trying to fix whatever came out the other end. I remember wearing headphones when I finally got the game to boot and, for whatever reason, the audio driver practically exploded my ear drums. After remastering the WAV files for the game, it became playable and, to my surprise, worked.
Once school started in the fall I simply stopped showing up and never went back. Even though I was a really young teenager, I regret having not had the awareness at the time to say thanks, let them know my plans, and wrap it up formally. I owe the Wahoo studios team a lot of taking a chance on a random kid who walked in and was offered a paying job at minimum wage to port a PC game to the Mac.
At around the same time, I also started getting involved with the Space Center in Pleasant Grove. Incidentally up the street from Wahoo Studios, the Space Center was a delightful playground of immersive storytelling. If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch this for some context.
Everything at the space center was created by volunteers, and I ended up in charge of the programming department as a teenager. I taught classes & summer camps on programming and graphic design, and was involved in a number of initiatives to take the Space Center concept beyond the walls of the school.
With all that autobiography out of the way, let's talk Space Ships.
Spaceship!
Each space center flight is staffed by at least one primary storyteller, the Flight Director. They voice characters, control the lights, sound, and music, and otherwise work to create an immersive environment for participants to explore and embark on. It's a mashup of a DJ, game master, impressionist, and improv artist all at once.
Given the broad strokes of story that could be told in such a setting (stories could be educational, horror, psychological thrillers, spy missions, mysteries, explorations of morals & ethics, and more), the software had to be flexible to a variety of storytelling styles and ultimate story goals.
You can see examples of this sort of software in the bridge simulator community, most notably my brother's work on Thorium which is a direct descendant of the work that he did at the Space Center after I left. The DNA of those controls permeates right down to the roots of the Space Center's software in Hypercard.
Each participant has a station, and each station has a specific function like "shoot the guns" or "keep the reactor online" or "sense the world outside the ship". The story would then weave together each of these functions so everyone felt like they had "a moment" when they saved the day, and then the broader story that was being told would bring home the specific plot points of what was being experienced.
Having designed & built a number of these simulators (both software and the physical sets that go with them), I've got an idea of what's involved in this style of construction.
What about merging these ideas with a narrative storytelling medium?
Ink meets HyperCard Revolution LiveCode Spaceship?
What if we took the Ink engine and slotted it on top of a space ship simulator?
- You have your set of screens for running the ship. Start out with the basics: Sensors, communications, power, defense, offense, environment, engines & navigation, damage control. All the stuff you need to basically drive around a tiny spaceship.
- It's not an open world sandbox, but it's not closed either. Rather, Ink provides all the stuff you'd get from a flight director: Putting stuff on the screens, responding to messages, reacting to user input.
- Game input (messing around with power, setting a course, or anything else) ends up being interpreted by the system as an Ink script input. The default option loops back to the same choice step on each of these inputs, so that you can do anything you like but certain steps will advance the story.
- Ink provides the experience & show control, since it's all hand-crafted narrative. The game engine provides the sandbox to explore.
This design is not unlike how Heaven's Vault works: you can run around in an open 3d world and interact with anything, and the game designers basically imbued everything with interactivity in the context of the narrative. This way, you get the feeling that you're unfolding a rich story even though you have a range of choices for when and how you expand that story.
Having a finite set of controls for a simple space craft helps as well, so it's not so complex as to be an entire bridge simulation, while also providing tight framing over what you're up to.