Blackstar: Exclusive ION Interview with Brandon Reinhart, Part One

Tags: in

Posted May 19th, 2008 by Cody Bye

Questions by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor

Answers by Brandon Reinhart, Lead Designer for Spacetime Studios

For an up and coming MMOG development studio, the loss of a publisher can lead to disaster. This was nearly the case when NCsoft North America ended their publishing deal with Spacetime Studios, an MMOG development company that was quietly working away on an action oriented space combat game titled Blackstar. However, Spacetime Studios has bounced back from the fall and recently purchased the rights to the Blackstar IP, allowing them to continue work on their upcoming MMOG project. At the ION Games Conference, Cody “Micajah” Bye had a discussion with one of Blackstar’s lead designers, Brandon Reinhart, who filled him in on all the details of the upcoming MMOG. Check it out!

A piece of concept art depicting a Scorn female.

Ten Ton Hammer: What's happening with Spacetime Studios lately? Are you still doing regular web updates?

Brandon Reinhart: It's been a little rough lately with everyone going on vacation, but we try to throw up a new blog every two weeks or so that rotates through the different divisions - the concept art team, the production team, that sort of thing. The most exciting thing for us was getting our IP, so we were able to keep moving forward on production of Blackstar.

So when our relationship with NCsoft ended that put us in a position where we couldn't work on our game anymore because they owned our IP. We owned the tech, but they owned the IP. We actually had to strip all of the IP out because there was a point where we had to do that because we play everything right legally. They owned the IP, so we had to strip everything out.

We got to keep some of it for demoing purposes, but we couldn't actually actively develop on the game. We spent three months figuring out new plans, but at the same time we knew we were planning on buying back our IP. Once the negotiations were finished we could go back and keep moving forward on the project. It was great for the team, because we really love the visual style and what we'd done for the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: Obviously the game is a Sci-Fi action-oriented game, but with that you run into some perils. Can players get out of their ships and engage in avatar versus avatar combat?

Brandon: Absolutely. One of the things we wanted to make sure happened in the game was that players were more than just ships. We didn't want players to feel like they were a ship, or that they were locked inside their ship. What we did was create the "hybrid experience". We call it that because it means that you can run around on the ground, attack enemies, loot their corpses, and that sort of things; and then you can transform into your ship.

Characters in the game basically pull their ships out of hyperspace pockets, go through these elaborate animations, and just take off and fly away. The ships are fighter sized, so the action you get is more akin to X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter or Wing Commander. In EVE Online, you fly these gigantic frigates and capital ships and things like that, but that's not our game. The combat is much more intimate than that.

But with the hybrids, it allowed us to do some really cool things with our PvP zones. Essentially you can fly around, land on a base, turn into your character, shoot at someone who's after you, then transform into your ship and take off. All of the abilities you have on the ground, you also have in space. The only difference is that each skill has different area effect ranges and that sort of thing.

More Scorn concept art.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is the tech more magical based?

Brandon: Yes. Our game isn't hard science fiction. It's very much what we call future fantasy, especially the Scorn Empire. Their technology is very much fueled by demonology. Humans may use a cold fusion reactor, but the Scorn use enslaved demon souls and that's how they power their starships.

The humans have a magical sort of technology as well, since they've kind of expanded out into this galaxy and have unlocked latent magical energy within themselves. As you adventure through the game, you unlock those abilities and on the Scorn side it's more like finding rituals that they can use.

Ten Ton Hammer: From a design standpoint, do you find difficulty with doing both ground and space based combat at the same time?

Brandon: We did really early on. It's always been our goal to have the game playable as soon as possible, and our first three month milestone was for that to be possible. So, as we worked on these prototypes, we got to a point where we could actually engage in some PvP combat. There was a point during balance where players on the ground - using shotguns - were the most deadly force in the game. You could fly by in your ship and players on the ground could one shot you out of the sky.

That was essentially data problems, because there were a number of things that should've been changed. But it was a hilarious problem, because you could have a guy flying around with a mini-gun and a guy with a little shotgun would take him out.

Other problems involved when we were initially inputting ability data, because we had to input two different sets for each ability. For players, it seemed like it was one ability, but behind the scenes it was two different types of data. That was a pain in the ass, because players found that they could cast two different abilities while they were on the ground or in the air. Eventually, we found out that that was going to be a problem so we changed the abilities so that you had one ability that basically just changed its mode depending on where you were at.

You do run into problems, but everything is completely solvable and workable.

Make sure you stay tuned in the coming days for Part Two of the Blackstar interview!

Bookmark/Share: