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DESIGNER DIARY > Development Update
PUBLISHED: Dec 23, 2005
AUTHOR: Daron
Stinnett
Here's a brief summary of the latest happenings within
the STO development team:
The engineering and art teams have been working together to see how
close we can get to photo-realistic, real time ship interior renders.
They've started with the TNG era Galaxy class since it is so iconic and
also happens to be the setting for at least one major hub. For this
particular exercise, they modeling and rendering a hallway, turbolift,
and the observation lounge and rendering it all in real-time with
next-generation lighting & material effects. Their results are stunning.
Once we've completed look development for our other two environment
types (space & ground), we'll release some screenshots - figure sometime
before summer...
We have our first character modeled, which is a female Vulcan. Though
we're not ready to have a character walking around in the game yet, we
went ahead and built her so that we'd have at least a static character
to pose in our interiors so we could better judge proportions and
evaluate how to render characters within our environment. The new
uniforms look even better in 3D.
Ken's team is continuing to concept the interior of a Galaxy class to
study how we can create spaces that will allow the Galaxy to serve as
what is effectively a player city. In my last update, I mentioned how we
were diagramming deck layout. Now we have perspective drawings of
familiar spaces that have been revised, and new spaces that have never
before been seen. We will be releasing a few of these drawings very soon
to give everyone an idea of where we're heading.
We're continuing to add to our team. I mentioned a few of these new team
members in my last update, but I want to share a little more on
everyone's background to give you a sense of the talented team we're
putting together.
- Ira Goeddel (Character Technical Director) -
Ira comes to us from New Pencil, a contract art development house
where Ira gained extensive experience working within and creating new
art pipelines for games throughout the industry including The Sims and
our very own Gods & Heroes.
- Lorien Gremore (Production Assistant) -
Lorien brings her recent experience working on the operations side of
The Matrix Online and before that, experience playing and helping
create MUDs. Her role is to support our development process in any
number of ways and we're pleased to have her perspective and
experience with live team operations incorporated into pre-live
development process.
- TJ Holleran (Art Technical Director) - TJ
joins us from Microsoft Game Studios working on a variety of sports
titles for the XBOX. TJ's role on STO is to oversee the technical
aspects of our art development and to bridge the gap between Art, Game
Design, and Engineering.
- Todd Berkebile (Server Lead) - Todd will be
leading the development of our server-side technologies. Todd's
experience at Turbine working on Asheron's Call as well as shared
technologies for D&D Online, LOTR Online, and previously at Microsoft,
gives him formidable server technology chops as well as a deep
understanding of the MMO development process.
- Michael Stemmle (Story Lead) - Adventure
game fans will recognize Mike as the co-creator and Director of hit
titles such as Escape from Monkey Island and Sam & Max Hit the Road.
And his writing credits include many other great titles such as Jedi
Knight II, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, KOTOR II - the list
goes on and on. We're pleased to have Mike's writing and adventure
experience, not to mention his enthusiasm for MMORPGs and his
encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek characters and stories from every
era of Star Trek.
I'll finish this development update with a list of some
of the design issues that Glen, Eric, and Mike are currently tackling:
- Travel - We're finally getting a handle on
how we're going to deal with player travel throughout the galaxy.
We've wrestled with this issue for a while with some advocating
instant travel to destinations while others on the team wanted the
freedom to explore the galaxy. But we all agreed that for there to
be a travel component to Star Trek Online, it needed to be
entertaining since you'll be doing a lot of it. Our design challenge
was how to turn the empty space in-between destinations into an
environment that is exciting and will capture notion of space
exploration and reward players for doing so. So I'm pleased to
report that while we haven't yet finalized our travel design, that
STO will indeed have robust support for travel within and free-form
exploration of the galaxy.
- Mission & Skill Systems - We've recently
taken a first pass at describing how our mission (quest) system will
work and the player skill tree. These are both extensive and
important systems that we've only just begun to document. But we're
pleased to be making progress on them and we're looking forward to
sharing details soon.
- State of the Galaxy - Mike has recently
put together a "State of the Galaxy" document that describes the
political and cultural landscape of the major forces within the
galaxy at the start of STO. While this document reveals too much
about our story to release in its entirety, Mike will be talking
about this document in another update that will be posted later
today.
Happy Holidays!
Daron Stinnett - Executive Producer
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