Editor’s Note: Newly formed Impeller Studios recently launched a Kickstarter for its new game, Starfighter Inc. We asked the team to give us a bit of insight into the game and what creating the game will entail.
David Wessman, project designer on Starfighter, Inc.
I’m writing this on Day 4 of the Kickstarter campaign for Starfighter Inc. I’m both proud and humbled that we’ve already attracted more than 3,000 backers and $100,000 in funding.
I joined the project following a chance encounter at Epic’s GDC party in 2013. I had just met one of the leads on the project and we were discussing games and technology. Once I’d revealed my background on the X-Wing series he told me about this “cockpit shooter” they were working on and asked if I’d be interested in helping out. I believe my immediate response was, “hell fucking yeah!”
Over the next few weeks I got to know the team and where they were at with the project. They had a very clear vision of recreating the classic space combat shooter experience, and making it even better using today’s technology. This seemed pretty straightforward, but in light of Star Citizen’s massive success and the fact that there were about two dozen other games competing for attention in the same space, I felt we needed something special to set us apart.
When everyone else is zigging, try zagging. I proposed that the best way we could differentiate Starfighter Inc. would be to make it as realistic as possible. While World War II in space is obviously a lot of fun, I wanted to see what would happen if we respected the science and avoided all the hand-waving, “unobtanium” and technobabble that most science fiction games rely on. This means no stealth, no artificial gravity, no force fields, no FTL drives.
The team was skeptical. We wondered whether the fact that nobody else was taking this approach was because it just wouldn’t be fun, or maybe it would simply be too difficult to implement? We all agreed that it was certainly worth trying, and we set out to create our first playable as a proof of concept.
It was crude. There was no proper HUD, the controls were mouse and keyboard, and the assets were borrowed from other games. It was frustratingly difficult (at first), but we quickly recognized that it just took a little practice to begin to get the hang of it. And then we started to get our first kills and the excitement was palpable. We had found our kernel of fun that we knew we could build on!
There was so much more that needed to be done. We didn’t have the resources to build our own engine, so we had to find one that would support our vision. This was a significant challenge by itself that took longer than expected.
And, of course, Jack and I had a lot of work to do in fleshing out the revised design vision. How far in the future should we go? What’s the backstory? What exactly is the player fighting for? What about interstellar travel? Will there be aliens?
The next big challenge was designing the ships and weapons. No one on the team has a degree in aerospace engineering, but we understood that “pure” spacecraft shouldn’t look anything like modern jet fighters, and our capital ships shouldn’t look like aircraft carriers or submarines in space. We have a great art team, but their engineering knowledge isn’t any greater than ours, and it’s taken a while to get everyone on the same page.
Early on, I turned the team on to the Atomic Rockets website created by Winchell Chung. This has been an invaluable resource, but it’s huge and can be overwhelming when you first start exploring it. It was there that I discovered a sketch for a realistic space fighter that was good enough to get the Atomic Rockets seal of approval. I tracked down the creator’s profile on deviantart and reached out to him to see if we could use his design, or even better, if he might be interested in joining the team.
While he wouldn’t let us use his design (he had other plans for it), he said yes to joining the team to create new designs just for us. And to our great delight it turned out he was actually training to be an engineer! Jackpot! With that, allow me to introduce Zach Hajj, our lead ship designer:
Zach Hajj, technical designer and concept artist for Starfighter Inc.
My job is to review game concepts for continuity with established paradigms and goals, and to explain and even provide them as necessary. Most of my life I have been engaged in creative works, which is what brought me to Impeller’s attention, and I wouldn’t have it any other way: surrounded by this atmosphere of enthusiasm, friendliness and creativity, and given every chance to explore my imagination and see it brought to life, it feels like I’m right at home.
When the team brought me on, they stressed the need for scientific realism, that Starfighter Inc. would not be just another generic space shooter. I knew at once that I could help with that. I’m an engineer by trade and what that gave me was a novel approach to design issues; that it’s not enough to solely address the function, for one must consider the implications as well. Media usually suffers with this because starting with a story, you’re then forced to reconcile it with what’s already known, but if you turn the table and look at the principles first and how they branch out, you’ll find they flow together and create new opportunities you’d never have dreamed of. Soon you’ll have webs, rather than links, and quite often it was the team with David Wessman at the front that brought new elements and ways to work with them to my attention.
Take the Shrike, for instance, the first ship I worked on and our poster-child for the game, and where I got to set a lot of our conventions. Jack Mamais wanted a futuristic feel that expresses man having come to terms with the rigors of space, rather than the struggling experimental forms we have today, so the systems seem compact, robust and filled with integrated backups. You can see this in the drive system: you’ve got a nuclear reactor powering the engine, but when you think about it, what that reactor does is heat up propellant to provide thrust, so you could easily substitute it with another heat source while continuing to make use of most of the initial parts, which is where the idea for the solar moth backup (or as I sometimes call it, the solar oven drive) comes in. Nuclear reactors don’t turn on and off readily, so you’d want to keep it active at all times, and I realized that the heated propellant could be recirculated as a working fluid in a heat engine, with the added bonus that it could run off the solar drive as well, and this became the basis for our in-game power systems. Inspiration in this case came from how I’d modeled heat engines in my thermodynamics course, as well an inside view of Skylon’s SABRE engine. That being said, inspiration doesn’t have to be all that complex – the wing sensors are based on the F-22 Raptor’s AESA system integrated into its skin.
Quite simply, human imagination on its own is limited, but nature is vast and expanding with our understanding, and we can harness that to create new worlds: “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
That doesn’t mean it isn’t without its issues. In the process of game-making, you end up asking so many questions you’d have never thought to ask. How does a spaceship really move? What does a nuclear engine stream look like? How does the atmosphere change around you during re-entry? All these things seem trivial when you’re writing a book or filming a movie – your mind fills in the picture, you think you know – but try to put them in a video game and each one is a process. You have to understand every possible step, how the ship is firing, what each maneuvering thruster is doing and all the possible ways they could fire, because you have to make them happen again and again. Quite often, the setting forces us to explore questions that have never been answered (say, what the above nuclear engine stream looks like in space, as none have ever been tested up there), and we have to learn enough to create our own conclusions. You’re doing this so you make others understand, to turn it into something simple so that players don’t have to nurse a headache every time they try to move. I thought I was a science fiction nerd, but making Starfighter Inc. I’ve learned more than I ever did through personal research, and I think by the time we’re through with this, we’ll all deserve honorary degrees.
Granted, that’s what the most immersive video gaming is in a nutshell – simple and easy to grasp on the surface, but unimaginably vast and captivating if you’re willing to look in a little deeper. As a storywriter I can vouch that the best novels that remain cult classics are those that are more than just stories, they’re worlds as well – Lord of the Rings, Dune, Game of Thrones – tales you can read for the characters and plot but can also get you lost in places living and breathing. Video gaming has plenty of its share too – Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Mass Effect, Dragon Age – and soon, Starfighter Inc., games you can play to have a blast, but also games you can play to get lost in.
That’s what we promise to bring to you.
Coray Seifert, project writer on Starfighter Inc.
Working with these hard science lunatics has been absolutely fantastic.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that 40% of our meetings devolve into arguments about physics (and Ion engines, and near-Earth production platforms, and what happens when your head gets blown up in zero g). As the writer for a project like that, let’s just say the feedback has been pointed and well-sourced.
While I have experience with writing for speculative near-future settings (Homefront and Frontlines: Fuel of War both explored environmental and societal collapse amidst a global energy crisis), this project has brought me more narrative growth than any I’ve worked on. The thing about working with hard science is that it forces you to abandon all of your beloved science fiction tropes; those wonderful assumptions you can make of an audience well-versed in sci-fi lore.
The Intergalactic Council? Nope.
The mysterious alien zealots bent on adding humanity to its panoply of subjugate races? Hah. No.
One all-powerful force controlling everything? Yeah, I paid for that one …
Once all of the tools in your Writerman Utility Belt have been stripped away, you’re forced to come up with new ways to dispatch your narrative foes. Do deep research. Work within the confines of a very strict set of creative bounds. Push yourself to create the emotional and aspirational universe you want without relying on magic, hand-waving or small furry creatures (I know, I was crushed too.).
The funny thing is that these creative bounds really allow you explore new territory and create a universe that is both compelling and deep. When so many easy options are eliminated by your ruthless Lead Designer and maniacal creative director (not to mention your well-read science consultant), you start working on different vectors than the rest of the games out there and the result is accordingly unique.
We’re extremely pleased with both the day zero narrative in place for launch and the deep plot that we plan to roll out over the lifetime of this franchise. We hope our audience will love setting aside The Force for a bit and diving into a fresh new universe of interstellar corporate espionage, military-industrial complexes and a representation of humanity driven by economic, personal and professional desires.
