“It's up to you to provide an experience that people want to have on your server,” Tiyuri says. A similar logic applies to server admins who abuse their powers at the expense of visitors to their domains. This is an admirable stance, even if it does mean that a certain percentage of players will use the tools available to cheat. “So it's not something we're going to worry about, honestly.”Ĭhucklefish trust players to choose the experience that's right for them. “To solve that problem, you have to cut out a huge amount of functionality,” he tells me. In particular, I was keen to ask if Tiyuri had any concerns that players would simply use these creative tools to short-circuit the game's progression systems. I wonder, however, about the experience for players who only tap away at the surface-without digging any deeper. I've no doubt that Starbound will be something special to the people who are in the right position to appreciate the way all of these ambitious systems work together. As with any community effort, however, the biggest rewards will go to the players who actively seek out these experiences and involve themselves in the scene. There are more creative people in the world than there are games that furnish them with the tools to be creative.
The future that Tiyuri envisions for the game is one where individual Starbound servers will have their own character and their own stories, combining modding, mission design and hands-on directorship to create as many versions of Starbound as there are players willing to work on them.īoth halves of Starbound's ancestry-traditional modding scenes on one hand, creative, freeform games such as Minecraft and Garry's Mod on the other-suggest that this plan will be a success.
“If I wanted, I could control just one enemy, and, er, have a really annoying enemy.” “You can do as much or as little as you want without ruining the experience,” Tiyuri says. “One of the first game I saw trying to do this was Sleep is Death.” “There's this problem with storytelling in games,” says Tiyuri. If you played Neverwinter Nights in multiplayer, you'll have a sense of what Chucklefish are trying to achieve here. They'll have a great deal of power to create environments and NPCs – they can even control any NPC directly to speak with players or provide a more challenging combat encounter. This will be a separate version of the game that lets any player with the right admin access act as a game master on a given server. These might be fixtures on specific servers, downloads, or instances that players can jump to via the in-game starmap. Just as the structure of Starbound as a whole is inspired by console platformers like Metroid and Castlevania, so will players be able to create and distribute their own Metroidvania-style games. Using simple logic devices, players will be able to create monster spawners, signposts, and so on.
On the list are player-made missions: dungeons or quests that can be built within the game itself then pulled out and distributed as standalone challenges. Modding has a role to play in making that a reality, but in-game tools are also a priority.