When players get together into friend groups, they often form a Guild in order to share common goals. The guild structure lets them communicate and share resources more easily, and in many games, it also lets them share a guild hall and guild logo.

GUILD TYPES IN STARS REACH

Our plan is to support several types of player organizations. Regular guilds are the sort you are used to from other games, and we see the function of these as primarily social. Because of this, we let you join more than one!

We are also planning on having two more guild types: armies and companies. You can only belong to one of each of these new types of guilds. Both require exclusive membership in order to minimize obvious cheats and keep things fair.

Armies can declare war on one another and companies compete economically instead, and have some special functions related to that.

Lastly, players can also form governments, which are sort of like guilds, but they are based on where you declare your citizenship.

In Stars Reach, we don't really have the concept of a "guild hall", but guilds will often organize to govern an entire planet. They can create a visual identity for themselves (via clothing, armor, and/or spacesuits) and they can also visually brand their spacecraft and equipment.

In many games, there is also the concept of a megaguild, which may have hundreds or even thousands of members. It is extremely likely that these organizations will be present within Stars Reach also.

ALLIANCES AND BENEFITS

But megaguilds are not to everyone's taste. That's where Guild Alliances come into play.

Let's say you're a small- or medium-sized guild running a single planet (or even a couple of planets), but your guild wants to start a trade collective beyond your current reach or a self-defense force to protect your solar system, something that would normally require the coordination and resources of a much larger guild (like a megaguild). With Alliances, you can reach out to other guilds and formalize friendships and bonds between your groups, becoming recognized publicly to any outside forces that your guilds cooperate with, while still retaining their own individual identities.

The Hyugon species has been one of the trickiest for us. We knew we wanted to have one "alien" species derived from classic Greens and Grays in some way, or for them to at least echo the spirit of older sci-fi back when special effects for aliens basically consisted of simple prosthetics and funky colors of makeup.

But Greens and Grays don't have much to work with for character customization! And if we weren't careful, we'd end up crashing into Andorians from Star Trek or Mantis from the MCU.

The big black eyes of course made us think of insects, so we market-tested down those lines. Turns out, people don't like the idea of playing as a bug, if it gets too insectile. And it got insectile pretty quick.

We had to stick to relatively humanoid shapes, so that we can share all the clothing and other assets across all of them. For a small studio, having eight times the load on every player animation, piece of clothing, or hairstyle would be prohibitive. We knew that players would probably be a bit unhappy about this, because everyone loves variety, but it's just a reality of development.

You've only seen "basic crafting" so far, and it's not even complete yet. So let's start this article with a brief overview of the sections for crafting.

ACQUIRE THE RECIPE

Recipes are known by everyone (with rare exceptions). But having the skill to actually craft that recipe is something you have to unlock by climbing one or more of the Artisan skill tree branches. Once you know how to craft something, you go to the next step.

CHOOSE YOUR INGREDIENTS

Different resources have different characteristics. The recipe you're building will result in an item that is greatly influenced by the characteristics of the ingredients you choose to use. For example, using Aluminum in a tool might influence its weight, but using Titanium will make it stronger, and Cobalt might change the appearance of the weapon in interesting ways. Additionally, the Titanium (for example) that you find on "Rodin IV" might differ significantly in statistics from the Titanium you find on "Gaiamar".

Once you've decided which resources to use, you'll use the basic crafting system to make the item. After it's created, it is stamped with your Maker's Mark and you're done with the basics.

At this point, you've already made some appearance choices, depending on the ingredients you chose and how they are applied to the item. (For example, that laser pistol barrel that you used Cobalt for might have a blue sheen to the metal, whereas if you made it from Iron instead, it might appear a gunmetal grey. Did you choose wood or metal to make the pistol grip? Etc.)

You then either collect the basic item you made…or you can try and make it into something truly special.

ARTISAN CRAFTING

When you decide to push your design forward with more effort, you enter into the Artisan Crafting section. There's a lot to this section, but suffice it to say that what you're doing here is tinkering with the design and trying to find ways to make the device more efficient, the widget stronger or lighter weight, or the clothing more durable (as examples).

The process isn't foolproof and you might even end up destroying the item you're working on, but the goal is to make something that's a standout achievement, a truly Artisan-level item.

Once you're successful at that, then you finally get the option to fine-tune the appearance of that Artisan item.

ARTISAN ITEM APPEARANCE CUSTOMIZATION (THE STRETCH GOAL!)

Your device is already stamped with your Maker's Mark, but there's a lot more you can do to customize the appearance of your items.

Every crafted item has regions on it that can be visually customized with appearance paints, dyes, and you can even select from textures. It doesn't matter if you're making a power station, a shirt, a quantum rifle, or a starship engine, you can craft the appearance to be the way you want it at this point.

From clothing to weapons to tools, you can colorize and texture your items extensively.

There may also be some modular aesthetic choices you can make as well (like swapping out a barrel or power supply style, or having a high collar on a coat instead of a low one).

Everything can be aesthetically customized…even building tiles.

When you're done with all of your aesthetic choices, you can then name your item, and write a description for it, all of which will be available for your customers to see if you sell it to them (or just to make you grin when keeping it for yourself).

Since players are always interested in both stats AND appearance, and because you, the crafter, get experience based on how often a player uses the items you create, it is absolutely in your best interest to create things that are strongly appealing to other players.

These aesthetic and lore elements you add to your items will definitely assist you in the goal of becoming a world-reknown crafter.

We did a deep dive into extreme modular functionality, but the crafting process
was inordinately complicated and the art burden was just too great. Maybe next game. 😉

By Kurt Larson

In the first post I outlined our overall approach to audio and why we do it that way. With all that in mind, here we can take a deeper dive.

DETAILS

Within the over-arching role audio plays in a game, different layers of audio have different jobs, goals, and effects. I'll talk about some of them here:

SFX

TOOLS AND WEAPONS

Audio for tools and weapons reinforces and rewards player agency. I believe that when the player is doing something with their (character's) hands, the feedback should be rich and rewarding. For this reason I am putting special attention and much resources into this component. For featured, often-used sounds such as this, it is very important to provide a great deal of variation to avoid the sound becoming tiresome. This is mainly achieved through randomization, and layering, and just having many different versions of a sound available.

For something like the Excavator beam sound, I have several different layers set up. Each time you turn the beam on, all seven layers play. But each layer has twenty-or-so different variations. Each of these is chosen at random by the sound engine each time you turn the beam on. Even with just two layers, that would be 400 slightly-different-sounding variation. With seven layers, it's 1.28 billion variations. They all sound recognizably similar, but never exactly the same, so your brain doesn't stick on the exact sameness and make you feel distracted.

Sounds which are non-continuous, such as gunshots, are easier, because you just fire the group of sounds and you're done. Most of the fine-tuning work comes with continuous, looping sounds, like our beam tools. (Excavator, Harvester, heat and freeze rays, etc.) This is where repetition becomes a problem to be solved. Even though variations are chosen at random, if we just looped those variations, after a while you'd start to notice a recurring, repetitive pattern. So for most of the layers, I took a long evolving varying sound and cut it into many sections of between 3 and 8 seconds each. Then one of those is randomly chosen, played, and cross-faded into the next randomly chosen one, and so on. You may, if you listen carefully, recognize little details which you've heard before, but it will likely never play in exactly the same pattern twice. It's not impossible, but by the time it does, you would likely not remember having heard that exact pattern before. Repetition in audio is only a problem when it grabs your attention.

CREATURES

Audio for creatures, especially creatures which interact with the player, is a huge and important undertaking. As our creature design is still evolving, and since we have been focusing on weapons and interactive objects, enemies in Stars Reach do not currently have any audio. But we are thinking about it.

Most creature vocalization audio in most games and movies is built up using recordings of real-life animals. No matter how alien or supernatural or bizarre the creature is, people respond best when they have at least some sort of recognizable sound as a starting point. (Think Chewbacca) I'd like to go beyond that a bit, but not so far that the voices of the creatures no longer speak to the player. One thing I intend to try is blending real-world animal sounds with completely other types of sounds, using a convolution reverb. (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/newsLetter/Convolution-Reverb.jsp)

I also want to try to give each of our creatures its own emotional profile. Like a personality, but more primal. The key here again will be variations. With footsteps you can get away with eight or even five. (I usually use twenty) With vocalizations it's better to have at least 30. The general rule I have observed is: the more personality a sound has, and the more it speaks to the player, the more variations you need.

UI

User Interface sounds are the ones you will hear the most. Counter-intuitively they require the least variation. Why?

My sense of it is that UI sounds are pure abstractions. They represent abstract concepts and actions which are, crucially, not representing something "physically" happening in the game world. It also helps that they are usually very short. As such, hearing the identical same sound every time you open a particular window may not be the best possible sound design, but it is often good enough. Even if you go for a very organic sound set, like, small wooden doors, drawers, and latches being opened and closed, for example, you still can tolerate a fairly high degree of repetition. In fact, the need for close similarity between the variations is quite high for UI audio. Each sound is a symbol for an abstract concept, like opening an inventory window or hitting an 'OK' button, and as such it needs to reliably signal the intended concept. Our UI sounds try to use the same sound for similar things, such that opening a window will always sound similar, but quite different from, say, hitting a 'Confirm' button.

BGA – BACKGROUND AMBIENCE

Background Ambience is all the layers of sound which represent the physical environment in which the character is located. Stars Reach provides a tremendous opportunity to create intricate, intimate background ambience which can continuously change, smoothly and meaningfully. Whereas a more classic game might only have a stereo background track which changes to a different one when you cross the border between the Ice Zone and the Lava Zone, the worlds of Stars Reach are continuously changing and evolving. Since they can be driven by naturally-patterned weather, environmental, and planetary data, and since we can tie all those data into the audio system, we can and will do things like:

• Around sunset, we can gradually cross-fade a strong afternoon wind with a gentle evening breeze
• As the player moves from a dry, desert environment to a higher-elevation forested biome, we can cross-fade different wind, start up some birds singing, turn on some light reverb-echo from the sound bouncing around in the trees, and you will likely hear some water flowing in some areas near streams.
• When rain happens, you'll hear it. Not just the rain sound starting up, but birds will mostly stop singing, wind will change, footsteps will take on a bit of a squelchy tone, etc.
• As one moves through different biomes; to a more humid or more dry area, subtle filtering changes can occur which can make all the audio sound slightly muffled or slightly crisper.
• Since our worlds will have seasons, our audio will respond according to the weather, temperature, humidity, and other data as the seasons change.

The possibilities are endless, but you get the idea. The important thing is that all this audio behavior can occur naturally, automatically, along with the evolving behaviors of our living worlds, rather than being pre-planned, scripted transitions.

In the third and final post, I'll talk about voice-over and music.

With all this attention to detail in our sound design, we are building an immersive and evolving audio experience that brings Stars Reach to life in a way that feels natural, dynamic, and deeply engaging. Every footstep, every tool activation, and every distant creature call is crafted to enhance the player's connection to the world.

But none of this happens without support. If you are as excited as we are about the depth we are bringing to Stars Reach, we need your help. Our Kickstarter is live, and backing us now means you will be a direct part of making this experience a reality.

By pledging, you are not just funding development. You are shaping a living and breathing universe where sound reacts, adapts, and evolves alongside you. Join us on this journey and help us push Stars Reach to the next level.

[Back us on Kickstarter today!] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starsreach/stars-reach

Every pledge counts, and we cannot wait to bring you more updates soon. Thanks for your support!