Stellaris' Uncomfortable Spotlights

Let's talk about sci fi, about 4X games, about Stellaris.

In my lifetime I have played a staggering number of 4X games. I even created 4X board games when I was a kid. It's a genre close to my heart, because I like building things and I like science fiction.

Most game genres have slowly matured. They have gone from simplistic simulations to more complex offerings that integrate many layers of player choice and interactive narratives. First person shooters started at Doom but matured into Mass Effect 3 and Just Cause 4. Sure, not everyone wants the added complexity of a cinematic universe, complex skills, construction, leveling, etc. But many people do, and those people have found these new games more rewarding and interesting than the "flat" old games.

4X games haven't done that. They're pretty much the same as they were with Masters of Orion, just with snazzier graphics. Stellaris is just another one in the chain, struggling to make its mark but refusing to step away from genre conventions that were outdated twenty years ago.

I'm not saying Stellaris is bad. Like many retro shooters, there is a place for oldschool games. The genre was invented to serve an itch, and the itch hasn't faded. But there are many of us that play 4X games because they are just vaguely close to what we want, like people that played Doom but wanted Mass Effect.

So let me creep up on the subject. Don't want to scare it off.

I knew I wouldn't like Stellaris too much, because all the marketing is about space battles. When it comes to 4X games, the space battles part is always weak. At first glance, it's odd how much focus these games always put on combat, since it funnels you into playing a warring species even if A) you don't want to and B) that makes no sense.

But the combat in these games plays two major roles, and the devs usually don't want to figure out a better way to accomplish those two roles, so they just keep combat in.

The obvious role is "meat gate". Other species, raiders, and passive alien hazards are all blockades that prevent you from just running roughshod over the whole galaxy. By forcing you to fight, the devs force you to spend time and resources on a navy. This means that non-warlike species don't have an overwhelming economic advantage - they still need to spend a lot of resources on their navy, even though it's not part of what they care about. This economic wall is a negative feedback loop that means star nations will expand at a similar rate regardless of their approach, which is a cheap and easy way to balance the game.

If you've played Stellaris, you probably already understand what I mean. There are a lot of random monsters, especially around high-value stars/black holes. These keep you cut off, force you to move slowly and settle for low-value stars. Eventually, you will need to use an expensive navy to fight those monsters. The earlier you do so, the more economic reward you get for having access to the high-value star and the more the science reward matters. It all balances out.

The other big role of combat is "storytelling". Humans are really great at weaving stories out of a few clear data points, and there's nothing clearer than a fight. We build a story in our head of our struggles against the Klarthians or whatever. This story keeps us connected to the situation, invests us in the universe. It gives the game punch.

It's easy to test this theory out: just play Stellaris after typing "invincible" into the console. You'll see how quickly the game falls apart. The pace and punch are gone, and it's just not very fun to play.

But I'm not holding that against Stellaris: every 4X game is like that. Stellaris has a few cool features to try and keep the game focused even in those situations, such as districts and such. But Stellaris is interesting because they accidentally stepped into my world, accidentally created a shadow of the game I actually want to play. A post-4X genre.

So, I settled on a big desert world named Dnar.

After a short while, my species evidently decided a desert world was a pain in the ass so, without asking (and without me having access to the tech) they genetically engineered themselves and called themselves "post-humans". Fine, neat!

This began what was obviously a scripted arc where tensions grew and then war bloomed between the standard humans and the post-humans. This is a really neat idea, meatily supported by the detailed population system, which allows for subcultures and subspecies to be clearly marked on the world maps. It was hampered by the way I didn't really get any options, couldn't really do anything. With every new event, the only option I had was "that's concerning".

Well, that was a bit disappointing, but it's a neat idea, right?

Here's the monkey wrench.

See, turns out Dnar wasn't an uninhabited world. There was a subterranean species and, after a short while, they joined me on the surface. Some kind of slug thing.

Then all the baseline humans left. The post-humans were suited to the desert environment, and the human-humans weren't, so all the human-humans just... left. Dnar was populated by post-humans and slug monsters only.

Still the scripted arc continued. The humans sabotaged the post-humans. The post-humans clashed with the humans.

But there were no humans. Everyone on Dnar was post-human or slug monster.

And there's the highlight.

This is real sci fi. This is where you let me shape the stories of whole populations, this is the story of people and places under the pressures of technology.

Of course it's all scripted and the script falls flat. It would have to: the setting is too diverse and chaotic to simply use a canned script.

But... you could use an algorithm.

The way the universe of Stellaris is set up, you know exactly what populations on what planets are what species, how happy they are, how strong their cultural drift is, and so on.

It would be possible to write an algorithm for how these species behave, how their events spool out.

The post-humans are considered travesties by the general population? But there's no general population on Gnar. The post-humans would have no outlet for that. Instead, it'd be about how they get along with the slug-monsters, with the human governor. How they emigrate.

Do they drift away from the core culture? Do they start to talk about succeeding from the empire? How does the governor deal with that? The president? The slug monsters?

To me, trying to govern that world, massage that situation is 100x as interesting as sticking pins in a map.

Now, that isn't to say that sticking pins in a map is bad, or even off the table. Sticking pins in a map is a great way to feel like you're part of the universe, a great way to manage your overall resources and the flow of your civilization. But the challenges and opportunities and complexities of a galactic empire stem from the isolation of space, the chaos of technology being adopted willy-nilly, the wealth and poverty to be found at each new colony...

That's the 4X game I want to play. One where you struggle to keep your empire intact. Not against the threat of war or random monsters from space, but from the simple threat of people under the pressure of technology. There's a huge space for this kind of game.

Come on let's twist again!

Let's talk about twists. If you want to know what caused this essay, watch minute 22 of this video, but there are mild SOMA spoilers.

I have a lot of experience with twists. There are times when I've had to pull a twist on two dozen people working together, all spending more time with the world than I spent creating it.

So let me tell you: the quality of the twist is not what matters. What matters is where the twist is.

A lot of people try to outsmart their audience, put in a twist they'll never be able to figure out. Hell, maybe SOMA does that in the end. But that's the wrong approach, because it's in the wrong place. It's like saying you're going to build a bigger and better boat to sail across the Himalayas.

The point of a twist is to shatter ground the audience thinks is solid, not to shatter something that the audience already thinks is broken. If the audience is struggling to figure things out, a twist isn't going to have much impact, because it's not a twist. It's just another piece of the puzzle.

For example, if I write a story where the main character doesn't know who her father is, the audience will naturally consider each vaguely right-aged man in the story. If I drop hints about who her father is, they'll figure it out immediately. If I drop misleading clues, they'll feel annoyed that they were misled. No matter who the father ends up being, it's not really a very good twist because the audience is already on their toes searching for that mystery.

On the other hand, Star Wars has a very pedestrian "Luke, I am your father" twist. It's a bit too spoilered to still have the impact it had back then, but it had a fair amount of impact.

Nobody in the audience was thinking about Luke's father much. They thought they knew Luke and Vader's relationship. So the twist shattered that understanding and worked well.

You don't need a complex twist. You need a well-placed twist, to shatter things the audience thinks they understand.

This is especially important in science fiction stories, because magic science widgets are inherently unstable. Introducing a concept like warp drive or cloning automatically makes the audience grapple for a pattern and struggle to extrapolate. They are reaching out for everything they can find, and a twist won't even make them blink. They'll just be happy they found another piece of the puzzle.

That is, if you mention clones or androids in your story, the audience will automatically consider whether any given person might be a clone or android. If you mention psychic powers, the audience will search for things that might be psychic. If your twist is related to a sci fi concept, it's not a twist because the audience will never be on truly solid ground.

That's why worthwhile sci fi tends to fall into a few categories:

1) Extrapolations
Extrapolate faster than the audience, and you can leave them amazed at the wonders your story holds. In order to do this, you'll need a new concept or a new take on a concept, since if the audience has seen it before, they'll have extrapolated it before. A good example of this is the Foundation series.

2) The Human Twist
The most reliable way to put a twist into a sci fi story is to put the twist on the human side rather than the sci fi side. This is why nearly every sci fi story reveals that a person is something they don't appear to be. A robot, a time traveler, the inventor of space dust, a double agent, etc.

The audience will feel more comfortable with the human side of your story than the sci fi side, and they'll usually stop looking for human-side twists. Sci fi stories can get away with human-side twists more easily than other genres specifically because the audience will be focused on the razzle-dazzle magic science half of the story.

But be careful about revealing that someone is actually a robot, because that's been done. A lot.

3) The Thematic Twist
Another popular way to put a twist into a sci fi story is to set it up with a stinger that changes the audience's perspective. A very common, trashy way to do this is to reveal that your far-future space opera is actually in the past and now the heroes have just become Adam and Eve. It's a good example, I guess, but it's really overdone.

A razor-sharp twist at the end of the story can reframe the entire story and leave it lodged in your mind for a long, long time. However, this is extremely difficult to do. If the audience can guess the twist, it won't work, and if the audience thinks the twist is an ass-pull, it won't work. The only way to pull this off is to have a twist which fits into the theme of the world rather than the logic of the world.

A good example of this might be the Ghost in the Shell story where pleasure bots start going ballistic and the team has to figure out why. Rather than a terrorist, it turns out that the bots were being sabotaged by corporate slaves that desperately wanted a rescue. There's not much in the story to help you "predict" that, but it's not a murder mystery, so that's fine. The theme of GitS supports this kind of story, and therefore it doesn't feel like an ass-pull.

I do not recommend aiming for thematic twists unless your world has a very strong theme.

4) Muddy Themes
A lot of sci fi stories are built around a "moral". For example, during the sixties every sci fi movie had the moral "scientists shouldn't tamper in god's domain". However, sci fi with a moral is typically excruciatingly bad.

Instead, consider thematic mud. Not only is it easier to write, it's also easier to watch.

See, thematic mud doesn't have to be something that is foreshadowed or deeply rooted. All you need to do is cast light on different sides of the story, or on things outside the main story line that are affected by the main story. This casts mud into an otherwise straightforward experience.

For example, the original Alien movie wasn't simply "alien kills humans". The theme was muddied by a corporation trying to sacrifice the crew and an android betrayal. This became a staple of the Aliens universe, and is a big reason it remains so popular: the muddy themes give it a much wider story space than a universe where all the humans are always heroes and all the aliens are simply villains.

Obviously, this is pretty common. The original Frankenstein novel shows the monster in a sympathetic light. Vader's depth comes from knowing he is Luke's father. Nearly every hero is written flawed so we can feel this same muddy sense.

By spraying a bit of mud into the theme, you can engage the audience more and create a better environment for fanfiction.

5) Justifications
Create a world (typically a terrifying one). As the people within the world become more and more desperate, the audience will become more and more assured that they understand what is going on, although they may not understand why. Then you introduce a justification which gives the in-world characters some concrete direction and flips the audience's understanding upside-down.

For example, a more memorable Star Trek episode is the one where Crusher is watching the Enterprise slowly shrink. People are vanishing, and eventually it's just her in a race against a collapsing universe. There is no foreshadowing of the twist - the authors didn't go "oh, hey let's go into WARP hey there was a bit of a WARPY WARP WARP malfunction in the WARP BUBBLE which you know COLLAPSES SLOWLY after you WARPY WARP but everything is oooookay".

Instead, they just let the tension rise, let the audience get comfortable with the world, and then revealed that it was a warp jump malfunction. They didn't need to outsmart the audience, or leave bread crumbs so the audience could figure it out. It's not a murder mystery. They just waited patiently for the right time, then let Crusher discover the justification for her adventure.

This gave Crusher something to grab, and the episode launches into a pretty tense race against a disappearing universe. The audience, now understanding that this is a warp drive malfunction, immediately begins thinking in the same way as Crusher: "What do we do to get out of this? Can we restart the warp core? What is the solution!" And the pacing of the final race is such that Crusher discovers ideas at roughly the same speed as the audience, similar to an extrapolation sci fi story on fast-forward.

It doesn't matter that it's basically nonsense, or that the phenomena is never brought up again. The pacing is fast enough to keep the general audience from being able to think that deeply.

Justifications are extremely common. Nearly every sci fi horror story is a justification story. The trick to remember is that your reveal switches your story from whatever it was to a race to extrapolate faster than the audience.

For example, in the Thing, the justification is revealed pretty early. The extrapolation is incredibly dense, though, because of the nature of the challenge. Therefore, an hour can be spent on stretching that extrapolation out just like a murder mystery, and at the end you may still be left with questions!

Terminator is similar, except that instead of a murder mystery it's an action movie. The movie continually reveals new powers for the Terminator, but each power makes perfect sense: the movie extrapolates what a robot from the future would be able to do, just a little faster than the audience will probably manage. Yeah, future robot can see better than we can. Survive getting hit by a car. Has metal underneath his skin. Can remove and repair his eye. Can imitate a voice. Terminator 2 is exactly the same technique, but with a more advanced robot that can be extrapolated with more breadth.

SOMA was likely trying to fall into this category, but they attempted to foreshadow their "twist". The problem is: it's not a twist. It's a justification. They needed to reveal it when the player started to feel comfortable with the rules of their situation. Then they needed to launch into a series of extrapolations where they reveal more and more of the things the justification can do to the world.

...

That's my thinking on twists.

How to Sci Fi

Using "deep sci fi" elements makes your stories more powerful, more memorable, and more easy to write. I think the only reason people avoid using deep sci fi in their games and comics is because they've never really known a good way to do it. So.

Deep sci fi. By the numbers.

What is Deep Sci Fi

A huge numbers of games and comics use sci fi trappings. Robots, cybernetics, space ships. And that's fine. Those are fun.

Deep sci fi is what gave science fiction its original staying power. It's what created those sci fi trappings. And it's pretty easy to tap for your own purposes!

Fundamentally, sci fi is about people living in very unusual situations. Sometimes those situations might be completely fanciful. Other times, those situations reflect a piece of our culture, refined and amplified. Normally, the latter is considered more powerful, and sci fi trappings are built specifically to allow us to easily move our current society into a future where pieces of it can be examined individually.

For example, the concept of robots and androids are a powerful way to discuss race, immigration, economy, and the nature of work. Space ships can offer some similar discussions on other concepts, but are more about allowing us to easily compartmentalize our world - we can simply say that all the pieces of our culture we don't want to examine are someplace other than the space ship.

These tools allow us to quickly and easily put people into compelling situations.

Deep sci fi is about exploring what those lives are like. It is about exploring the limits of the human condition by putting humans in weird conditions.

Setting Up Sci Fi

At this stage, you probably have some idea about the kind of sci fi world you want to build. Is it some kind of cyborgs-in-cities adventure, like Deus Ex? Is it a tale of huge starships at war? Or a small crew of people trapped on the moon? Or engineered monsters fighting against fridge-wearing supersoldiers?

Even if you aren't thinking in terms of deep sci fi, those seeds already exist. When you choose the kind of situation you want your audience to experience, you have already chosen a deep sci fi topic. You just need to make it clear to yourself.

There's no need to be clever or unique or savvy. Just find what you're focusing on.

In a world like Deus Ex, where the people have become cyborgs and work for huge corporations, you're probably trying to focus on the nature of the daily grind and how people coexist with large corporations. This sounds like an overly simple foundation for the sprawling, epic gun-adventure you might want to build, but it provides a strong foundation for your writing.

Understanding that this is about how people coexist with large corporations allows you to easily build your key characters by simply designating them as in different kinds of relationships with the corporation and having different kinds of reactions to that.

Your main character is bound to the corporation not wholly by choice, having signed a contract that brought her in deeper than she thought. Now she finds herself a tool of the corporation in a literal sense, flesh replaced by mechanisms.

Then keep up the brainstorming.

Another character is bound in the same way, but the corporation saved their life and they are happy with the situation. Another character is seemingly bound to the corporation, but has such a high rank that it is her tool rather than the other way around. Another person is a chair on the corporate board but has no implants and is not bound to it. Another is working on implants and is bound to the corporation through high-security zones and reams of red tape rather than required maintenance. Others are not bound to corporation, and find themselves struggling to stay unfettered in a world where corporations are almost a requirement to get work, health care, money. And yet others are bound to the corporation by their need for maintenance, but do not work for the corporation - wealthy ones that can afford the best, poor ones that suffer greatly when they fail to make this month's payments, and ones that are bound up in the system and are "covered"... as long as they can keep their job, which is strongly pushing for them to turn themselves into tools and therefore be bound ever more deeply...

These simple relationships aren't hard to brainstorm. While some of the scenario is written into these assumptions - for example, we're assuming the corporation is not terribly ethical - there is no "plot" here. But you can already see how the plot might evolve as these characters and their activities bounce into each other. Each character is also written as a shadow of a character. We don't know exactly what their job is, or exactly what their feelings are. Those things, too, will evolve when things start to move.

You can easily repeat this process for every kind of setting you might be interested in.

Are you making an epic space military game, something like Homeworld or Mechwarrior? You're probably exploring the nature of war, or examining pieces of our current militaries. There's a lot of easy characters there, as well. Simply defining someone as "an admiral" is already more meaningful than before, because you know this is an admiral that exists to help explore the nature of war. So you know that, in the end, he's going to weigh in on topics like civilian casualties, the weight of soldier's lives, and how politics/money enters the equation. He's not simply going to be "good" or "bad". He's not simply going to come up with masterful strategies. He has more important things to talk about as well.

All of these kinds of thoughts do come with a price tag.

They make your writing easier, more compelling, and more memorable... but they do require you to show some opinions. You don't need to try to hammer your opinions home - that'd be counterproductive - but your opinions will naturally shine through. You might think this is problematic, but take a look at the best selling big games. They tend to have opinions. It's okay. You're allowed to reveal some part of yourself through your art. It's kind of what makes it art.

Building With Sci Fi

Well, you're brainstorming your setting. You're thinking about writing standards. What's your first act? Your second? What's the twist? What's the arc? What's the-

Stop!

The thing about formulas is that they exist for the same reason we're developing right now. Formulas and scaffolds allow you to direct your efforts effectively, and write efficiently. It's hard to follow two formulas at once, so let's talk about a sci fi formula in specific.

The point is to give your story enough structure to make it compelling. We're not about ticking checkboxes - this won't make your story formulaic.

Finding Peace

Deep sci fi starts when someone is not at peace, and ends when they are. It doesn't matter whether it's a 1000-page book or a half-hour episode of an endless series. The easiest way to show how someone lives in a strange situation is to show them struggling to live in a strange situation. This is structurally similar to a heroes' journey, but it's easier to think of it in this way.

In Blade Runner, Deckard is called back to work for his old bosses. His peace is disturbed and he is sent out to do something dangerous and annoying. At the end of the movie, Deckard runs off with a beautiful robot, at peace with his choice and with the short time they will have together.

It's an extremely simple arc. Does Deckard "learn" anything? Does he change? Does he grow?

Maybe. Maybe not. It doesn't really matter: sci fi is not about the people growing or changing. It's about them living.

In Star Trek, every episode is about something disturbing the peace of the Enterprise - an SOS, a space wedgie, a sudden vacation, a nightmare, a warship. At the end of the episode, peace is achieved. In most episodes, twin arcs are used - an "A" and "B" plot, each of which is about striving for resolution in its own way.

In a cyborg game like Deus Ex, your peace is disturbed when you find yourself beholden to the corporation. What are some potential resolutions?

This is the easy part. Because sci fi is about exploring the human condition, "peace" is all about the kinds of peace people actually find. And there's not many options.

Death, falling, passing the torch, gaining a family, taking on an important job, or returning to old habits are the most common options.

In our cyborg game, death would mean the main character sacrifices herself or decides to leave the corporation even though she will die without its maintenance. Falling would be continuing to work for the corporation, or getting promoted. Passing the torch might be if she retires but a child she saved takes over. Gaining a family would be if she finds someone to love, adopts a kid, or remembers who her family was before the operation. Taking on an important job would be if she decides to fight to fix the system, or is promoted and decides to reform the company, or becomes a doctor, etc. Returning to old habits would require we establish old habits in the first place, but it's pretty straightforward.

Not all characters have to find peace. Only the main character. Others can take it or leave it, it really doesn't matter from a structural perspective. Similarly, they don't have to find a peace that somehow matches up to how they lost it: Deckard found peace in love, but his lost peace is contract work. You really have to squint to relate those.

So, when you are developing your story, figure out how their peace is lost, and figure out how they attain peace in the end.

The Engine

You have one or more main characters worked out, with their lost and found peace jotted down in pencil. Now you need something to give your story mass and shape.

The twist?

Thinking of a good twist is hard, and it's probably not worth it, because it'll be spoiled by the box art and the headline of the first review. Nope!

The engine.

What we need is an in-world conceit that shapes all our interactions. The key here is that the engine is not something which grants physical powers. It's something which grants specific relationships.

In our Deus-Exlike, the engine is the maintenance drug that only the corporation can provide. It binds everyone to the corporation, and instantly creates a ton of relationships. But - here's the kicker - it's a standin for ordinary corporate dependence.

The maintenance drug is a way to purify and amplify our real relationship to corporations. Our inability to choose another ISP or power provider. Our inability to leave our day job. Our inability to get away from our landlord. Our willingness to buy the next Apple product. Being forced to use Microsoft Word. Or, more darkly, being forced to obey increasingly aggressive policing, both physical and digital. Being forced to stay quiet despite the exploitation and destruction corporations cause. Otherwise, the company will take you to court and crucify you.

In Star Wars, the engine is the Force. It's basically magic, but the exact way it manifests forms the beating heart of the Star Wars universe. You can certainly argue that Star Wars isn't "proper sci fi", but it does have a good engine inside it. Like a moped with a rocket on the back. The Force allows us to amplify the concept of good and evil, of duty and personal responsibility.

In Star Trek, the engine is the starship itself. Starships occupy a very unusual place in that universe, because they are all large and owned by benevolent (or disinterested) governments. The Enterprise has a hilarious amount of freedom to do absolutely anything, and it's backed by the almost endless resources of the Federation. This allows us to build a setting in which benevolence can shine: good people are empowered as a default. Therefore, a lot of Star Trek is about exploring different definitions of "good".

The engine cannot be easily escaped. It forces people to do things, it gives some people power over others.

You may already have an idea for what your engine is. It can be anything that pushes people into new relationships. Anything that makes people band together and split apart. This will give you your cement, because it will guide your characters together and also tell you what kind of friction they will create.

... You can still put in a twist if you like, but it's just not as important.

Filling in the Stones

With an engine and a list of characters, we can start to see shapes form between the characters. "The corporation" never does anything. One of the characters with leverage over the corporation uses it as a tool. "An asteroid on route to earth" never does anything. Instead, it's the pressure and panic that causes the characters to do things.

Our main character works for the corporation, bound to it by reliance on the maintenance drug. This automatically creates friction between them and their bosses, between them and ordinary people. "Why are you doing these bad things?" some kid on the street asks her. She would stop if she could! She would stop. She tells herself.

The drug cannot be easily escaped. It gives your bosses power over you. And, in a way, it gives you power over everyone else - your advanced cyberware is only possible due to that drug.

In Star Trek, our space ships empower us. They give us the strength to push our concepts of "good", to resist or protect other people pushing their own versions. The Klingons think it is good for the strong to rule. The Vulcans think it is good for pure logic to win out. The Ferengi think that the greatest good is profit. Everyone is trying to be good, and our engine (ships/benevolent bureaucracy) give us all the power to push and shove and fight.

So, if we want to do an episode of Star Trek, we simply start with an A plot and a B plot. Let's say... Data's peace is lost when he installs an emotion chip. It is regained when he uninstalls it. The peace of the ship itself is lost when we fall for an ambush and find ourselves floating powerless in a nebula. It is restored when we defeat the Klingon and sail away. Very simple plot!

The stepping stones. Data's exploring the idea of "good" as an emotional response. This conflicts with the more nuanced and stable ideas of "good" put forth by the other members of the crew, but their concept of "good" does include the freedom to explore your own ideals. So Data moves through the episode conflicting with each character in turn, and each getting slightly more annoyed in turn. Each one gets to explain their idea of good, and how it conflicts with Data's idea.

So to do this, we just look at every combination and we write everything that comes to mind. Data's lower efficiency annoys Geordi, whose idea of "good" involves functioning well. Data's fear annoys Riker, whose idea of "good" involves bravery. Data's rage annoys the captain - no, wait, that's one option, but perhaps a better idea is if the captain represents the "good" of exploring your own ideals. So Data would attempt to remove the chip, and that would annoy the captain. Data's new emotions confuse him, so he sees Deanna, and she tries to cheer him up...

Why limit it to the crew? Data fights Klingons, who are impressed by his anger and prowess. Data talks to Klingons, and they are annoyed by his mechanical nature before he puts the chip in, and annoyed by his fear and weakness when he finally does put the chip in. Data gets into a fiery argument with a Klingon.

These are stones for one of the plots. Not everything is staunchly related to the engine of starships/benevolent bureaucracies. Not everything is related to the concept of "good". Those are simply underlying things which make it easy to come up with some of the stones.

There's not really an order to them, although there are some orders that make more sense than others.

You can come up with a similar set of stones for the plot about the ambush.

Enterprise tries to do its kind of good: rescuing people. Klingons try to do their kind of good: proving their strength and capturing trophies. Enterprise tries to be innovative and hold on. What are some specific encounters? Well, in this case it tends to come together rather more chronologically for me.

Enterprise tries to rescue "damaged" Klingon warbird. "Injured" Klingons beam aboard and try to take the ship. When that fails, there's a fight and the Enterprise is badly damaged. It runs into the nebula, where it loses power and drifts. Klingons try to hunt it down. Enterprise wins.

Coming up with things that can happen during the fight is kind of fun, although not very deep. Enterprise vents atmosphere to change course. Enterprise vents fuel and then blows it up. Someone - captured Klingons or crew - tries to build a radio and call for help using some other power source such as a phaser. Electrical storms cause damage to the Enterprise, but then become part of the critical final plan.

This method of brainstorming isn't anything new or impressive, but these scenarios look great tacked up on a wall.

Bridgebuilding

Now it's simply a matter of putting the stones down in an order that makes sense, and linking them together. But this is also where deep sci fi shines.

Often, these mini-scenarios have an obvious order to them. The Klingons can't get annoyed by Data's cold-fish demeanor after he's put in the chip, so that has to come first. The ship can't drift into a the nebula before it gets attacked.

But frequently, the setpieces and events you come up with won't have any obvious order to them. Does it matter whether Riker or the Captain gets annoyed at Data first? Does it matter whether we suffer from a damaging electrical storm before or after Data talks to Deanna?

You can put them in some order, and it'll make sense.

But nobody will remember either event.

I'll give you three methods to link events up when there's no obvious order. This is not just a way to arbitrarily stack things: this is a way to make the themes and characters shine very brightly, because they all hold together.

Tick Tock

The first thing to do is to separate your ticking clocks. Ticking clocks are extremely powerful. Introduce them early, and resolve them late. A ticking clock adds a massive amount of tension, and every moment that happens within a ticking clock has more weight. Moreover, actions can be taken to try and resolve or extend the ticking clocking throughout its span, giving you an easy inspiration for additional events.

Our most obvious ticking clock is the electrical storm - the ship can only take so much zapping. Do we have any others?

Sure, how about when the Klingons invade the Enterprise to try and capture it? There's a struggle to find and contain them before they can damage the ship or hurt crew. Similarly, when the Enterprise takes a beating and warps into the nebula, we can make that a ticking clock to escape the weapons range of the Klingons. Whether a ticking clock is five seconds or five hours, it adds weight.

Ticking clocks are the "Dragonball charge-up scene" of sci fi.

Thematic Cause and Effect

The next thing you want to do is find the thematic links between events. For example, Data's steadily unraveling nerves are similar to the disintegrating ship. While Data's nerves are not a hard enough limit to be a good ticking clock, we can echo his mental state by using the grinding, sparking lightning storm. When Data says he's not sure how much more he can take, the ship judders and sparks fly out of a wall panel. You could even cut away to show the lightning storm from the outside, growing stronger.

Basic rule, though: don't cut away and then immediately cut back to where you were. That's a bit on-the-nose.

Echoes like this are very powerful. Cut between characters to contrast or support each. In our Deus-Exlike, our avatar is brought down by a debilitating lack of drug. We could cut away to show the loyal employee injecting himself, or we could not cut away, but instead have our avatar fall off the building and land in an alley full of discarded limbs.

Both work well - you don't have to worry about being too obvious, because too obvious is just about right.

In these situations, you have the opportunity to advance another thread during a cutaway. If we cut to the loyal guy injecting himself, then we should be advancing loyal guy's thread. On paper, whether that scene happens before or after your fall is unimportant. In the actual experience of the game, the thematic power of him advancing while you fall is very powerful. People will remember it: it's not simply that one came before the other. Thematically, your fall caused his ascent, even though the two were not related in any in-world causal way.

Ticking Callbacks

Most of your stuff should have a pretty concrete order at this point. Ticking clocks form strong bounding boxes, and within those boxes come the thematic cause-and-effect. And, of course, the fact that some things directly cause or predate others.

You may still have some floating bricks. You may be too sparse and need to come up with more detail. It's time for the Ticking Callback.

Ticking clocks are a call to action for everyone affected by them. As long as you have a ticking clock, you can show any scene of someone trying to fix it or delay it and it'll work perfectly. It's so easy, in fact, that you can also easily tie it into your themes, character progressions, and setpieces without raising the bar much.

You can embed events into the ticking clock by making them about the ticking clock. Geordi's annoyance at Data's new inefficiency is most powerful if it happens within a ticking clock, so it can be an event where Geordi is trying to reduce the damage from the lightning storm. Because there is a ticking clock, the scene fits in great, and now has a powerful explanation as to why Geordi is so annoyed.

But that's not the limit of our ticking clock integration. Oh, not even close.

See, whenever you create a scene to try and thwart the ticking clock, you have to create another scene where you use that exact same method for other purposes. This is absolutely required: a freefloating ticking clock scene is not very powerful, and sticks out badly.

If Geordi gets angry at Data as they attempt to armor the ship against lightning storms, good, that's scene one. But it's not very memorable on its own, and has no feeling of resolution. Geordi's little arc doesn't find peace.

So we come back to it. At the end of the encounter, the Klingons are getting close. How does the Enterprise defeat them? By turning the storm against them using the same technique that failed because Data was too confused and slow. Even if Data doesn't come up with the solution, it's fine: Geordi can say "hey, Data, remember when you made that storm worse?" And then the two of them can share face-splitting evil grins.

You can also set this up in the opposite order. If you think of a cool level or scene (the Enterprise vents fuel and lights it on fire!) you can set that up with a ticking clock action (someone discovers heat makes the lightning storms worse). However, keep in mind that the setup needs to be thematically linked in. In this case, we can link it in by having Data and Geordi have a spat about it.

This is just another way of setting up a Chekhov's Gun, but this method is powerful and easy.

For our Deus-Exlike example, we have a ticking clock of running out of drug. We attempt to resolve it by raiding a company warehouse, only to find that the inventory document was a lie: the warehouse is full of illegal robots that are far more dangerous and fun to shoot at. Later, we have the opportunity to unleash those robots on the corporation to create enough chaos and cause enough damage to let us accomplish a more important goal.

Final

These approaches are built to help create a compelling story. They are flexible enough to accommodate the "cool setpieces" approach to sci fi writing, and also strong enough to let you link things together even when your boss dictates that level 2 and level 7 should be swapped.

To recap:

Figure out what aspect of today's society you are amplifying, and create characters that interact with that.

Figure out an "engine" to drive how people relate to each other, and who has power over who.

Figure out at least one main character: how do they lose their peace? What kind of peace do they attain in the end?

List a lot of cool interactions and setpieces and figure out how they interact with those ideas.

Find your ticking clocks. Start them early, end them late.

Figure out which scenes can thematically descend from or echo which scenes.

Fill out your roster with Checkov's Guns built inside the ticking clocks. Make sure the setups involve your original concerns, and the second half should be a turnaround.

Don't bother with a twist unless it's REALLY good.

Now you have a killer sci fi story that is both compelling and deep.

Science Fiction Corridors

I've been trying to up my science fiction interiors game for a while, ever since I learned to model interiors. So I guess it's fortunate that I stumbled across this and this and this.

It's a corridor-centric bunch of links, so let's talk about corridors. We can talk other kinds of interiors on other days.

The first thing to realize is that science fiction corridors rarely exist in a vacuum. Or, uh, I guess they're technically more likely to be in a vacuum than any other kind of corridor, but what I mean is that they are modeled on existing visuals.

You can try to create a corridor which "makes sense" for your science fiction environment, but in the end you're creating fiction. You have no specific physical constraints. Your corridors could be made out of Cheetos. But, because your environment is trying to have a specific feel and specific implications, you try to make your corridors make sense for your setting.

In some cases, this is a physical thing. The corridors in 2001 were the inside of a spinning disk, a unique structure that captured the physical idea of spinning space stations. Similarly, the lower decks in Alien's space ship looked just like steam tunnels because they were supposed to be steam tunnels. The organic tunnels in the alien ship in the same movie were that way because it was what organic tunnels would probably look like.

Normally, science fiction interiors (and corridors in specific) are instead designed to feel right. They aren't physically reflecting a physical role in the physical reality of the setting, they're physically reflecting an emotional role.

For example, some corridors in Alien are octagonal, with a lot of weird, puffy striations. It's nonsense to have padded tunnels, but I don't think anyone ever complained, because it fit. It was a disquieting feeling - claustrophobic shape combined with unsettling geometries. Just enough to make everything creepy, not so much that it felt unreasonable.

With this in mind, many science fiction corridors clone from existing architecture a lot more aggressively. Some feel like bureaucratic office spaces from the fifties. Others feel like libraries, or industrial complexes. By punching up real-world architecture, you get both a believable layout and an implicit emotional connection to the source. Later Alien movies used this a lot, not to keep talking about Alien all the time.

Emotional connection is the word of the day, and that's why the actual shape of the corridor is only one of the pieces of the puzzle. Lighting is another big piece. If possible, sound, motion, and interactive bits are also useful in establishing a good emotional feel. As an easy example: sunlight streaming through a big side window can make a hallway seem extremely pleasant, even if the rest of the hallway is unimpressive. A small, blinking console on the wall can give a sense that a hallway exists in the universe for a reason, and is tied to the rest of the ship or station, and actually moves through time with the rest of the universe instead of simply being a prop.

That said, let's discuss some of the basic corridor philosophies.

Basic Shape

In the most general sense, the default corridor is rectangular, like every corridor you've ever seen. With normal proportions, these corridors don't inspire much claustrophobia. It is common to stretch them a bit, which typically makes them feel claustrophobic or restrictive. These kinds of stretched rectangular corridors are frequently used for rigid, authoritarian ships and stations to make them feel unbending.

Because any stretching on any axis tends to make these hallways intimidating, a lot of designers use asymmetry to break up that intimidation. This is typically a canted ceiling on large hallways or rooms. It makes it feel more like an airy loft than a dour government facility.

Tilted walls, both symmetrical and asymmetrical, are sometimes used. By angling the walls outward, you create more space at the top of the hall. Angle them inward for less space. Angling them in will feel claustrophobic, while angling them out will theoretically feel less claustrophobic, but in practice it feels a bit weird. This is why so many corridors in Star Trek are canted inwards, even though that theoretically makes them more claustrophobic, it makes them feel less authoritarian.

Vaulted ceilings are sometimes used to add extra headroom and make a hallway less oppressive. However, keep in mind that these are specifically vaulted, with struts and indents. A smooth curve at the top of the hallway has a very different, organic feel. We'll discuss the difference in more detail later.

A more common technique used a lot is to create bevels or angles on the walls. The secret to these is that the shoulder-height wall, ceiling, and floor all need to be orthogonal, but everything else is open to fiddling. By folding the tops and bottoms of the walls inward, you can create an octagonal hallway. By folding the top of the wall sharply outwards and then upwards again, you can create spacious headroom. Any combination of folds can be used for a variety of results, but in general these either make the hall feel more claustrophobic or less claustrophobic.

Probably the most common technique is to add organic curves to the walls.

It's pretty rare to use circular corridors. In reality, a lot of underground facilities use circular corridors, but in a movie or video game it feels pretty unnatural. Instead, the walls are typically parabolas of any arc you please. Most of the time, these parabolas are both vertically and horizontally symmetrical, with their widest point halfway up the corridor, but that's not required.

The three examples of organic curves on your walls that I would use are:

The Alien ship: a very organic look with large corridors that look like an esophagus or rib cage. You can use organic shapes to get an actual organic look, like this.

Star Trek wobbles between using inward-canted walls and organic curves depending on the set designer, but they both serve the same purpose: to make the corridors seem less authoritarian. This is necessary because the corridors are not decorated, and would appear spartan if they were square.

Many classic 60s movies such as Starcrash actually used angles that were wider than a circle would be. These create a slightly surreal look, and although it's arguable as to whether they create the same impression with everyone, to me they feel like they are under pressure, at the bottom of an ocean.

Wall and Ceiling Struts

Your basic hallway shape is not what you think it is. That is, nearly every science fiction corridor is made alternating segments - the wall shape and the "strut" shape.

There are plenty of science fiction corridors that don't have struts and are simply the wall shape. But these are typically oppressive, nightmarish corridors, and are designed to give no texture to the human eye. They aren't even utilitarian: they are flatly oppressive in the most aggressive way possible.

This is why nearly every corridor alternates a long and short shape - we'll call them "wall" and "strut".

The best example of this is the Star Trek corridor. Whether rounded or canted, all Star Trek corridors have struts. These are fairly subtle, usually the exact same shape as the wall, but simply scaled inwards a bit. If they want the ship to feel a bit more oppressive, the struts are more like supports, angled inward more aggressively at the top. This gives those corridors a heavier, more armored feeling. Either way, the struts are typically colored slightly differently from the rest of the hall - enough to give the hall texture, but not enough to make it feel candystriped.

As a side note, doors in Star Trek are typically flanked directly by struts, which is part of what gives Star Trek doors their unique "strong yet unobtrusive" feel.

Not all struts are what we might recognize as struts. Some corridors simply have two alternating hall segments of similar length - you can do anything you want.

But one thing to keep in mind is that the struts don't have to be the same shape or impression as the wall. Many corridors use struts to even out a more exotic hall shape. For example, if you have a weird, canted-out wall shape, you might use struts that don't cant out, and maybe even create a smooth line for the roof. In this way your alien-feeling primary shape is blunted by a more familiar secondary shape.

Even if you do have an unusual shape, such as a smoothly curved "keyhole" roof, you can make it feel less aggressive by breaking up the profile. To do this, you can simply make the struts a slightly different size.

You can also make the struts noncontinuous. For example, you might use heavy, padded grips as your "struts". They serve the same purpose, even though they don't exist as a separate structure. You could push out the struts, so that your primary walls are actually more narrow. There's a lot of things you can do.

In the end, though, remember that the struts are intended to be part of the hall. If you make them too aggressive and obvious, the hall will feel all chopped-up.

Direction, Connection, and Breaks

It's not just the cross-section of the hall that matters. It's also how the hall feels as you look down it.

Many sci-fi sets use rigidly straight halls because they're easier to build. Similarly, a lot of them use "fractured straights" - halls that go straight for ten meters, then suddenly end in a door. This is because indoor sets can only be so large. We're used to this, but let's discuss some alternatives.

Star Trek pioneered the use of the gentle curve. By creating curved hallways, they made it so that there's rarely more than 10m of hall visible, but rather than end, it just continues on at an angle you can't quite see from here. These gentle curves also made the ship feel more organic and less authoritarian. This is probably also the reason that the doors are always braced between struts: a flat door and a curved wall don't generally mesh very well.

An option that's hard for movies but easy for video games is the vertical curve, as seen in 2001. This curve upwards or downwards also keeps the halls from stretching very far on-camera, but it feels extremely alien.

Of course, this being a game, we can make our halls stretch on however far we want to. We can have miles of hall. But most people are not comfortable with how this looks, since we're not used to indoor areas that large. Even in real life, airports break up their long halls a bit.

One trick here is that our strut placement is typically a function of our maximum view range. In Star Trek there are struts about every 2-3m, because you can never really see more than 10-15m. In longer corridors, the segments are stretched out to give your eye the same amount of texture - otherwise, you lose your visual grip. So as you are walking down a long airport corridor, you'll see the "wall" areas (moving walkways with endless windows) interspersed every 80m or so with a "strut" area (a 5-10m 'room' with no moving walkways). Even though these strut areas serve no real purpose, they give structure to the long corridors.

The same thing is true in sci fi. If you have a 100m long steam pipe tunnel and you can see to the end, then your breaks are going to be spaced out much longer - pipe support braces every 15m, perhaps.

Providing structure to your hall is a critical part of the concept of struts, but struts are also not the only thing that provides structure. Another structural element are "wall breaks". These are areas which break your hall up by radically changing the profile. An example of this might be a rounded sitting gallery, or a glass veranda to let the sun in, or a small arcade. You can also clamp inwards, although this is a bit claustrophobic: computer towers, rubble, lowered ceilings, stairs leading up to a door in the upper part of the hall.

You can also break up your hallways with connections to other pieces of architecture. One handy trick is to simply have an intersection, either a T or a cross. Don't feel the other hall needs to have the same size as your hall: you can have it be much larger or smaller as your needs dictate. But large doors are also possible. Small doors break up the monotony, but large doors are landmarks as long as they are clearly visible. Security checkpoints are also a good way to make intersections seem more prominent - you can turn left, but there's a booth and a dude with a gun and a scanning checkpoint.

Anyway, the point of this is that you need to make your hallways seem like they exist. Long, unbroken hallways are extremely unwise. Use some kind of alternate hall structure (a "strut") to break it up and, if that's not gonna work, use wall breaks and intersections. These are also great ways to give your ship or base a real personality.

Sound

Sound is generally not discussed much, but I'll mention it in brief. There are three kinds of sound to consider.

One is ambient sound. What kind of sound do the ship's engines and generators produce? What about the life support? It's surprising how distinctive these sounds can be, and if you like, you can even vary them based on where you are in the ship - engineering has a distinct rattle due to its proximity to the generator, while the quarters has just the quiet hum of air filters. The noise of other crew members or active machinery should also be considered.

Another is footfall sound, or more generally the sound of moving through the space. In general, the louder the footfall sound, the more frantic the player will expect play to be. This is inherited from movies, where if you can hear people walking, it means you're hearing them run from monsters. We can relax that constraint a bit in video games, as the sound of your avatar's footfalls are pretty immersive. But you can go the Star Trek route, where the sound of uniforms rubbing together is louder than the actual footfalls. vip vip vip vip vip vip

The last one is the acoustics of the area. Most shows have studio acoustics because, uh, they're done in studios. No echo or blurring at all, unless it's some kind of cinematic setting. But in our video game, we can easily apply audio effects to create gentle environmental clues. Blurring or echoing is great, as is "wind whipping the words away" and other such effects. You don't have to apply them aggressively, just enough to make the hall feel like it exists.

In reality, footfalls and acoustics are the result of the shape and material of a hall. In video games, however, they're emotional triggers and you can play fast and loose.

Decorations

Decorations are what the walls are actually made of.

While some hallways are blank and flat, this is usually too oppressive and doesn't give the audience's eye anything to grip onto. Instead, most hallways have a variety of patterns that are applied to various walls to give the audience a visual grip.

In Star Trek these are fairly minimal, consisting of some gentle paneling and an occasional touchscreen. But there's more to it than that, because there's also lights, and most of the Star Trek corridors are defined mostly by their lights. Some corridors are aggressively blanketed in lighted panels from just above eye level all the way around to the other side. Others have recessed lights and LED strips. Either way they have studio lighting: we're not talking about the actual amount of light in the scene, but instead about the fact that the lighting panels themselves are a major component in the decoration of the hallways.

Most other science fiction franchises are more aggressive. Nonfunctional decorative doodles are frequently used, such as complex tile work, lots of touchscreens with different things randomly displayed, random wiggly padding segments, and so on. This sort of noise is easy to forgive, so feel free to play around.

Some harder sci fi franchises try to use functional or semifunctional decorations such as pipes or wires. Lockers, drawers, and other storage units are also very popular decorations, sometimes even being opened or accessed. Older shows frequently have speakers/PA units, button-pads, electrical switches, and other very functional parts, but modern science fiction tends to Apple it up and hide that stuff behind panels and in touchscreens.

One of the things a lot of designers overlook is the importance of giving depth to a hallway. You can get some depth out of your struts, but it's also quite possible to get depth out of your decorations. Grated floors and ceilings are probably the easiest, most fundamental method of doing this. Lights that protrude into the hallway are another way to do it, either hanging from the ceiling or tipped out from the top of the walls.

Grates in general are a powerful tool. If they lie flush with the wall, they imply that there is something behind the wall - air ducts, perhaps. But grates can also be a layer of wall in and of themselves. There's a lot of excuses to put grates in - you can hang wires through them, mount small equipment on them, protect delicate equipment behind them, and grab on to them if gravity fails.

Perhaps a more powerful tool is protrusions - for example, hand rails or similar. These rarely need to have any excuse to exist, and can be either horizontal or vertical with no problems. They can be bare or they can be integrated into the hallway in complex ways, such as supporting wires or having a "rotate to open" lock system attached to them.

When decorating, keep in mind that decorations are repeating themes, but aren't intended to completely saturate a hallway. Especially if your decorations are aggressive, consider alternating them out with other decorations. for example, not every Star Trek hallway segment has a touch screen. There are several varieties of subtle paneling and several kinds of doors it gets swapped out with. Similarly, sometimes they use eye-level variation and sometimes they use floor-level variation.

Even aggressive decorations such as steam tunnels don't simply repeat over and over. The pipes swap in and out. Sometimes you'll have patches of unusual piping. Never enough to confuse, but enough to give the player's eye some traction and sense of depth.

Also keep in mind the difference between square, vertical, horizontal, and akimbo decorations. Star Trek relies mostly on square decorations: nothing too aggressively vertical or horizontal, nothing diagonal. This gives it a regular, reliable, gentle feel.

Something like steam pipes or railings is aggressively horizontal (if running along the hall) or aggressively vertical (if punching vertically through the hall). These affect how the player perceives this stretch of hall. If things are mostly horizontal, the hall feels like a place to move through. If things are mostly vertical, the hall feels like a place to be constrained by. Keep that in mind, because there are definitely parts of your levels you won't want the player to feel like he's just going to move through.

I use the term "akimbo" for decorations that run in any other direction, whether it's diagonally or across the hallway horizontally or any other direction. I don't really have any solid opinion on them, except that they are a lot more aggressive than other types.

There's rarely any need to feel constrained by decorations. They don't have to serve much of a purpose, they just have to fit into the basic idea of the hallway.

Lighting

Lighting is probably the most important element of science fiction settings, but it's rarely discussed much. Let's talk about it.

In my mind, there are three different schemes of lighting science fiction interiors:

1) Ambient Lighting, AKA "studio light". This bright, soft lighting scheme is ideal for places that should feel inhabitable. It's mostly notable for lighting backgrounds as brightly as the actors, and therefore has a low-drama feel. To see the difference this can make, compare an episode of Star Trek TNG with a movie from the same era. The dramatic lighting in the movies gives the ship a completely different feeling - tense and aggressive. Not all ambient lighting needs to be comfortable: you can do ambient low light, or washed-out ambient brights, or even something like ambient red lights, but any way you cut it this tends to play down the punch of the actors in favor of the sets and scenario.

2) Dramatic Lighting. AKA "movie lighting". In movies, this kind of lighting is typically used to play up the most important element of the scene (typically the actors) while leaving the rest of the set downplayed. In video games, this typically involves light that actually comes from lights and highlights the main avenue of play while leaving much of the rest in shadow... but contrary to movies, darkness is often when draws your attention, instead of brightness. Either way, this lighting is not intended to actively conceal gameplay items, it's intended to create drama and variation. It can involve colored or blinking lights to play up that drama even more.

3) Schtick Lighting. AKA "Doom lighting". This is when you have aggressive light sources that dominate the scene. For example, it's dark except for a flickering, swinging ceiling light. Or except for a light behind a slowly-revolving fan, casting bright wedges of light along the hall. Or even just a game where there's light here and pitch darkness there. The difference between dramatic lighting and schtick lighting is that schtick lighting affects the gameplay: at the very least, the darkness is deep enough to be hard to see into. The light may also indicate something, like the classic of the corridor having intermittent blasts of exhaust fire or whatever, and you have a schtick light to indicate that.

In general, ambient lighting is often considered passe these days, only used for places that are supposed to feel ethereal. Most first-person games use dramatic lighting for the bulk of their game, combined with a small amount of schtick lighting.

Don't forget that brightness and color of light matter. You don't have to put in a bright red light if you want colored lights: gently tinting the light slightly blue, yellow, or red is enough to make the scene feel different. With dramatic lighting, light brightness is a bit of a battle, because it can be a bit difficult to get the light to feel bright at the right distance without washing out the scene near the lights - this is because it takes several bounces to get "good" dramatic lighting, and most engines don't support real time bounced light... well, it can get pretty annoying.





Anyway, that's me thinking to myself about science fiction corridors.

Retro is Poison in Large Quantities

I love me some zeerust! Get me some zap guns and silver suits!

I love me some pixel art! Get me 16x18 sprites and palette-swapped wolves!

But it's not enough.

I know everyone has something to say on the topic of retro. Here's mine!

People get sucked into retro as a concept. It's enticing: it's less impossible than cloning one of today's big-budget games and less depressing than cloning one of today's grimdark scifi settings.

But, for some reason, ideas tend to stop at "retro". Because it's retro, that's all that it is.

A good example of this is every retro game ever created.

Wait, let me try again.

You have to want to say something. If you're making science fiction, you have to want to talk about society, about people and their place in the universe. If you're making a game, you have to show some interesting idea, some meat for a player to sink their thumbs into.

When people start from the idea of "retro", they rarely have anything interesting to say. There are a few reasons for this.

First, it's easy to think of that as a "concept" rather than a "constraint". Retro stylings are a constraint upon which your concept can be built, a "foundation" for your "house". But if you think about it as a concept, it is instead a house for you to decorate. You can still express yourself while decorating the house, but it has a lot less impact than designing the house.

It's easy to see this in RPGMaker games, most of which are literally the same game with the same graphics, just arranged with different color text and maps. While it can be a good exercise, it's not going to be an interesting game like that.

Second, even if you do create a unique concept, it's often mired in the old concepts from that era.

For example, there are a number of RPGMaker games that have slightly unique battle mechanics or setting ideas. However, because they are mired in turn-based "blob" combat and flat grid maps, the uniqueness is drowned out. The only people that can see the distinctiveness are people who have played so many RPGMaker games that they can no longer see the tint of RPGMaker itself.

Similarly, many people who make retro scifi comics or stories get mired in the concepts of the cheesy zeerust. Maybe we're talking about 5-crew cigar ships and zap guns that never kill anybody. Maybe we're talking about 10,000 crew superdestroyers and people that die at a moment's notice. Either way, those concepts weigh heavily on your story, and it's easy for your story to get lost in them. Especially if you lay it on heavy - for example, throwing in famous tropes and references to your favorite stories. Your unique, personal concepts are pale shadows.

Worse, many of those old concepts are extremely tired. For example, the idea of "magical, mystical elves" is painfully tired. When you put such elves into your setting, you are creating a bare spot in your setting, salting the soil so it'll be hard to grow anything of interest.

To be honest, I think these problems are what "Cerebus syndrome" stems from.

"Cerebus syndrome" is when a comedic story turns overly serious. It's common in webcomics, but also in Japanese manga/anime. For example, Fairy Tail is an anime that started off lovely and lighthearted, but turned slow, serious, and dark as it continued. Eventually it turned into a humorless version of Dragon Ball Z.

While Cerebus went dark because the author broke down, I don't think that's why most stories get grim. I think they get grim because they have to escalate. Escalation typically means exposing the characters to more severe challenges, which naturally results in darker stories. And they escalate because they've run their core concept dry: they can't "unfold the concept" any more, so they need "more of the same".

Fairy Tail's core concept was mostly "retro plus fun character design". That makes a great splash, but it runs dry pretty quick. So the escalation begins, and it gets dark.

A similar anime, Slayers, shows that this is not always the same cause and effect. Slayers has several series, and nearly all of them wobble unsteadily from light to dark and back again. This is because the fundamental setting has a lot of powerful concepts in it, but the concepts cannot be easily explored in "comedy mode". So it's not just escalation that causes darkness. Sometimes the core concepts are dark.

Still, all of that mumbling aside, the result is that you have to be careful when creating retro-flavored games or stories.

You can do it right. Shovel Knight is an excellent retro game that explores several fun concepts.

But you have to have a concept that you can build on top of the idea of retro. You can't simply take retro as a concept and decorate it. You need to consider what parts of "retro" support your concept, and what you need to cut away so you don't sabotage your idea with tired ideas and loud distractions.

Sci Fi Navy Terminology

One of the difficulties in creating science fiction worlds is creating a naval setting. Starships are incredibly critical in most science fiction settings, basically replacing trains, ships, and airplanes all in one go.

In most cases, I'll have some idea of how the universe works - a specific set of technologies, a specific kind of culture, that sort of thing. But when I was a bit younger, I had a really hard time putting things into a reasonable military (or pseudo-military) structure. This is because whenever anyone talks about navies, they talk in exceedingly specific terms and concrete examples. I needed general information, and they were drowning me in trivia.

It came up again this month, with a new setting I developed, so I figured I'd go ahead and write a bit about the naval terminology and structures I tend to use.

These aren't really based around any real-world navy, but they are feasible enough and flexible enough to form a scaffold. Obviously, if your starships are so rare that they never form into fleets or task forces, this isn't necessary.

First off, I start with a very quick overview of how shipping works. The reason for this is because military vessels will usually have the same spectrum of sizes as shipping vessels. This is for two reasons. The first is because you build the space frame sizes you're comfortable with, and the second is because it's hard to supply ships that are larger than your supply ships.

If your planets are largely self-sufficient, then there won't be any ultra-heavy space trucks. In turn, that means there won't be any death stars. On the other hand, if you need to ship massive quantities of food and metal, you're going to have massive military vessels. The bigger the freight requirement, the bigger the biggest military ship.

Similarly on the small end. "Space fighter" is a pleasant thought to most science fiction authors, but it only makes sense in settings where there are civilian uses for a tiny interstellar ship. Because of this, I tend to only use fighters in settings where there is no FTL radio - the small ships are essentially messengers. Obviously, you can go against this rule if you like, but I find it makes more sense to follow it.

Similarly on the fast versus slow. Do you have "jet liners" for people to travel from star to star, or are they more like "ocean liners", taking weeks or months? Well, the military's gonna have the same kind of preference, taking into account their additional need to keep an active presence in a given theater for months at a time.

With that out of the way, you can begin to think about the kinds of combat encounters that might crop up, and begin to think about the kinds of ships which fit the role. In general, the terms used by real-world navies are pretty adaptable. You might get looked at a bit funny initially, but once it becomes clear that the role is warped by the technology, the players will accept that the real-world name still fits okay.

Now, I can list a bunch of kinds of military operations you might want to have - for example, orbital domination (requires a vehicle that can deploy and control thousands of satellites) or blockade running (requires vehicles that can stealth and vehicles that can detect that). However, the encounters you want in your world will shape the world you build.

Not every setting has blockade running. Not every setting has orbital domination. Not every setting has mines. Or drop-pods. Or interdiction. Or even carriers. It all comes down to the kinds of battles you want to happen in your setting. You can always retroactively add more if you feel the need.

The key is to identify the kinds of scenes you want. Do you picture marines rushing out of a smoking drop pod? Do you picture bombers harassing a burning supercarrier? Do you picture a destroyer floating above a frigate, pulling it in with tractor beams? The vivid imagery you have in mind will immediately tell you the kinds of ships you need.

Then it's just a matter of giving that class of ship a vaguely suitable name. For this, you can read up on military classes like "destroyer" and "battleship" and so on, but remember that those are typically roles not sizes. For example, a "destroyer" isn't defined by its size, but by its role as an anti-submarine escort to larger ships. A "cruiser" isn't "bigger" or "smaller" than a "destroyer" - it's a vehicle that's built to operate for a long time unaccompanied.

By these rules, the Enterprise of Star Trek fame is a cruiser. See?

You could also just invent your own names, of course. Don't know what class the psychic vortex ship is? Just call it "psych-class" or whatever.

Anyway, that's how I do starship design in scifi settings.

Speculative Worlds Summary

A few people have expressed interest in the worlds I create, so this year I'll be releasing a few of them as posts. I'm calling it the "speculative worlds" project, just to have a tag for this kind of post.

The reason it needs to have a tag and an explanation is that I'm not releasing the worlds as any kind of strongly coherent narrative. It's a mishmash of notes, scenes, and sketches, depending on the nature of the world I've developed. So don't expect to find a beautiful coffee table book!

The reason I'm calling it speculative worlds is because these are not just generic science fiction universes. The idea is that a created world casts light on the beliefs and norms of the author. By creating a world, you can cast light into the parts of your brain that are hard to illuminate, explore your suppositions, and come up with interesting insights.

So I'm not trying to create "cool" or "complete" worlds. I'm trying to create "interesting" ones - ones which explore an assumption. I hope, if you choose to comment on any of them, you will do so understanding that this is my aim.

And I hope people do comment, because the same exploration turns out differently when done by a different person. I recommend following standard improv policy, though: negation's not a great idea at this stage in a world's development.

Lastly, I have no interest in controlling this project. If you want to do the same thing, feel free. If any of my worlds strike you as interesting, they are all available with a creative commons attribution license, so feel free to use them, too. Just link a lot, and everyone will be happy.

Personal Mesh Nodes

One of the things I do pretty regularly is come up with science fiction settings. One feature that keeps intruding into my worlds is personal augmented reality. When everyone can look through their phone or glasses to see the world in another way, what does that mean for everyone?

One thing most people overlook is the fundamental technology behind this kind of widespread augmented reality. It implies that everyone has a strong computer - stronger than an iPhone - that is always being used to access local data. If we think in terms of a "super cellphone", we can see that the device must more or less always be transmitting and receiving tons of data from the cell towers. This is not ideal.

The solution I keep coming back to is local mesh networks. Since augmented reality heavily mixes in local stuff, it makes sense to communicate with other local devices instead of saturating the sky with long-range communication. While some stuff will still be non-local, a surprising amount of it can be made local with the assumption that nodes will have terabyte caches of random crap.

The key here is in the mix of mobile (personal) nodes and immobile (local) nodes. Your local Starbucks has their own (quite powerful) node that they make sure is always cached up-to-date with Slashdot and other geek media sites for maximum speed. It is connected to the Starbucks across the street, of course, and the Starbucks down the block... but these local nodes are also connected to every other random local node within range, including your apartment, the department store, that parked car...

Some of these nodes can connect to the internet, some cannot (except by routing through one that can). However, whether they can connect to the internet or not, they can serve up local information and perform local analysis.

...

Aside from developing this kind of scenario out of curiosity, what purpose does a distributed, largely anonymous mesh network serve? Isn't the internet a better choice?

When considering a scifi setting that's supposed to be reasonably hard, you have to answer these sorts of questions. Why did the mesh network come to be? What are its strengths and weaknesses? What purpose does it serve?

The answer is "an internet of things", to use an already-trite phrase.

"Things" can and will produce and ask for more and more data. Right now, we think in terms of price tags that automatically update and coffee pots that know when they're empty. But those are miniscule baby applications.

It's not unreasonable, especially if you're thinking in terms of scifi, to assume that things will become a whole lot more active. In a dystopian future, your TV watches you as much as you watch it, your clothes will whine and complain if you walk by their brand's store without shopping, your cell phone will constantly track and predict your paths to better bombard you with ads.

But dystopia is not the only place where objects are smart. Even in a utopian setting, items can be very smart and talkative.

Small ways are obvious - your clothes might track when they get tattered and alert you, your chair might detect that you are sitting in it (as opposed to someone else) and assume an ideal firmness and shape, your TV can auto-detect the signal and set its resolution correctly without you having to memorize the complexities of the menu interface...

But these reactive devices are not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about devices that buy and trade information. Huge amounts of information. Terabytes a day.

Your phone tracks the state of the network, keeping the mesh map up to date and plotting which hubs to rely on, always striving to get access to more restricted hubs for better speed. Your shirt constantly communicates with all the other clothes and adaptive murals in the region to cooperatively form a kind of mass artwork that expresses you as well as participating in the whole. Your AR gear constantly talks to the local nodes, "selling" them topological information that it can pick up with its camera in exchange for topological information it can't quite see.

The internet doesn't have infinite capacity, and cell phone communications have even less. Fundamentally, the centralizing protocols the internet uses are inappropriate for an "internet of things", no matter how many integers we increment them by. A mesh network is really the only answer.

Mesh networks have the issue that they are fundamentally decentralized, which is bad from the point of view of a corporation. Centralized information stores allow corporations much more capability to analyze, leash, and abuse their customers, so that's naturally their preference. However, less corporate devices will benefit most from talking to other devices of similar types, rather than simply serving as snoops for their hidden masters. In a utopian setting, talkative devices are largely loyal to their owners rather than their corporations, and may even be manufactured using 3D printers in someone's basement.

Right now, it probably seems like talkative devices are pointless and useless. However, they're almost guaranteed to be part of our future, much as your branded jeans and your lattes and your Youtube videos would be seen as pointless and useless luxuries fifty years ago. Unlike lattes and branded jeans, talkative devices might actually be helpful in the long run, assuming a view that is more utopian than dystopian.

Either way, in a scifi setting, mesh networks lead to a rise of things. In my settings, this is usually accompanied by a rise of AI agents and virtual pets - interactive things that the readers or players can get an intuitive emotional feel for. An equally interesting idea is that humanity will integrate the software agents into their personal feeling of self. Your shirt is an expression of your personality and will, there's no need for it to have an independent "face" for you to deal with...

Anyway, random talk.

Shadow Puppets

I came up with this idea while trying to invent a hacker game setting, and I thought it was an interesting thought experiment. So here's the deal:

Imagine that in the future, we have software that can analyze audio and video (and writing and pictures). By analyzing the media, the software can program a virtual entity with a personality and appearance very similar to the writer/actor/whoever is in the media you passed it.

The virtual entity is quite advanced. Assuming you have a good computer and the most recent pseudo-AI drivers, the virtual entity is almost indistinguishable from the original, at least in the context of media. The gaps in the seed media are overcome by careful guessing. That mean the virtual entity can act very reasonably even in situations not covered by the seed media.

In the game world I designed, problems arose when people began creating virtual entities of politicians and releasing very convincing fake videos of them saying or doing things they never did or said. It came to a head with a bevy of fake-porn cases in which the real versions of the virtual porn stars launched a whole lot of lawsuits for everything from character defamation to abuse.

The courts came up with a rather novel solution. Which, I guess, is the most fantastical part of this setting. It's called the "virtual volition" rule.

Basically, the courts ruled that everyone had the right to personal privacy. The programs were considered to breach that privacy by simulating that person's behavior and body in a way they did not approve. This was considered fundamentally different than drawing cartoons or even photoshopping lewd pictures because of the extremely high fidelity and accuracy of the virtual entities.

The misused virtual entities were labeled "shadow puppets" - programs that looked so much like specific real world individuals that they violated the privacy of those real world individuals. Shadow puppets became illegal. Later, the definition expanded to include virtual entities in breach of copyright, such as one fed on Mickey Mouse cartoons that looks and acts like Mickey Mouse.

Of course, it's impossible to ban a piece of software like this. Legal, open source software could be fed with publicly available media to produce a high-fidelity shadow puppet. Still, don't get caught: it's considered abuse or assault on the person being simulated.

Legal virtual entities abounded. Many simply were unrealistic, or a mishmash of media that didn't attempt to simulate any one person. Others were specific people or cartoons or whatever, but had very strict limits and would refuse to "fill in" the gaps and act beyond the "volition lock". IE, you couldn't convince your official Steven Fry virtual entity to strip down and sing show tunes.

In the game world, it had tons of ramifications and made the world a very complex place.

Anyway, there's not really any point to this essay. It's just a random interesting thing I thought I'd mention.

Super Books

I've been thinking about electronic paper - you know, rolls like paper, thin like paper, image can change as needed.

There's a common sci-fi object - an electronic book. An electronic book is made of electronic paper and some kind of computery system to control what displays on the pages.

It always seemed thoroughly pointless to me. You wouldn't need multiple pages. The computer can "turn the page" without you having to physically turn the page.

But there is a use.

Imagine if each page of "paper" is a self-contained wifi-driven computer. Maybe it's paper the thickness of a credit card, with the edges not more electronic paper, but instead wafer-thin electronics.

Each page of paper could then be attached (magnetically, say) to the spine of the book. Or detached.

Then what you could do is disassemble the book. If there's something you need, "rip it out" and put it next to you where you can refer to it, play with it, change it however you need. When you're done, stick it back into the book.

It would effectively be a set of portable monitors - perhaps two dozen small monitors. They're relatively cheap, so you could actually pass them back and forth between collaborators... they're self-contained, frungible, and use insignificant power, so you could actually separate them from their book for a long time, swap them, submit papers on them, use them as game pieces... anything.

Now that, I think... that would be really useful. I would give up books and, probably, every other computer for that.

I Coulda Been a Contenda

Huff, puff, trying to get back into theorizin' shape.

This here's an essay on Science Fiction. More specifically, all the fun and wacky variants! It's a list of all the facets I could think of. See if you see anything you like.

I suggest not trying to read it through. It's a bit repetitive. Instead, skip anything that bores you. I, uh, should warn you. It's pretty detailed, and definitely only a first draft.

Science Fiction facets

2055

I wrote a silly 1-page thing about job recommendations in the year 2055. If you feel like your daily dose of scifi, you might enjoy it.

(You might need to download it if word wrap doesn't work on your browser.)

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