KickStarter Free Stars: Children of Infinity - upcoming Star Control 2 sequel from original creator Fred Ford

[Infinitron]

https://www.dogarandkazon.com/blog/2021/6/17/i-seriously-considered-adding-a-cow-to-this-image

I Seriously Considered Adding A Cow To This Image

After last week's short, cryptic announcement, several of you asked, "Where's the beef?!" Actually, none of you asked that (sadly, beef-related metaphors have been on the decline), so I will put this in simple, vegan terms: Fred and I have been working on UQM2 full time since Fall of last year. So far it's just the two of us, with Fred working loooong hours developing a cool new designer-friendly scripting system for gameplay, and me reading old sci-fi, drinking Mai Tais and trying to make something coherent out of almost 30 years of story notes and design sketches.

Our goal is to create a genuine sequel to the game we last worked-on in early 90’s -- something that feels like a seamless continuation of your best UQM memories. Selfishly perhaps, we also want to make the game our own way without any bosses, driven only by our own imaginations and that of the UQM community. To that end, we will soon be opening up a forum where the core UQM2 team, volunteers and fans can discuss, debate and collaborate on the new game.

We are making real progress, but we still have a long way to go. We sincerely hope that all of you are up for the journey -- it's going to be a blast!

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I don’t trust any information offered by the Melnorme for free.

 

[LESS T_T]

https://www.dogarandkazon.com/blog/2021/7/19/we-want-your-brains

We Want Your Brains!

Whenever we set out to make a game, we ask ourselves two really basic questions: "Why are we doing this?", and "How do we define success?" So why are we making a sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters? The short answer is "we want to". The more complex answer is that we find ourselves in the joyful position of doing things our own way. Our definition of success is simply to create a sequel that you will love - but of course that's far from simple. That's where your brains and our doing things our own way come in. We are going to try an experiment! We are going to engage the fan community's collective brainpower to help us figure out some of the of the most interesting, most important questions for UQM2.

Our current plan is, each week, to highlight a few questions at https://reddit.com/r/uqm2 and have a dialogue about certain aspects of the game. We'll be checking in mid-week with our own thoughts, and each week we will likely close the old questions, highlight our current thinking based on the discussion, and ask new questions. We'd like to let the community determine questions to discuss as well, so we will even be open to asking questions you'd like us to ask. This subreddit will strictly be for our Q&A format. This process is experimental, so we will almost certainly change and improve how things work over time as we learn together.

Introduction: https://old.reddit.com/r/uqm2/comments/olr4wn/we_want_your_brains_welcome_to_ruqm2/

Howdy Everyone! Fred and I are excited to launch this experiment in game creation -- incorporating the brains of fans (thoughts and ideas -- not actual pulpy flesh) directly into the creation of its sequel! More than anything, we want our follow-up to The Ur-Quan Masters to be a game you will love and see as a fun, exciting, weird, and most importantly authentic continuation of the science-fiction adventure we released in the early 1990s. What you will find in this subreddit is a first pass at our process of conceptual collaboration -- one we will be modifying and improving upon over the next months.

Who Are We?
And speaking of brains -- we have 2 new core team members joining Frungy Games -- Dan Gerstein and Ken Ford. Dan worked with me and Fred at Toys For Bob for more than 15 years, where Dan served as a lead technical designer and lead gameplay systems designer for our Skylanders games. Dan also is our resident bird expert and dance instructor. Ken Ford was programmer #2 at Toys For Bob, working with me and Fred initially on the 3DO version of Star Control, and all of our subsequent games at Crystal Dynamics -- The Horde, Pandemonium, The Unholy War, and 102 Dalmatians. Ken has read almost everything there is to know about World War II, and he plays Thief 2 obsessively.

The Part Where we Want Your Brains
Whenever we set out to make a game, we ask ourselves two really basic questions: "Why are we doing this?", and "How do we define success?" So why are we making a sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters? The short answer is "we want to". The more complex answer is that we find ourselves in the joyful position of doing things our own way. Our definition of success is simply to create a sequel that you will love - but of course that's far from simple. That's where your brains and our doing things our own way come in. We are going to try an experiment! We are going to engage the fan community's collective brainpower to help us figure some of the most interesting, most important questions for UQM2. We’re starting with this format to begin with:

• We will post a series of focused questions, one per thread, on this subreddit every week on Monday. We’ll chime in during the week in the thread if we have more questions based on responses, and then close out each thread at the start of the next week with some conclusive thoughts.
• We may re-ask the same question in an even more tightly focused way depending on how it goes or leave the thread going if it is still generating useful, broad discussion.
• We’ll provide a list of topics we want to ask questions about so you know what’s on the horizon.
• Anyone will be welcome to participate in threads following our discussion guidelines.
• Posting will be disabled; only replies to existing threads will be allowed.

We’d like to run this way for a month, see how it goes, and then ask this question again. What do you think of this way of holding discussions?

This week's questions.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uqm2/comments/olq49m/melee_camera/

Melee Camera

Here’s a question that’s been bugging us for 25+ years -- how should the camera work in Melee with more than 2 ships? Previously we pointed the camera at the midpoint between the two ships, then zoomed out to keep them both in view. If we follow this method for 3+ ships, you spend most of your time at max zoom, which is not very exciting. What’s a better way to handle more than 2 ships?

https://old.reddit.com/r/uqm2/comments/olq5tk/who_needs_friends/

Who Needs Friends?

Truthfully friends are optional. I say this from experience, since the only companion I had as a child was a hibernating turtle who I later discovered was a concrete lawn decoration. But everyone else is like, “I have friends!”, “My friend helped me after my bad break-up”, “Friends are useful for identifying animate from inanimate objects” Okay, whatever. We give in. If you could play the adventure game co-op with a handful of friends, what would be the most fun thing ever?! A related question: what is the second most fun thing?

https://old.reddit.com/r/uqm2/comments/onlyp9/how_retro_can_you_go/

How Retro Can You Go?

We want UQM2 to feel like a direct, natural sequel to the original game which, given the passage of almost 30 years, needs some updating, but not too much updating. So to you, what parts of the game should be preserved as-is, what should be given a little modern polish, what should be re-imagined for modern tastes and technologies, and what (if anything) should be bonked on the head and chucked out the airlock?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Making a game, via committee, on Reddit?

...

This will be interesting to watch.

 

[Cael]

Making a game, via committee, on Reddit?

...

This will be interesting to watch.

Anyone want to count the number of shades of hair colour on a single toon when such a game is done?

 

[Elestan]

Making a game, via committee, on Reddit?
...
This will be interesting to watch.

I don't see this as making the game by committee; it's just them polling for what people are interested in, and for feedback on the last game. It doesn't mean that they'll act on any of the suggestions, but there's no harm in the asking, and they might find a few good ideas in the mix.

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

If you have any hope for this game abandon it now. This is a video interview of Paul and Fred. I have not watched the whole thing but this is what I have gleaned from it so far.

1. After several years of being "in early pre-production" they are only just now figuring out WHAT they want their game to be. They don't even know at this point. Which is an especially bad sign. Have a concrete vision first, change as needed. Not "i dunno we'll just work on whatever." That may have worked for budgets in 1990 but not in 2021. Get a fucking clue. Crowdfunding is litered with people who just had one or two ideas and wasted their budgets just chasing whatever they wanted with no plan.
   
2. They want to "lower the bar for entry, make things more inclusive" by simplifying development so that non programmers can contribute to programing. This is disastrous. It leads to situations such as Ubisoft using a children's coding tool for teaching coding so that Trannies can pretend to code an entire triple A game. You will end up with a development team that cannot fix bugs because they fundamentally do not understand the code they are working with.
3. They slipped up by saying "anyone with a high school education in Math" can work on the game with their "inclusive" pipeline. They're looking for cheap labour essentially. Not real coders. This is equivalent to hiring the poofters who work on Skyrim mods to make a whole video game themselves. They are specifically looking for SJW wokeies with liberal arts degrees
4. based on all of this, this is not a real game. It's a PR stunt that is designed to agrandise Paul and Fred similar to how most modern total conversion mods are just hubs for trannies to circle jerk and no actual work gets done.

If they had an actual plan, they'd onboard who they need. Have a simple design doc with statement of intent that even if they never revealed publicly they could at least reference for interviews to say anything beyond "dunno, we're still working on the game." and also make sure the people they hired had enough understanding in their fields to be competent without having to "simplfy" the entire dev process so you can hire less talented people.

 

[Elestan]

1. ...they are only just now figuring out WHAT they want their game to be. [...] Crowdfunding is litered with people who just had one or two ideas

Then I guess it's a good thing this game isn't currently crowdfunded. If you'd watched the rest of the video, you'd have seen them talk about how much they enjoy iterating on a game until they figure out how to maximize the fun, and how that's something they missed doing when working for a big studio with fixed deadlines.

2. They want to "lower the bar for entry, make things more inclusive" by simplifying development so that non programmers can contribute to programing. This is disastrous.

I have no idea how you reach that conclusion. What they're talking about is essentially just having a level designer/plot scripter/mod system that sits on top of the game engine, with the former used by designers, and the latter maintained by programmers. That's a tried-and-true division that game developers have used for ages.

As for the rest, based on your needless use of inflammatory language like "Trannies", "poofters", and "SJW wokeies", it seems to me that you're mainly trying to troll people, rather than trying to have a meaningful discussion.

 

[LESS T_T]

Game dev/Q&A streaming on Friday: https://www.dogarandkazon.com/blog/2021/10/25/incoming-message-from-the-dan-beast

Incoming Message from The Dan Beast

This is a quick note to say that we are making good progress on the tech and narrative underpinnings of UQM2. Ken Ford and Dan Gerstein have been part of the core team for the last few months. Speaking of Dan, he has an interesting idea! I’ll let him describe it…

Dan here. I got my professional start in games interning for Paul and Fred at Toys for Bob. I was inspired by their spirit of helping, learning, and experimenting -- our UQM2 subreddit is a good example of this spirit in action. Now I want to try a crazy new experiment motivated by those same ideals. Every week, you can watch a live stream of me working on UQM2 for a couple hours. This is not a curated or gussied up show -- it is raw, real game development at a very early and rough stage. It’s going to look a lot like programming (that's mostly what I do) except I will be using the bespoke scripting language Fred has created. Fred will be joining me for this first session, answering questions about his language, and -- if I know Fred -- relentlessly mocking me, my programming, and probably the very reason for my existence. If people enjoy this experiment, I'll be doing this on a regular basis.

We will be starting for now on Friday at 2:00pm PDT (21:00 UTC) at https://twitch.tv/pebby. Please stop by if you’re interested in UQM2, game development, or if you just want to say hi and stare at my screen with me.

 

[LESS T_T]

So they've been regularly doing dev streams showing prototypes and docs. https://www.twitch.tv/pebby/videos

From their channel's "highlights"

 

[hibby]

So they've been regularly doing dev streams showing prototypes and docs. https://www.twitch.tv/pebby/videos

From their channel's "highlights"

The bad news is you guys were wrong and it looks like they're implementing core game logic with their bespoke language. The good news is that it's so indecipherable that no danger hair will know what to do with it.

 

[e-mailio estevez]

So they've been regularly doing dev streams showing prototypes and docs. https://www.twitch.tv/pebby/videos

From their channel's "highlights"

It triggers me when grown men say "weee" or "yaay".

 

[karoliner]

Is this really going somewhere?

 

[Cael]

Is this really going somewhere?

Yes.

 

[Zarniwoop]

So they've been regularly doing dev streams showing prototypes and docs. https://www.twitch.tv/pebby/videos

From their channel's "highlights"

It triggers me when grown men say "weee" or "yaay".

Wawaweewa eez nice.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

So they've been regularly doing dev streams showing prototypes and docs. https://www.twitch.tv/pebby/videos

From their channel's "highlights"

It triggers me when grown men say "weee" or "yaay".

Aye, that's a wee bit annoying

 

[rusty_shackleford]

watching washed up devs trying to relive their glory days is getting really embarrassing

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.dogarandkazon.com/blog/2022/2/14/special-story-stream-announcement

Special Story Stream Announcement

If you have been following our live development streams, you may have caught guest appearances from our full, colorful cast of characters. Sometimes, they’ve been unplanned, like when Paul decided to publicly shame Dan by outgunning him in melee. Other times, they are intentional, like when Fred joins to discuss technical details of our language. In all cases, it is especially fun to have our viewers get involved in the creative process, or at least prompt bad jokes.

This Friday (2/18) at 2pm PT, we will be doing a special version of the stream just focused on that! Lee Hutchinson, who has been assisting with our writing, will be hosting an audience-participation writing session where you, the viewer, will get to contribute to an imaginary alien encounter. We want to guarantee this is entirely spoiler-free, but if you help write something incredible, we also can’t promise it won’t be in the game. If you want to learn a little about our process, possibly contribute actual text to the game, and have some fun, please join us at https://twitch.tv/pebby on Friday.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

They seem to be explaining how dialogues are made.
Also:

 

[LESS T_T]

They established a studio: https://www.dogarandkazon.com/blog/2022/4/6/announcing-pistol-shrimp-games

Announcing Pistol Shrimp Games

Little, weird, and dangerous: the pistol shrimp.

We’re excited to announce the extremely official formation of our studio, Pistol Shrimp™ Games. Those of you already interacting with us on our other platforms might already know who we are, but did you also know we were secretly becoming something else all along, too? Like the butterfly emerging from its previous flightless form, we now coalesce ourselves from the briny sea of game development intangibility into a single, charismatic crustacean.

What does this actually mean for Ur-Quan Masters 2 and its development? As far as designing the game, the live streams, and our general communication with everyone, nothing is really changing. However, by establishing ourselves as a real developer—with a real website, named after a real animal!—we hope to open up important opportunities which will help see our game to completion. Most important and near on the horizon is being able to help fund our project, which deserves its own post (or series of them) discussing our approach in detail.

For the fans who have followed along already here on our blog, our subreddit, or even watched our Twitch streams, we appreciate that you were interested in us just because you knew about the creators or the project. For everyone else, we hope this site will help you to get to know us and what we’re doing with UQM2.

At the very least, everyone reading this now knows that there is really such a thing as a pistol shrimp.

Visit us at pistolshrimpgames.com.

Description of the game from the website: https://pistolshrimpgames.com/uqm2/

The Ur-Quan Masters 2 (UQM2)

The Ur-Quan Masters 2 (working title) is a direct sequel, made by the original authors for the fans who have been so supportive and patient for over three decades.

The new game begins three years after the defeat of the Ur-Quan Hierarchy and its Sa-Matra battle platform, as a new discovery draws The Captain into confrontation with an old mystery.

UQM2 Contributors
UQM2 is being developed by the Pistol Shrimp team as well as some talented contributors.

Lee Hutchinson
Lee played Fred & Paul’s games as a young child, leaving him twisted and psychologically scarred. He joined the Ur-Quan Masters II writing team after defeating Paul in a no-holds-barred Turkish oil wrestling competition. When not authoring Umgah slashfic, Lee works as an editor at Ars Technica. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Damon Czanik
Damon Czanik has had a varied career of art, technology & programming. His 2D & 3D art has been featured in magazines, clothing, and numerous games. He’s probably most well known here for creating Ur-Quan Masters HD where he doubled as lead artist for both the HD project and Project 6014.

That Lee guy is the one who wrote Stat Control lawsuit articles on Ars Technica.

 

[Infinitron]

https://pistolshrimpgames.com/2022/04/stream-highlights-2-25-22-4-8-22/

Stream Highlights: 2/25/22 – 4/8/22

Some day I won’t procrastinate so much, but I keep putting it off. Here are the stream highlights from the past – counts fingers – 7 weeks! Crikey. Well, as they say in showbiz: leave them waiting more. Or was it wanting more? I don’t remember. I’ve been putting off improving my memory too. Speaking of memories, here are some short to long highlights of my favorite bits from the streams!

At the end of the last highlight chunk and the start of this one, Fred and I had spent some time working on a first pass of Melee AI that supported code making smart decisions (like calculating navigation and shot trajectories) while letting me have script control to customize behaviors and support unique ships. Some highlights from continuing to specialize the AI, support ships with unique input, like the Kohr-Ah and Melnorme, and a complete refactor of how script managed the AI controls:

• A first pass of a Kohr-Ah controlling its blade shots
• After a refactor, here’s how we can make a Kohr-Ah with different AI behaviors and support for 2 weapons
• Using the reworked script structure to easily support the Melnorme

If you want a detailed technical walkthrough of the AI script refactor and how it’s authored, there are some longer clips where I tried to describe what was going on:

• Before-and-after diagram of each method
• Detailed walkthrough of the refactored script

Our goal with this pass was not to create a final AI, but to explore it enough so that we had confidence in our methods – especially when it came to supporting newer, wilder ships and modding – and understood a little better what the remainder of the hard work would be. We were really satisfied! It’s very cool how little ‘smarts’ an enemy ship needs to be convincing and interesting to fight against. We still will have a lot of work to do, but it made sense to move on.

Different parts of the game are always at different levels of completion. I talked about this on stream somewhere, but if having a short, detailed experience is vertical (picking up some minerals, playing a Melee battle), then a long, less-action-packed experience is horizontal (flying between stars in hyperspace, exploring the planets in a star system). Right now, we have a lot of vertical experiences but haven’t focused as much as on the horizontal experiences. Part of this is just because we haven’t tried building them, but also because we didn’t necessarily have good support structures to make those horizontal experiences fun, like having reasons for resource acquisition/loss. Several of the streams were focused on creating these supports using UQM1 as a model or exploring examples of things we could do within them, enriching the long play experience:

• Support for a battlegroup to locate and chase the player across the universe
• Running out of fuel in hyperspace and receiving “help” to refuel
• Support for the Flagship’s ‘fleet’ of ships:
  • Part 1: Storing, buying, and selling ships in the Shipyard
  • Part 2: Reading/writing the fleet data in Melee
  • Part 3: Remembering crew loss (partial damage) in Melee
• Improving resource storage and interaction using our favorite worm missile pal
• Creating an orbiting battlegroup in Approach

In addition to just supporting a lot of the things that UQM1 does, we have ideas for some more experimental game experiences, many of which we’ve sourced from all of you! Among these is the idea of creating what we call Melee puzzles/minigames, which let you take the familiar Melee ships into an experience where the victory condition is not just defeating the other ship. I explored a couple of prototypes around that, and the second one was motivated entirely by community comments (nice job, community!):

• Prototype of locating and retrieving an object in a dangerous/obscured Melee space
• Prototype of a Melee ‘bullet hell’ experience

On the topic of experimental experiences, one of the biggest and wildest is allowing players to play cooperatively in the adventure mode. A lot of these ideas exist in our head and sound fun, but building support structures to let us prove it and actually trying to prove it is way better than thinking it sounds cool. We never really know until we try. In the first clip, basic support for having two players participate together against an AI in Melee is shown, and in the second I show just one prototype of how co-op can support different kinds of play:

• Support for 2v1 co-op in Melee
• ‘Supporting fire’ from outside Melee in Co-op

We got a really clever, game-changing feature a couple weeks ago for the Simple scripting language called complex property initialization. If you’re interested in the technical side, Fred and I spent some time walking through why this was so powerful and important. Walkthrough of complex property initialization.

Lastly, there’s always work and conversation unrelated to the immediate task at hand. Here’s a grab bag of various discussions about our past, the Simple language, and the stream itself:

• What is it like to teach Simple?
• How Simple fits into a final game and game engine
• Fred talks about funding the end of SC2 and subsequent events
• Dan trying to describe what this stream is about

P.S. We know why you’re all here. The unintentional, unscripted comedy:

• Accidental Flagship replication?
• The birdbrains behind development

Thoughts? Special requests? Comment on Reddit!

 

[LESS T_T]

Getting more hands from the community, they'll share dev tools and set up a Patreon page: https://pistolshrimpgames.com/2022/05/simply-going-wild/

Simply Going Wild

When we started working on UQM2, we knew we would want to involve the community: starting a subreddit, conducting live streams of work, and eventually arriving here at our next weird and wild experiment.

Very shortly, we will be providing a copy of the development tools we use and our own, real Melee data for anyone to play with and enjoy. This means any of the work you see Dan doing on stream is something you, too, will be able to do. You could make a new ship, play networked Melee with a friend (or enemy), or even make entirely different gameplay!

What we’ll be giving you is in active development and by no means complete. It is something which we are using to build UQM2, though, and will continue to improve. In addition to the help we’ll receive from everyone using and having fun with our tools, we’d like to set up a Patreon page where you can support our active development. If it is wildly successful beyond anyone’s imagination, you may even help us avoid the need for a costly crowdfunding campaign, and UQM2 will be even better for it.

What do you think? What questions do you have? Discuss with us on Reddit!

 

[Infinitron]

https://pistolshrimpgames.com/2022/05/simple-and-melee-gameplay-now-available/

Simple and Melee Gameplay Now Available

Pistol Shrimp is excited to announce the very early release of Simple, our development tool for The Ur-Quan Masters 2. We’re also releasing some sample content, including our in-development Melee gameplay. This means you and your friends—or enemies—can start playing and tinkering with a slice of our game.

Now, before you get too excited—we’re the excited ones here, remember—we want to make sure you know what to expect. Our tools and content are under heavy development and far from finished, and there will be lots of rough edges on display. (We’ve only had a limited number of devices to test on, and we’re a very small team!) We expect to provide updates to Simple on an ongoing basis, and we’ve made a start at some documentation. Additionally, our twice-weekly livestreams are a good source of information and examples.

We made Simple for us, but at heart we are explorers, experimenters, and tinkerers. We want anyone with curiosity to be able to try making and playing with things, even if they’ve never tried before. With that in mind, we’re happy to be able to license the Simple binaries under a Creative Commons license and the example/Melee content under an MIT license. Play, create, have fun, and share with others freely. We want to know what your experience is like, and we especially want to see if you make anything wild, weird, or fun!

Simple and the content we’re providing are free for everyone. If you like what we’re doing and want to support us in developing The Ur-Quan Masters 2, you can hit our itch.io page linked below. We’ll also have a Patreon coming online soon! Follow these links to get started:

• Get Simple: https://pistolshrimp.itch.io/simple
• Get Content: https://github.com/pistolshrimpgames/simple-content

Questions or feedback? See the FAQ or comment on Reddit.

 

[Infinitron]

https://pistolshrimpgames.com/2022/06/join-pistol-shrimps-discord/

Join Pistol Shrimp’s Discord

Are you lonely? Forget social networks, dating apps, or sock hops. What you need is Pistol Shrimp’s Discord!

Since releasing Simple and our Melee content, we’ve heard and seen some of what the community has been able to do with almost no guidance. We know these things are very early works in progress, so we wanted to create a venue for discussion focused just around them. Whether you’re trying to learn how to play with Simple, figuring out how to get some networked Melee going, or made something really cool you want to show to us, this will be the place to do it.

If you want to hang out with us and the rest of the creative (or just very brave) community, join us at https://discord.gg/nvw4JbsY.

 

[Infinitron]

https://pistolshrimpgames.com/2022/06/simple-build-20220608/

Simple Build 20220608

A new build of Simple is available at https://pistolshrimp.itch.io/simple.

simple

• Fixes for running executable from certain unique paths.
• UI: Add support for changing script text size.
• UI: Fixes for entering numbers in different locales (commas/period separators).
• UI: Line number display fixes.
• UI: Add unique button for dropping in to a local multiplayer game.
• Physics: Collision body damping properties work better.

view

• Fixes for certain OpenGL failures.

Questions about using Simple? Join our Discord.