Exclusive Sword of the Stars Developer Diary – Part 3 

“I can only say I did my best to swat all the clichés or make them dance in interesting new ways.”

Space may not be the final frontier when it comes to the video game genre, but a well crafted space game is certainly a thing of joy.

Sword of the Stars, a PC title, is planned for an early summer release and looks to be counted among the well-crafted space games, opening vistas to the imagination while giving players an entertaining and challenging gaming experience.

Features include:

• 4 races - Human, Hiver, Tarkas and Liir - each with technology advantages and disadvantages.

• Each race has a unique mode of transport between star systems, creating very different styles of play, depending on what race you choose to control.

• Slider bar controls and simplified interface to avoid the confusion of other games without sacrificing depth of gameplay.

• Over 150 distinct technologies to research on a dynamic tech tree that changes from game to game. While the core technology of the tree is consistent, certain offshoots are random from game to game. There is no perfect path up the tech tree to memorize and exploit, because the path keeps changing!

• New technology reflected in detailed ship models, weapons and combat effects. Over 40 weapons from six different weapon classes, in various size classes, from point defense, turrets, and massive spinal mounts!

• Players can design and build ships from three size classes - Destroyer, Cruiser, and Dreadnought - by mixing and matching ship sections (command, mission, and engines), then outfitting them with armor and weapons to suit their preference.

• Up to 8 players can play against the AI and one another over LAN or online.

• Choose from a variety of scenario campaigns to play alone or with friends, each adding more color and depth to the Sword of the Stars universe.

But to truly understand the game from the inside, it is better to go inside and what better way to do that than with the developers chronicling what they are bringing to the game, as well as detailing the state of the development.

For the previous two parts of these exclusive developer diaries, please see Part #1 and Part #2 .

In this exclusive GameZone feature, we turn to the Kerberos team for an up close look at the making of Sword of the Starts.

Kerberos Productions Development Diary
Sword of the Stars – Entry 3

The Races of SotS
By Arinn Dembo, Lead Writer, Kerberos Productions

My name is Arinn Dembo, and I am a professional writer.

I have been involved in the computer gaming industry since 1995, when I wrote my first reviews for Computer Gaming World magazine; since 1998 I have contributed background fiction and world-building to five different SF-themed computer games, including Sword of the Stars.

Throughout my career as a dev I have worked closely with Martin E. Cirulis; in the early days, the contributions the two of us made as a writing team were often listed under a single joint psuedonym, “Marcus Skyler.” So it was only natural that when Martin formed his own company and took the helm as lead designer and CEO of Kerberos Productions, he would want to put my skills to use in the creation of Sword of the Stars.

As the writer of the game’s background fiction, I am responsible for all descriptions of the four races that one can choose to play in SotS. As you flip through this game’s manual or click through the pages of the extensive Sword of the Stars wikipedia, you may find yourself reading passages about the lives, the cultures, the history or individual characteristics of the races you can play in this game. Just about every word of that material was written by Yours Truly, over the past two years.

The only orders I had from On High, when I began my task, were as follows: “We want four races. Some future star-faring humans, a reptile intelligence, an insect intelligence, and some kind of aquatic race. And don’t make them clichéd.”

Now, given how common insect, reptile and aquatic races are in ALL science fiction, but especially in science fiction gaming? Telling me to create these four races without making them clichés was a whole lot like asking me to pour a drink of water without getting the glass wet. But Martin Cirulis is the kind of man who can ask the impossible and get it, nine times out of ten—he’s just that kind of guy. So, inspired by his example and the ground-breaking approach that Kerberos was taking in matters of design, I asked myself some crucial questions.

Number One: what exactly makes an insect, a reptile, or an aquatic intelligence a cliché? My job was to figure out what the majority of depictions of these races had in common — and then decide, as Cirulis and Stewart had during in the design process for this game, whether these common attributes were “fun” or not. If something wasn’t fun — or remotely interesting or relevant – it had to go. And if I saw some common attribute which was, in fact, not only un-fun but downright lame, dumb or despicable? Well, I made it my job to twist it, turn it upside-down, or rip it out by the roots.

The Humans were a relatively easy job. They already exist in the real world and they have roughly ten thousand years’ worth of recorded history to study, if you want to get to know them better. All I really had to do was jettison all the bluff-and-hearty cheery optimism of previous human stellar empires — stories in which the stars are conquered by a version of the human race with the toothpaste-commercial smiles and Flash Gordon naivete of American commercial SF from the 1930’s to the 1950’s.

No, I wanted to give the power to span the stars to a rather different sort of humans. Accordingly, the Homo sapiens of SoTS are anything but the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed children of an untouchable empire. These humans are hard-luck, hard-scrabble sons-of-bitches who have clawed their way out of the ruins of their own catastrophic wars, their own moronic environmental depradations, and the additional burden of a colossal unexpected cheapshot — a planetary bombardment inflicted by a race which had space supremacy over them, and chose to kick humanity in the nads just because they could.

The resulting humans are a little more interesting than Biff Chestrock and the rest of his galaxy-busting crew. The humans of SoTS are tough, vengeful, and subtle in their movement through the universe. They slip from star to star along paths which only they can see and use. They strike unexpectedly and retreat to locations which are difficult to anticipate. And their unofficial motto is a few words of grubby bastardized Latin: “Repensum Est Canicula” — “Payback is a Bitch.”

When I moved on to create the Hivers, I knew what I was up against, in previous depictions of insect civilization. The stereotypical Bug race is a mindless horde, acting as one and motivated by nothing but rapacity. Coldly logical at best, the classic insect intelligence is really nothing more than an onrushing carpet of death. Their motives are simplistic, they have no emotions, and they have limited or no sentience at all as individuals.

Unfortunately, my own intelligence rebels at the thought that any species of creatures so incredibly limited as individuals would ever be able to achieve a high level of technology on their own, much less become a star-spanning empire with their own system of faster-than-light travel. In fact, I know from the history of my own planet that great forward advances in technology almost always result from the stubborn insistence of one or two individuals in opposition to the mass mind of prevailing wisdom. And I truly do not believe that one mass mind— no matter how many individuals serve it — could ever accomplish every task and come up with every necessary idea to create an entire technologically advanced society. Hell, from what I see around me on THIS planet, it takes several sentient individuals to make me a decent cheeseburger.

So I could see it was time to kick some of these clichés in the ass. And the first one to go was that the Hivers could all be members of any kind of mass mind. No way, Jose! Each one of these insect people had to be an individuall — a thinking, feeling, sensitive being who had ideas, yearnings, and dreams of his own. Every one of them would be capable of creating or enjoying a work of art, of having a religious faith, of taking pleasure in music and having plans for the following Thursday.

So the real question was: what could possibly motivate so many individuals to join one cause with every fiber of their being? What could bind so many individuals to serve, to sacrifice, to hurl themselves into the breach and give up everything they had, including their lives, without ever having to ask why?

If the Hivers were not a mass mind, why would they ever behave like a Hive?

There was only one real answer to this question, in my own experience of the world: love, plain and simple. In the case of the Hivers, this love is the love of family – the pride of origin, the devotion to brothers, to fathers, and above all to their mothers. The Hivers are all individuals, but they choose to live and die as part of something greater, as many humans do, for the sake of love. Hivers could teach us a thing or two about family values.

With each race of this game, there were new questions to ask and new clichés to kick. The stereotypical lizard race in most science fiction is cold-blooded, stolid, logical, slow-moving and slow-acting – incapable of emotions, which are common in human beings. When they are anything but anthropoid dinosaurs, the secondary set of clichés is a race of greedy, malevolent serpent-people a sinuous cross between slender human beings and snakes.

I thought all of this was garbage, and I created the Tarkas instead. Biologically modeled on gorillas, the Tarka are a society dominated by alpha males and coteries of females who direct their aggressions and energy. Instead of being cold-blooded and incapable of emotion, the Tarkas are passionately sensual beings who love life and do their damnedest to hang onto it. Instead of being slow-moving and slow-acting, they are quick in all things, including their wits and their combat reflexes. Instead of being stolid and logical, they are Machiavellian and Mandarin; instead of being humorless and sociopathic, they love jokes and games, are loyal soldiers and friends, and worship a thousand different gods with gentle tolerance. Like many imperial cultures they are far more concerned with clawing their way up the social ladder at home than with impressing the members of any other species they may happen to run into — but they have a taste for human poetry, especially warrior-poets like the Greek Archilochis.

When I began writing about the last of the game’s four races, I was not at all interested in creating just another species of cold fish. I dismissed the idea of making our aquatic race water-breathers right away; I wanted warm-blooded creatures who nurtured their own young and had strong social ties, more relevant connections to one another than any fish could likely develop. So I decided to make the Liir a cetacean species, and I gave them some of the characteristics that I associate with the cetaceans here on earth, especially in terms of their personal and cultural ethics.

There were, of course, some problems with creating a cetacean race which was actually capable of creating and manipulating technology to the point of becoming star-farers. My Liir needed the ability to communicate complex ideas and relate to one another underwater. They needed bodies that were adapted to swimming as a primary means of locomotion, but they also had to have the dexterity to handle tools as well as humans can with a pair of hands and opposable thumbs.

Accordingly, the species I created is both telepathic and telekinetic, with refined tool use capability. And although their personal and communal ethics are non-violent—in and of itself a cliché-buster, in a genre which is at core about armed conflict and imperialism—the Liir are a race which has suffered enough pain to lash out at others in return.

Like many groups of humans in the history of our own planet, the Liir were once enslaved, dominated, murdered and oppressed by those who regarded them as inferior. And like many humans who have suffered a similar ordeal, the Liir eventually decided that they were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it any more. Try to imagine the people of Tibet rising up tomorrow and creating a tailored virus which would kill the invaders who have subjugated their country, obliterating the enemy down to the last man.

If the Tibetan people then crept into the abandoned tanks that their oppressors had left behind, adapted them to their own purposes, and ventured forth into the lands beyond their own borders, ready to establish outposts and defend themselves from any future attack? They might be a culture very much like the Liir of our game: an ethically advanced civilization which abhors unnecessary violence, and still understands intimately the phrase “Never Again.”

So … did I achieve the impossible? Could I pour a drink of water without getting the glass wet? I can’t say; I’m going to have to let the players judge. I can only say I did my best to swat all the clichés or make them dance in interesting new ways. And overall, my job was to give this game a little breath of life, and lend your strategic and tactical options something that only a writer can give: character, resonance, and meaning.

You’ll have to let me know how I did when you play the game.

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