Developer's Diary: Meet BoB - the first expansion for Sword of the Stars

"At Kerberos we tend to view our games more like living things than products"

Sword of the Stars, a PC strategy game fro Kerberos, was billed as a 4X strategy game - a high end strategy game that offers many factions and ways to play. While that can be a little daunting, the game managed to pull if off nicely (see GameZone's Preview).

But with any successful title, there is bound to be an expansion and Sword of the Stars, published by Lighthouse Interactive, was no exception. That was when BoB, or Born of Blood, was conceived. According to the official press release:

"Sword of the Stars, originally released in August 2006, is a breakthrough 4X Strategy game that has returned gamers to the action-packed roots of the 4X genre with some new twists, including a 3D starmap and real-time combat resolution in a 3D environment – all available in multiplayer as well.

"In the official Add On 'Born of Blood' fans will see an increase in diversity, tactical depth and replay-value of the original game. SotS:BoB will give players a variety of new weapons, technologies, ship sections, scenarios and menaces to further expand and extend their gameplay experience. SotS:BoB is an essential upgrade for anyone involved in the Sword of the Stars universe."

Game features include:

• 1 new race - the Zuul - with 80+ ship sections and Tunnel Drive FTL technology.

• Massive Zuul slaver disks allow them to take slaves and use them to boost production on Zuul fortress worlds.

• Over 15 new weapons to battle with including Boarding Pods!

• Over 25 new technologies to research and deploy.

• New diplomatic Data and Comm systems. Make demands! Ask for help in attacking specific targets. Warn players off from the worlds you have yet to claim!

• More Intelligence technologies allow you to keep track of enemy ships, tech and battles.

• A new trade route system making economic control and output even more vital for military success. Star freighters ply the trade routes making money for the player but are also vulnerable to raiders. Active piracy and escort battles enter the SotS universe with a bang.

• Details combat results and status graphs allow you to track the rise or fall of your empire over time.

• A variety of new ship sections for the original races to help meet this new threat.

• More tactical combat options.

• New combat arena as ships are called upon to battle in the dangerous depths of Node-space.

• New random menaces / exploration threats.

• 2 new Scenarios (for both single- and multiplayer).

• 5 new galaxy types.

• Various GUI and multiplayer enhancements.

Kerberos, in preparing for this expansion, is sharing its developer diaries with GameZone.com. The first, naturally, deals with the process of conceiving an expansion.

The Hardest “X”
By Martin E. Cirulis, Lead Designer, Kerberos Productions

When it comes to the development of a 4X game, the X that many tend to over look is “eXpansion.” Traditionally expansions for computer games are seen as a “bonus points” situation. You get your game out the door, it hits the shelves, you watch the sales numbers and then, hopefully, someone calls and says “I bet we can sell more of that stuff! What can you give us in a 20-buck box?”  Now no one is unhappy with a call like that, but sometimes the result can be a little ad hoc. After all, when you put everything into a game that you can, “more” can be a dangerous proposition.

At Kerberos we tend to view our games more like living things than products that are put into a box and then are moved-on from. When it is time to issue a patch for some unavoidable technical glitch or another, we tend not to look at it as an unpaid chore as much as it is a small chance to nudge the SotS universe ahead by a few notches. So when the call came asking if we were interesting in making an expansion, we were thrilled not just at the initial success of SotS but also at having a chance to evolve the game a little bit more down its timeline. SotS had come into existence by asking a lot of questions of the standard 4X genre and we had decided awhile back that any expansion would continue in the same vein instead of just being a simple content pack.

As was always intended from the start, any SotS expansion would revolve around a new race and a new drive technology. Given the attention paid to the original races and star-drives, this was a given. And while creating another full-on race at the same level of detail as the four originals was not trivial and creating a new drive system that didn’t completely throw out the balance of the game was its own mighty task, the real meat of things was the process of asking what new slice of time would the SotS expansion cover and what would it mean to gameplay. These were the considerations that were paramount when it came time to create the first SotS expansion, what eventually became known as, Born in Blood.

BoB, as it instantly and affectionately became known as, is insight into the post-first-encounter era of the SotS universe. Sword of the Stars was meant to represent those first tentative steps into a hostile universe where everything is strange and dangerous and survival is your only priority. BoB on the other hand, shines a light on the first half-step back where empires begin to reach out and think in the long term, both in the developing of their empires and in the interacting with others. Of course, it wouldn’t be a time of fledgling empires without some wolves at the door and so the Zuul were born into the SotS universe to be a new and deadly force among the stars.

Now, an evil race is hardly new in the realms of space 4X, but once again, Kerberos wanted to question how a concept like that translates to actual gameplay. Sure, it’s easy to say, “Slavery is evil! They should be slavers!” but to make that a simple government-type decision - where the result is, for example, more production, but generates less happiness - wouldn’t be the SotS way. Instead it came down to “Well slavery is all evil and stuff…but where do slaves come from?” And of course the answer to that is “your enemies.” And so the mechanic for sending large ships to the surface and capturing population was born into gameplay and in itself it added another option in combat than destroying enemy worlds. Now suddenly there were players that were not perhaps trying to win battles completely, but instead just keep you busy enough to get away with prisoners.

Other questions further evolved the game. With the original four races now starting to get used to the idea of cohabitating the galaxy, obviously diplomatic channels would improve. But how? Again a standard 4X list of options didn’t interest us much, but questioning the mechanic led to a modular language system where you could warn/demand and deal with another player quickly, easily and effectively, be they human controlled or an AI opponent. Do you want to demand a planet from another empire? Then do so and it lights up on their maps instantly. Want to ask for help taking down an enemy world? Pick it out and send the info - including the invasion date - to your allies with a few clicks of the mouse. Want to keep track of enemy designs and weapon load outs? Then its time to research the first steps in a galactic intelligence system.

When it came to asking how evolving stellar empires would deal with finances, a system of trade routes seemed an obvious answer, but once again, it had to have an involving gameplay mechanism that made things interesting without bogging them down. This line of thinking eventually led to the creation of the trade sector system that would allow players to not only design and build star-freighters, but also raider vessels capable of lurking along trade-routes and attacking shipping from seemingly nowhere. Of course with raiders come escorts and with a few clicks players can assign all these ships to work in any trade sector automatically. Of course when a raid event occurs the player can choose to play out these tense, small-scale battles where merchantmen try to escape intact while raiders and escorts tangle in deep space.

It’s this process of question and answer that has made developing BoB more of a pleasure than a trial and has made the whackload of content available in this expansion virtually organic to the design. All the new techs and weapons derive smoothly from the progression of the SotS universe and so, while expansions can often be tricky and run the risk of blurring a design, BoB has been a real joy to work on and has even allowed us to add even more clues and story bits to the future of SotS beyond BoB. The Zuul may have been born in blood, but the expansion they inhabit was born in the heart of gameplay.

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