Developer’s Diary: Creating evil and a new threat within the universe

“The Zuul represent a commentary and a reflection upon the past of the science fiction genre”

Kerberos and Lighthouse have a solid formula for success – create a space-strategy title, pack it with all the elements that make a strategy title very entertaining and then continue to add to the foundation until the palace is build.

Sword of the Stars was the foundation; Born of Blood is part of the building blocks. Sword of the Stars 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. 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 can be found at http://pc.gamezone.com/news/04_16_07_09_56AM.htm.

Evil: It’s not just a word
By Arinn Dembo, Lead Writer for Kerberos Productions

Creating a new race for Kerberos and the Sword of the Stars universe is always a challenge. The Kerberos team defines “expansion” a bit differently than many other developers do. When we work toward an expansion, it isn’t just the ship sections or the art assets that expand, or even the strategic and tactical options available to players. Everything has to get bigger and better, wherever possible.

It falls to me to make sure that the backdrop for the game also evolves, so that these epic struggles for empire do not take place against a static, lifeless curtain. History demonstrates that when technology advances and cultures clash, great transformations of thought and cultural practice can also take place. Every race that I created for the first game will be constantly recreating itself as time passes, as the minds of its people are broadened by experience.

With the release of Born of Blood, Kerberos is moving the SotS universe forward in time. When a BoB player begins a new game, his theoretical “starting position” will be a few decades later than the original SoTS. The four previous races of the game will have already crossed swords and made limited alliances more than once, at this point. Although each race began the quest for interstellar empire with a paranoid attitude of extreme xenophobia and racial supremacy, after a few decades of interaction there has been some progress toward mutual understanding. This understanding is anything but perfect, but in the rising tide of exploration and expansion there has been enough peaceful contact to allow members of different races to find common ground and interests - whether their governments and interstellar navies were getting along at the time or not.

On any highly populated imperial world, there are usually hundreds or thousands of resident “aliens,” who live and work among the dominant species. A modest form of interstellar trade has begun, as each race takes an interest in the goods and services of the others. Along with the trade, there is a certain amount of piracy and privateering — no one is certain exactly who to blame when a trade route is attacked, however, because the pirate ships fly no imperial colors.

Into this brief era of uneasy peace and mutual toleration, however, there intrudes a fly in the ointment: a new species. The Zuul, now emerging as a playable faction with Born of Blood, have been with the SoTS universe all along. They began in SotS as a random event, a minor annoyance for most players — a single vessel that would appear seemingly out of nowhere, attack a random world on the periphery of an empire, and try to escape with a cargo of slaves.

“Slavers” was the name that players quickly gave them, but the developers called them Rippers. There was a reason for this. “Ripper” is a word that captures the way they move through space, the way they research new technology, and the way they treat their planets … in general, it sums up their entire relationship to the universe.

With each consecutive update for the original game, we added a bit more to the Ripper presence in the SoTS universe. Their attacks became more frequent. Eventually the first Ripper tankers appeared as refuelling depots were found in uninhabited systems, and a large bounty was placed on all ripper ships. The military intelligence agencies of all four original races were very concerned about these mysterious “slavers” — and the fact that their technology seemed to be advancing.

Like all the races I created for SoTS, the Zuul represent a commentary and a reflection upon the past of the science fiction genre — as well as my own species in general. As always, I was looking for a new approach to an old concept. I had to ask myself what slavery really is … and what it means.

This is a species that arrives in force on an enemy world, snatching peaceful people from their homes to make them slaves. In the bellies of their overcrowded galleys, countless innocents have suffered in pain and fear, hunger and thirst, injury and illness, praying to be released into the light and air once more — only to arrive on a frightening, alien new world and be systematically worked to death for another’s profit, watching their friends and loved ones drop one by one and be cast aside as empty husks.

From the outset, I knew it was not possible for me to introduce such a race and its “economic model” without seriously addressing the implications of slavery. This mode of production has logistical and strategic implications that other designers had to contend with but it was the cultural and moral implications that I had to contend with. Slavery is not a simple matter of “+2 production, -2 happiness.” It is, in fact, an extremely brutal way of life, based on a sense of elite entitlement and moral superiority, which have to be backed by significant military force.

The Zuul, then, represent my own ruminations of the subject of mastery, and on that sort of imperialism which is not content to simply kill others and take their land, but thinks it better to humiliate their defeated enemies and make them serve. In the process of creation, I asked myself what sort of species could embody every culture I had studied which was capable of this particularly sadistic form of extended genocide. I ruminated on the nature of sadism and servitude, and how such a thing could be made possible on such an epic interstellar scale. And since I am a horror writer, I decided to have a little fun while creating a race that would be physically, mentally and spiritually capable of enslaving a whole galaxy. Sprinkled throughout their background, history and culture are the things I borrowed from many lands and epochs of history — from the Spanish Conquest to the Khmer Rouge.

The Zuul are a savage marsupial race, developed in the biowarfare laboratory by an unknown species. They have developed a species-wide religion based on the worship of the scientists that created them, known only as “The Great Masters.” The rootstock from which they were bred was a carrion-eating, pack-hunting predator, and they still have the high reproductive and metabolic rate of their ancestors. They live fast, breed fast, and die fast. And along with their many physical abilities, they are also telepathic, with a talent for coercion and interrogation — dominating the will of another, crushing the will and forcing the body to obey, and ripping thought, memory and ideas from the cortex of another living thing. Zuul masters call this process…”research.”

In any sadomasochistic hierarchy, of course, every master is ultimately the servant to an even higher power. The Zuul are a race created by biological engineering — but they did not create themselves. Somewhere in the future of the SoTS universe, players may find the race that the Zuul call “the Great Masters” … and what will the free peoples of the galaxy do when the masters of the masters return?

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