Stars Reach News

The Fae have been core to the concept of Stars Reach since close to the very beginning. They are central to the core storyline of our universe, in ways that you are learning about in the recent lore story “Staying Grounded.”

In thinking about their visual appearance, it was important that they not be “space elves.” They are meant to be faerie, inspired by Celtic myth, and an important part of the science-fantasy aspect of Stars Reach. There’s a great wellspring of myth and legend to pull from there that is far more interesting than the sanitized and streamlined elf from D&D, which is basically a way less mystical version of Tolkien.

One of the earliest pictures I had in my head was of the character Bram from “Staying Grounded” – a massive hulk of a fellow, with tiny wings that really didn’t do much. In fact, I kind of envisioned him looking like Alley Oop. Just with those tiny, useless wings. This is because for any given one of our archetypes, I always want to play with subverting what one expects. I want players to come to the characters and instantly see a personality that they resonate with – a sort of “breakfast club” menu of characters: a jock, a goth, a slacker, a nerd… and then have the room to explore all the ways in which people are just not that simple and easily put in a box.



This here is one of our earliest key art pieces for the entire game, back when we were thinking about what the vibe of the universe was, and what gameplay might actually look like. You can see many things that would serve as core to the game: fantastical landscapes, weird but cute creatures, a player market, interacting via tools… and a Fae.

You’ll notice in these first two images that we tried out blending sci-fi elements in the core of the species. In the lore, the Fae do not have a homeworld – they have been living hiding in the ducts and crevices of the vast Servitor ships that roam the Garden tending it for the long-vanished Old Ones. They have wings, but they cannot fly – they are apparently vestigial. So early experiments involved adding bionic prosthetics to them. But that then looked like they could all fly after all, so that fell away.

Of course, elves exert a powerful gravitational force. Visually, it’s hard to get away from them, and as we were designing, we kept creating things that didn’t satisfy visually. We kept landing back at, well, space elves. In fact, we’d even get concepts labelled ELF. I kept having arguments with the artists, and eventually pulled out my Charles Vess, Arthur Rackham, and of course, one of my several copies of Froud & Lee’s Faeries, and sent around the bits that seemed to me most representative of our aim.



The key things that I was looking for were more of a sense of that otherworldliness. Elves in media have become very human over the years. The thing that was creatively exciting about Fae was the ways in which they could convey deep mystery, because we needed them to carry some of the central mysteries in the lore.

We needed pointier chins! Less Orlando Bloom and more wood spirit! More sense of magic, even though there isn’t any in our universe! In our lore, the Fae believe that their lost homeworld is Tír na nÓg, and that magic once worked there and they could fly. The rest of the Transplanetary League basically considers this to be a religious belief, but it needed to feel real and true to them, and to players who would choose to embody them.



For a while, we overcorrected, and actually had magic leaking out of them in various ways. That didn’t really work for our setting, though – our universe is often silly and often mystical, but not quite that mystical.

We explored concepts that were basically Tinkerbell, which was closer in some ways, but didn’t offer anywhere near enough visual differentiation from humans. But we were iterating closer over time, and bits of these concepts started finding their way into our iterations.

We got closer to capturing the sharpness of features, and the wings, and the otherworldliness, but the eyebrows seemed maybe a bit much.Part of the idea, after all, was to have a Fae who might be a spaceship mechanic, covered in grease, wearing goggles and carting a welding laser.



Having glowing magic bits hanging off of them led us to exploring more fantastical looks that conveyed their magical beliefs, and from there led us all the way back to the Celtic depictions of sidhe with antlers and horns and other animal qualities. The butterfly wings were an interesting touch, but we decided they conflicted with our desire to have wings, which is probably the single biggest thing that we could do to make them look less elven.

So even though having them all have glowing blue eyes felt like too much, it started leading us towards our eventual target. We landed at having a spread of wings from dragonfly to butterfly, at echoing those Celtic horns, and even some remnants of that leaking blue magic that summons faint memories of blue woad, as markings on the antlers and as tattoos.



The other thing that we want to achieve is to have the Fae be capable of being small. Every MMO wants to have its super-short choice, and faeries are a good choice for that (we explored having “chibi” Elioni and Hyugons too, but ultimately, it felt like there were already loads of short catlike people out there and Hyugons felt like they wanted to be elongated, not squished!). They don’t all have to be short, though. It felt like instead, having the variability was one of the things that could make them feel special and different. Fae with antlers and without. A lot of wing styles. Which fits, in the end, with the faerie tricksters of legend, shapeshifting creatures of air and shadow, with whom you must bargain very carefully, if at all.



HOMEWORLD: lost Tír na nÓg

CULTURE

The Fae have a pronounced split between Ground Fae and Space Fae. Space Fae lived aboard the Servitor ships, hiding in the nooks and crannies and living off of the leavings. Ground Fae snuck aboard descending Servitors and went to live in the wilderness of the various planets tended by the Servitors.

Many, many Fae died to the indifference of the Servitors, until the founding of the Transplanetary League. Now they are known as the first of the spacefaring species, and also the only one without a known homeworld. Some insist they came from a land where their wings worked and they could fly, and to this day there is a House of Magic that passes down the traditions of supposed magicks and obedience to Queen Mab. But these days, most Fae just think of all that as quaint nonsense.

Perhaps because of their lack of a homeworld and embrace of what others think of as mysticism, the Fae on the whole tend towards good cheer and indomitability, and of course, a certain wildness of spirit. There is still much mystery in the saga of the Fae, and it may be that the only answers require pulling back the curtains of night and passing beyond the veil.

[Support Stars Reach on Kickstarter!]

Let's talk about Stars Reach VFX with Johnny Ow!

From dust clouds to dynamic fog, learn how visual effects are an essential puzzle piece for the in-game experience.

What are his favorite tools? And what excites him the most about the Game launch?

[Watch on Youtube!]

In our second post, we talk about sound effects. In this third and final post, I’ll talk about voice-over and music.

[h2]VOICE-OVER[/h2]
Voice-over refers to any spoken lines recorded by humans speaking them. This is typically narrative dialogue and exposition, but is also, importantly, the less-important off-hand comments and reactions people utter in various situations, like the NPC grocer talking to an NPC customer or a soldier crying out in pain. In situations where you want to hear people around you, voice-over brings it to the game.
Our plans for voice acting, scripted lines, background NPC chatter... anything like that, are not yet set. We might have none! Whatever we settle on, Stars Reach will almost certainly not be a voice-over-heavy game. But if we do, again, variation will be the crucial factor. You just don't want to hear that guy tell you about how he took an arrow to the knee... one... more... time. I love Skyrim, but I kinda felt like that particular Nord could have had something like forty to eighty different voice-over comments, rather than the... what, two or three? that he had?



[h2]BGM - BACKGROUND MUSIC[/h2]
In the 80’s and 90’s, my career was in music. In the 90's and 00's, I composed a fair amount of music for games. As I pushed my career more towards general audio design and implementation, I took that experience with me and was able to act as liaison/interpreter between team leaders and composers. (Who do not speak the same language) What I have come to believe is the role of music in games is:

• Music creates the soul of the game.
  
• Music speaks to the player on a level deeper than does information.
  
• Music speaks to the heart.
  
• Music supports the emotional experience the player is likely to have. (Not the one you wish they were having!)
  

However, music is undoubtedly the aspect of games which has the most conflicted, unclear, emotionally-charged history. It is difficult because music is a difficult target to begin with (because individual tastes vary so widely). It is difficult because there is no consensus on the role of music in games. It is difficult because we can't just follow the film model for several reasons. And yet, we have to do it, because few companies have the courage to release a game with no music. This has tended to create a fear-based approach to music in which teams look around at reliably-successful examples (cue Star Wars theme) and just do that. Then if it doesn't turn out well, you can at least point and say "Hey! We got triple-A music! We recorded in Prague! John Williams made it! It's not my fault!" (Cue Lando)

The basic problems in game music are:

• Games are not films. They are not linear narratives. You can't control what is happening every second, so you can't guarantee coherence between the music and what is on the screen.
  
• Games are long. Any game team with a budget can commission a great theme song. Any composer worth their salt can put a music score under a cinematic because that's just linear film music. Ad agencies can put music under your 45-second ad. The hard part is what to do with aaaaaaaaaaaallll the rest of the time. The
• other* 99.72% of the player's experience which is neither the splash screen nor a cut scene. This is where the real work of game music happens.
  
• Repetition. Most music relies on certain forms of repetition to be what it is. But this repetition tends to be at the lower levels. e.g. a drum beat, a repeated motif, or a sixteen-measure break which is mostly just the same four-bar pattern four times. At middle levels, you can repeat things somewhat. e.g. a chorus which is repeated three times, or the same guitarist doing a solo in two different places in the song. But on higher levels, the repetition becomes more problematic. If Green Day played a concert and played the same song four times in a row, that would be weird. If Beethoven's Ninth had only two sections and they alternated for ninety minutes, that would be boring.
  

And I don't know about you, but I had more than 7000 hours on my main character alone in EverQuest.



But you can't commission 7000 hours of unique music. Even at the relatively low cost of $2000 per minute of music, that would cost your company Eight Hundred And Forty Million Dollars, and for that money you could buy two F-22 Raptor fighter jets and invade a small country. So what do you do? Maybe you commission about 30 minutes of music and just repeat it a lot? Yeah... about that... see next paragraph.

The over-arching problem to avoid is what I call 'Zombie Music'. (Which is a sub-category within 'Zombie Audio') By this I mean music behaviors which seem to be disconnected from what the player is actually experiencing, lurching about like a zombie. The player becomes annoyed and distracted and is likely to turn the music off, and there goes your $200,000 budget recording with an orchestra in Prague. Music is experienced by people as a sentient entity speaking to them on an emotional level. But now imagine that person repeating themselves over and over like a drunken office-Christmas-party co-worker. You want to get away. Imagine the music telling you about a funeral while you're trying to play Frisbee with friends, or laughing at jokes while you're trying to solve a difficult work problem. Music must be in alignment with how the player feels, and unlike a film, you can't dictate how they're going to feel. You can only make good guesses and be gentle in your musical messaging. It is there to support, not to lead or dictate.

And so, repetition at a high level (i.e. looping a 2-minute song for which you paid $4000) is Zombie Music.

How to avoid? As described above, all-unique music for an entire play-through is usually impractical, and with an MMO that problem is 2-4 orders of magnitude larger. One answer is music which is randomized yet connected to the game experience such that it always sounds appropriate, recognizable, but not identical. This is the method I prefer for MMO's, and the method I have spent much of my career developing. It is not a method I invented; look up Aleatoric Music, Music Concrete, Generative-Adaptive Music, and this:


The basic idea is that rather than playing pre-recorded music, we party like it's 1999 and give the game musical sounds, along with randomization and playback data, and tie the audio playback engine into the game at a very intimate level. The game's conditions alter how the sounds are played, and which sounds are played. The most obvious and classic example of this is combat-specific music. But that was 1985. We can go so much further now.

Stars Reach is exquisitely well-positioned to make compelling use of this kind of music system to create rich aural support structures for the player's experience. We can tie in environmental data to make the music respond to weather, time-of-day, seasons, etc. We can tie in player actions to make the music respond with a gentle congratulatory feel. We can tie in assessments of the level of enemy challenges nearby to create a sense of danger, or ease. Let’s change from major to minor key when it starts raining. Let’s increase the tempo a bit if the enemies in an area are way higher level than you are. Let’s let the player set little melody motifs which will then play occasionally with subtle variations!

Back to the beginning of this segment about music: It can be the soul of the game. All without clumsy switching between over-stated, insistent musical cues which try and fail to dictate your feelings.

[h2]TO CONCLUDE:[/h2]
I feel like my whole career, both of my careers, really, have led me to this project. The opportunities we have here to create wonderful, socially-connected, fulfilling player experiences are unprecedented. This is exactly the kind of project on which I want to work, and seeing it through to becoming a real living, breathing collection of worlds and people will be a crowning achievement for my entire gaming life. From 1975 when I first saw Pong, to now when I really need to be sure to keep doing the daily and weekly Umbar crafting tasks in LotRO so I can get enough luck-stones to fully upgrade my Elven Pickaxe... Stars Reach is all I need to say I really did the gaming thing as well as I possibly could have. :)



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Every pledge counts, and we cannot wait to bring you more updates soon. Thanks for your support!

Photo by LericDax


[h2]PART TWO[/h2]

[h3]Now:[/h3]

“So it’s true, then, that the Fae had no homeworld? They lived on Servitor ships?” The Gertan girl – she seemed so young! – looks at Clare quizzically. “Or… I guess that means they lived in Servitors? Since the ships are Servitors?”

“Not all of them. Well, some of them – like Bram – believe that they came originally from the magical world of Tír na nÓg. Where magic worked and they could fly using their vestigial wings.”

“That just sounds like religion? I mean, we had legends of Tír na nÓg back on Kuru.”

Clere chuckles. “So did we, on Earth. I bet you had legends of faeries too.”

The Gertan aide looks thoughtful, rummages in her box, and starts taking notes. Then she stops. “Then where did they come from?”

Clere shrugs.

[h3]Then:[/h3]

“There, suture it good and tight.” The old crone pointed her bony finger at one edge of the cut on her leg. Blood oozed past the stitches, and her skirt was flung immodestly up her thigh, but she didn’t seem to care.

Shae grit her teeth and pushed the needle through the crepey skin. It tore when she pulled the thread tighter. The old woman winced.

Shae flung the sewing kit down. “This is ridiculous. There has to be a better way.”

Rosmerta stared at her. “What better way? We’re out of ointments, child.”

“It’s going to get infected, you know that.”

Rosmerta tsk’ed. “And if it does, I’ll catch the blood fever, and I’ll set out some offering to the spirits of the ever night, and I’ll sing my way through the veil.”

Shae sat back on her heels. “And if it does, I’ll be cleaning up your piss and wiping your arse and then dragging your stinky body to the nearest disposal chute.”

“Ah, don’t do so poorly by me, Shae! Drop me in a recycling vat, please, let me return to the cycle of nature.”

Shae sighed exasperatedly. “What nature? We live inside a giant robot that doesn’t care we’re alive.”

Rosmerta’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, they care. It is part of the Bargain.”

Shae kept her face impassive. “Of course, the great Bargain struck with the Old Ones.”

“Yes!” Rosmerta said, drawing herself up. For a moment she looked like the witch from the House of Magic that she once was, before dwindling away to frailty. “The Servitors keep us all alive, because that was the Bargain struck with their masters.”

“And what we did we give those masters, in this bargain, eh? Because if I’m to believe these bedtime stories, we must have struck a deal. We are bound by bargains, aren’t we? Isn’t that another part of all these old stories?”

Rosmerta looked at her, then came to a decision. “Here, help me up.” Shae got under the old Fae’s arm, and Rosmerta grabbed her walking stick. It was a prized possession, made of actual wood and worn smooth with handling. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“It’s time you understood some of the House of Magic.”

The paths through the Servitor ship were dark, because they did not need light to follow their programming. Rosmerta led Shae on an unerring journey, up levels, past huge empty spaces where drones floated in endless zipping rows on endless inscrutable journeys. She led her past cathedrals of circuitry that glowed in colors Shae could not name. They stepped over a river of liquid that folded their souls as they passed over it, like fingers running along the inside of their spines.

The whole way, the stitches came loose, and the leg bled more, and Rosmerta limped more and moved more slowly.

“We should go back,” Shae said. “I’ll never find my way home if you can’t guide me.”

Rosmerta cackled. “Just follow the trail of blood, my dear! But worry not, we are here. This is our chamber of mysteries on this ship.”

And there past the doorway, was the dazzle.

Shae hadn’t seen it since she was a child and was orphaned – and never like this. The glittering black velvet and spray of gemstone stars. The diffuse tendrils of heated gases billowing in cosmic winds. The room was a semi-circle, with vast windows onto space.

Standing around the room were Servitor types she had never seen before. Some were shiny and clean, and some were rusty. They had blades for feet and vicious corkscrews for fingers; antennae like insects and energy pulse cannons as forearms. Some hovered folded into balls, and others loomed, frozen mid-gesture.

“The House of Magic tries to keep the memory of our magicks from Tír na nÓg alive. But none of it works here.”

“Because magic isn’t real,” Shae said sourly. All this mysticism talk was ruining her amazement at the view. She gingerly walked past all the immobile Servitors. They were powered down, and she had learned early in her life to recognize when the robots were blind to her passage. When she reached the windows, she laid her palms and the tip of her nose against the window and stared into the abyss.

“None of it works here,” Rosmerta said. “But any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

And with that she took her cane and rapped it smartly across the head of one of the Servitors.

Shae turned in horror. “What are you doing?!?” She ran towards Rosmerta, but the old woman waved her off. It was too late anyway, as light flickered on under the joints and in the oddly shaped face of the Servitor. Limbs reconfigured with sine wave slides and servo smoothness, and the vast head turned.

“Organic,” the Servitor said. His voice was metallic, and Shae shivered. They talk?

Rosmerta inclined her head. “Servitor. I invoke the Bargain.”

“There is no justification. Statistical models show that a sustainable population of your species exists on many worlds.”

Rosmerta calmly said, “Our local communal knowledge store is at risk of criticality threshold loss. Information transmission must be permitted to preserve cultural identity, per the Bargain.”

The Servitor paused. “Localized knowledge of historical data is not critical to maintaining species level knowledge.”

“Our social structure requires one node to maintain privileged data for each established population center.”

The Servitor nodded. “This is in our data store. Clarify the risk.”

Rosmerta hiked up her skirt, and extended her leg. “This node is at risk of neural collapse, in the event of contamination by foreign organisms causing systemic collapse.”

The Servitor extended one of its impossibly jointed arms, then extended a projector digit from its forearm and played a beam over Rosmerta’s leg. “Organic entity is correct that invasive species have begun colonization.”

Rosmerta said again, “I invoke the Bargain. I must have time to transmit knowledge to a new node according to our traditions.”

“Oral transmission is inefficient. If this younger organic is the destination node, we could simply copy your neural net and overwrite.”

Shae shrank back. She couldn’t quite follow the conversation, but that didn’t sound good.

Rosmerta shook her head. “Not acceptable within our cultural norms.”

“Very well. We offer a solution.” The servitor extended his arm towards Rosmerta’s head. Once extended, the forearm unfolded into a fan of six hyperprojectile cannons, and they began to spin around his arm. As they sped up, they charged up with an eerie glow.

And as Shae screamed, the Servitor vaporized Rosmerta’s head. Then he vaporized the rest of her.

As he did it, Shae kept screaming, eyes shut, weeping, curled into a ball on the floor. She braced herself for the heat of a beam, for the sensation of molecular disassembly. She screamed until a hand came down on her shoulder. “Hush, girl.”

It was Rosmerta’s voice.

Shae opened her eyes. The Servitor was quiescent once more. There was a carbonized shadow on the floor. And outside the windows, peaceful endless space floated as it always had.

“What… how…?”

Rosmerta grinned. “The House of Magic never has figured out how to make our spells work here. But we have learned something of the magic of the Old Ones, and how to make the Bargain work for us. This, we call ReLifing.” She looked better than before, less drawn, less ill. She tugged up her skirt and showed up her unblemished leg. “See?”

Shae looked at the grinning old woman, and was suddenly furious. “You mean, you have had healing here this whole time? You have had the ability to bring back the dead? Like those children’s mother?”

The grin faded from Rosmerta’s face.

“You mean you could have saved my parents?” Shae was weeping now, pounding her fists against the old woman’s chest.

“Hold, child,” Rosmerta said, and took her in an embrace. “It is time that you heard some difficult truths. This is not truly power. We exist by sufferance, and by the will of vanished gods. We can rules-lawyer at the edges of the Bargain, but not much more. And this, I will teach you.”

And with that, Rosmerta and Shae talked into the night, and Shae learned what was traded by the Fae, how to bargain with the Servitors, what became of the Old Ones, and, some say, she learned the location of lost Tír na nÓg.

She also called Rosmerta a fucking asshole at least five times.

The Stars Reach community is growing fast, and it’s time for our first-ever Community Goal!

If we hit 5,000 backers on Kickstarter, we’ll unlock a Cinnamon Bun Hairstyle for all players in Stars Reach!

That means every player gets this iconic look, thanks to the support of our amazing community.

How do we unlock it?

If you’re already a backer, share the campaign! Bring your friends in.
If you haven’t backed yet, now’s the perfect time! Every pledge gets us closer.
This is just the beginning of what we can build together. We’re so grateful for your support! Now, let’s hit 5,000 backers and unlock this reward for everyone!

—---

Community Goal Incoming!

Reach 5,000 Kickstarter backers to unlock Cinnamon Bun Hairstyle for ALL players!

Already backed? Share the campaign! Haven’t yet? Now’s the time! Let’s hit 5K together!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starsreach/stars-reach