Stars Reach News

Stars Reach will be a free to play game at launch, with a Property Pass that you buy monthly. The Property Pass gives you the ability to own land within the game.

As with other F2P games, there will be an MTX Store. We are opposed to pay-to-win and are avoiding it in our business model.

The gameplay features that you get to on your owned land will also be available via public facilities for all players.

You can earn a loyalty currency through game play which can be used to obtain Property Passes (and other shop items), so you won't necessarily have to use real money to get them. You can also share homesteads with other players, or trade or gift Property Passes.

Join us! www.kickstarter.com/projects/starsreach/stars-reach

By Kurt Larson
Audio examples available on StarsReach.com

In the first post I outlined our overall approach to audio and why we do it that way. With all that in mind, here we can take a deeper dive.

[h2]DETAILS[/h2]
Within the over-arching role audio plays in a game, different layers of audio have different jobs, goals, and effects. I'll talk about some of them here:

[h2]SFX[/h2]
[h3]TOOLS AND WEAPONS[/h3]
Audio for tools and weapons reinforces and rewards player agency. I believe that when the player is doing something with their (character's) hands, the feedback should be rich and rewarding. For this reason I am putting special attention and much resources into this component. For featured, often-used sounds such as this, it is very important to provide a great deal of variation to avoid the sound becoming tiresome. This is mainly achieved through randomization, and layering, and just having many different versions of a sound available.

For something like the Excavator beam sound, I have several different layers set up. Each time you turn the beam on, all seven layers play. But each layer has twenty-or-so different variations. Each of these is chosen at random by the sound engine each time you turn the beam on. Even with just two layers, that would be 400 slightly-different-sounding variation. With seven layers, it's 1.28 billion variations. They all sound recognizably similar, but never exactly the same, so your brain doesn't stick on the exact sameness and make you feel distracted.



Sounds which are non-continuous, such as gunshots, are easier, because you just fire the group of sounds and you're done. Most of the fine-tuning work comes with continuous, looping sounds, like our beam tools. (Excavator, Harvester, heat and freeze rays, etc.) This is where repetition becomes a problem to be solved. Even though variations are chosen at random, if we just looped those variations, after a while you'd start to notice a recurring, repetitive pattern. So for most of the layers, I took a long evolving varying sound and cut it into many sections of between 3 and 8 seconds each. Then one of those is randomly chosen, played, and cross-faded into the next randomly chosen one, and so on. You may, if you listen carefully, recognize little details which you've heard before, but it will likely never play in exactly the same pattern twice. It's not impossible, but by the time it does, you would likely not remember having heard that exact pattern before. Repetition in audio is only a problem when it grabs your attention.

[h3]CREATURES[/h3]
Audio for creatures, especially creatures which interact with the player, is a huge and important undertaking. As our creature design is still evolving, and since we have been focusing on weapons and interactive objects, enemies in Stars Reach do not currently have any audio. But we are thinking about it.

Most creature vocalization audio in most games and movies is built up using recordings of real-life animals. No matter how alien or supernatural or bizarre the creature is, people respond best when they have at least some sort of recognizable sound as a starting point. (Think Chewbacca) I'd like to go beyond that a bit, but not so far that the voices of the creatures no longer speak to the player. One thing I intend to try is blending real-world animal sounds with completely other types of sounds, using a convolution reverb. (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/newsLetter/Convolution-Reverb.jsp)


I also want to try to give each of our creatures its own emotional profile. Like a personality, but more primal. The key here again will be variations. With footsteps you can get away with eight or even five. (I usually use twenty) With vocalizations it's better to have at least 30. The general rule I have observed is: the more personality a sound has, and the more it speaks to the player, the more variations you need.

[h3]UI[/h3]
User Interface sounds are the ones you will hear the most. Counter-intuitively they require the least variation. Why?

My sense of it is that UI sounds are pure abstractions. They represent abstract concepts and actions which are, crucially, not representing something "physically" happening in the game world. It also helps that they are usually very short. As such, hearing the identical same sound every time you open a particular window may not be the best possible sound design, but it is often good enough. Even if you go for a very organic sound set, like, small wooden doors, drawers, and latches being opened and closed, for example, you still can tolerate a fairly high degree of repetition. In fact, the need for close similarity between the variations is quite high for UI audio. Each sound is a symbol for an abstract concept, like opening an inventory window or hitting an 'OK' button, and as such it needs to reliably signal the intended concept. Our UI sounds try to use the same sound for similar things, such that opening a window will always sound similar, but quite different from, say, hitting a 'Confirm' button.



[h3]BGA - BACKGROUND AMBIENCE[/h3]
Background Ambience is all the layers of sound which represent the physical environment in which the character is located. Stars Reach provides a tremendous opportunity to create intricate, intimate background ambience which can continuously change, smoothly and meaningfully. Whereas a more classic game might only have a stereo background track which changes to a different one when you cross the border between the Ice Zone and the Lava Zone, the worlds of Stars Reach are continuously changing and evolving. Since they can be driven by naturally-patterned weather, environmental, and planetary data, and since we can tie all those data into the audio system, we can and will do things like:

Around sunset, we can gradually cross-fade a strong afternoon wind with a gentle evening breeze
As the player moves from a dry, desert environment to a higher-elevation forested biome, we can cross-fade different wind, start up some birds singing, turn on some light reverb-echo from the sound bouncing around in the trees, and you will likely hear some water flowing in some areas near streams.
When rain happens, you'll hear it. Not just the rain sound starting up, but birds will mostly stop singing, wind will change, footsteps will take on a bit of a squelchy tone, etc.

As one moves through different biomes; to a more humid or more dry area, subtle filtering changes can occur which can make all the audio sound slightly muffled or slightly crisper.

Since our worlds will have seasons, our audio will respond according to the weather, temperature, humidity, and other data as the seasons change.

The possibilities are endless, but you get the idea. The important thing is that all this audio behavior can occur naturally, automatically, along with the evolving behaviors of our living worlds, rather than being pre-planned, scripted transitions.

In the third and final post, I’ll talk about voice-over and music.

_____________________________________________

With all this attention to detail in our sound design, we are building an immersive and evolving audio experience that brings Stars Reach to life in a way that feels natural, dynamic, and deeply engaging. Every footstep, every tool activation, and every distant creature call is crafted to enhance the player's connection to the world.

But none of this happens without support. If you are as excited as we are about the depth we are bringing to Stars Reach, we need your help. Our Kickstarter is live, and backing us now means you will be a direct part of making this experience a reality.

By pledging, you are not just funding development. You are shaping a living and breathing universe where sound reacts, adapts, and evolves alongside you. Join us on this journey and help us push Stars Reach to the next level.

[Back us on Kickstarter today!] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starsreach/stars-reach

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

We have exciting news to share. Our Kickstarter is officially live, and thanks to your incredible support, we hit our funding goal in just one hour!

We are beyond grateful for the overwhelming response. Your support proves how much this project means to you, and we could not have done this without you.

[h3]LET’S KEEP THE MOMENTUM GOING![/h3]
Reaching our goal is just the beginning. Every extra pledge helps us improve the project, add new possibilities, and bring you something truly special.

If you have not backed us yet, now is the perfect time to join in. Every bit of support helps us push further and deliver something amazing.

[h3]BACK THE KICKSTARTER NOW![/h3]
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starsreach/stars-reach

Thank you for being part of this journey. Let’s keep the momentum going and see how far we can take this!

I’m Kurt Larson; I do the audio on Stars Reach. Since we’re trying to communicate our vision to the players, I thought I’d try to give some insight into how we are approaching audio on the project.

I have responsibility for our audio, but the creative-approval team also includes Raph and our head of game design, Dave Georgeson. We talk about high-level goals, and I implement and find the devils in the details. I am in my 32nd year of working on game audio, so of course I bring my own philosophies to bear. I’ll share some of them here for those interested in how our project is being made.

[h3]CONTEXT[/h3]
One of the first questions I ask when interviewing with a new team for a possible job is “What do you want audio to do for your project?”. I generally don’t expect a really in-depth answer because most game developers have never had to articulate that before. But I learn a lot from what I hear. The answers I hear the most are:

• “Well, what do you think it should do?”
  
• “I guess… um, tell the player about what is happening; to convey information.”
  
• “Wow, I really don’t know, but we need someone to handle audio because we can’t keep doing it ourselves; we have other things we need to be doing.”
  

From that I learn something about what the team needs and wants. On the times I have been hired, I keep asking that question of various people until I have a sense of what they expect. Usually most teams just really need someone who isn’t actually supposed to be doing something else to plug in all the audio assets. But I can usually develop a sense of what the major stakeholders want to accomplish in an artistic, player-experience sense. I also believe one of my jobs is to tell the team what their audio should be doing in each instance. In our case, combining what Raph and Dave have expressed with my own love of the game, I have arrived at this: That the purposes of game audio are:

• To provide an additional layer of pleasure and gratification for the player which is vastly cheaper to create than graphics.
  
• To add a sentient, emotional voice to the game which is always speaking, gently and quietly, about the meaning of their context and their experience.
  
• To make what you see feel real. Art and graphics make it look ‘real’, within the realism of the established art style. Audio ensures a strong connection between the player and that fiction which they inhabit.
  

To convey information and context.

[h2]MANIFESTO[/h2]
[h3]OUR AUDIO WILL BE:[/h3]

• Pleasurable: Like color, animation, and gameplay itself, audio can and should be a direct source of enjoyment for the player; bypassing the cognitive process and gratifying the brain at a sensory level. If a game is a joy to hear, the player is more likely to play more often and for longer. This contributes to player retention and thereby the overall success of the product.
  
• Blended and harmonious: Every sound needs to fit into every context in which it may find itself. (And every context needs to accommodate any of its sounds) Sounds heard well in isolation may not sound well together. Attention must be paid to the higher-end noise content; not only transients but sustained noise components, like water falling, “Energy” sounds, etc. Too many sounds competing for the higher-frequency segments of the listening experience can create aural discomfort.
  
• Interactive and adaptable: Star’s Reach is the most proc-gen, open-ended, vast-possibilities, combinatorial-explosion project on which I have ever worked, and the audio will need to make full use of everything I have learned about these things. Almost all sounds should draw from multiple granular randomized layers. The background ambience and music must adapt intimately and intelligently to the changing conditions of the world through which the player moves. The un-scripted nature of our players’ intended experience mandates that our audio leans more towards procedurally-generated philosophy than to a more scripted, film-like approach.
  

With those general ideas here to set the context, in the next post I will look at the details; breaking down different layers of audio design in a game and how each relates to Stars Reach.

Our Kickstarter is launching on February 25th! Head over to the Coming Soon page and sign up for notifications!

The Stars Reach Kickstarter launches February 25th! This is your chance to help shape the future of a community-driven sci-fi MMORPG where exploration, survival, and player creativity take center stage. Get ready to back the project, score exclusive rewards, and be part of something truly epic from day one. Mark your calendars, the countdown begins now!

Head over to the Kickstarter Starting Soon page, click the button to “Notify Me on Launch” button to know the second we go live.

Thanks for all your support.