Welcome to the second in our series of devlogs for Space Trash Scavengers in the run up to Early Access launch, in just one week's time! If you haven’t already, please do mash that wishlist button so you get notified on release day.
Today I’m going to talk a bit about Space. Okay, well obviously this game is set in Space. I mean, it’s in the name! But more than that, I wanted to talk about lower case space - the spaces you, the player, inhabit, and how you traverse through them. Because it underpins a lot of what’s unique about Space Trash Scavenger. Are you ready? Then strap into your jetpack and let’s go...
Spatial dynamics
Space is big. Like really, really big. It’s so big that it’s almost empty. It takes ages to get anywhere. How do we reconcile that with a game which is, at its heart, a 3rd person action game (albeit one with some interesting additions like mario-galaxy gravity, and survival)?
We started by prototyping the idea of traversing just asteroid fields, jetting between small floating rocks with “mario gravity galaxy” (which I will hereon-in call microgravity before we get sued!). It was interesting to me because before, this mechanic always seemed to be associated with pristine spheres and planets.
This proved to be pretty fun, and surprisingly evocative with just a scavenger floating in space. We decided to take the prototype further, and turn it into a survival game. What could go wrong?
Fuel goals
At first we built the game up around a fuel mechanic. It has a real world impact on how you play and what you can do. With the asteroids procedurally placed, the player would consider their fuel reserves before plotting their route.
In this way you have almost a little subgame of examining your 3D space and plotting your direction between asteroids where you could get more fuel resources. It felt like this brought something more interesting to the open world spaces typical of 3rd person action or survival games.
Downsizing
Then we had the idea - why not have the asteroids orbiting gas giants? It looked cool. And a little unusual. Of course, the distances involved in orbiting a gas giant, the size of say Jupiter, are rather large. It’s diameter is apparently 88,695 miles. Any locomotion for a man-sized object at subluminal velocity would mean the planet would appear pretty much static in the background for weeks or perhaps months at a time. Your motion in the world would feel divorced from your surroundings.
We quickly embraced the idea of shrinking them down to what are, in reality, ridiculously small sizes. Budding astronomers and physicists may riot, but we found you get all the atmospheric benefits of gas giants, while still having meaningful locomotive choices to make.
Jumping
It felt good. But what about base building?
Every Salvage Sector is a finite space, necessary for you to plan and devise good decisions on where you go and why. Not just a stream of random places you will have to visit in fixed order. After you have explored it, you can jump to another, each one different.
Some sectors may have fewer asteroids, or have no gas giants. Some have more derelict spaceships, some have huge stars instead, or farms or mines. And the diameter of orbit and number of asteroids can change. Jumping means you can take your base with you. Incidentally, this was partly why we opted to have players build bases in Space, rather than on an asteroid.
When Rigs can fly
During testing, we noticed quite a few people asking if you could fly your rig around. At first I wasn’t so sure. Why should it move, if the game is designed with jetpack travel? But we realized it adds a little more depth to the experience. Plus, it’s cool. Perhaps you would want to pilot it near a collection of asteroids, to make it quicker to explore them all. Or maybe you would position it near an enemy base to have your turrets help you out. It’s still quite early days with mobile rigs, but they add an interesting new dimension to things in the later game.
Seamless travel
The last piece of the spatial puzzle was seamless “dungeons”. Orbiting asteroids is cool, but why not go inside them, and plunder abandoned mines or huge derelict spaceships? Scavenging these places was always a core part of what we wanted players to do. It switches up the experience of the game, allowing areas with standard gravity, and tense combat in more closed spaces, without load screens to interrupt things.
Until next time!
Well if you stuck with us this far, thanks for reading! Turned out talking about space took a while! It’s important to remember that aside from space, there is a whole survival crafting game with combat built around these ideas. Not to mention automation. I’ll talk about that side of things next time.
As I say, if you haven’t already, please wishlist and follow for all the updates - and stick with us for launch, next Thursday 9th November!
