Index
Welcome back to the Spaceship Unity Designer Diary. The first part, Spaceship Unity or how Indiana Jones became a spaceship recruit, you can find at www.pegasus.de/en/news/pegasus-spiele-blog/designer-diary-spaceship-unity-or-how-indiana-jones-became-a-spaceship-recruit.
The story must go on
The system we created was perfect for telling a story over a few chapters, alternating between the timed and non-timed mode (or action- and challenge- chapters as we started to call them). This way we would be able to make this a 60 to 90 minute game without exhausting the players. But what happened if players failed a chapter? We absolutely didn't like the idea of repeating that chapter until you were successful. Not only is this not how stories work, it could also mean that the game could theoretically drag on forever. We also couldn't just take a few points off the players and send them to the next chapter since we didn't have points and still didn't want to introduce them into the system. The options we had left were: Ending a failed chapter with a "deus ex machina" within the story or to let the story progress in a different way after you failed a chapter.
We settled on a mixture of both. Multilinear storytelling is obviously a cool thing. But if you think it through it is very obvious that you can only use it in a limited way in a board game. Imagine we want the game to be 5 episodes long for the players with several chapters. And after each chapter you progress to a different chapter depending on you winning or losing. That would mean there would have to be 16 different versions of episode 5 with 32 different endings. And a total of 31 different chapters that all have to be written, tested and represented on physical components. And that's for a single 1 hour experience. That was simply not a viable option. But we could write the endings of chapters in a way that the story wouldn't split at every crossing. Together with a deus ex machina here and there we could keep the multilinear aspect at a manageable level so that many chapters would have two or three different version, depending on prior performance of the players, but not 16. We built one such 1 hour experience and it worked great. The players felt the consequences of playing poorly, but the story would always go on, so players wouldn't get frustrated. After a few tests we also added a last chapter in which you basically get a performance review. One could argue that this is almost a scoring, but the important thing is, it happens within the story and not on an excel-sheet.
A TV Series captured in a Game
So we had one Episode. Testing went great. People had fun and tweaks were made to improve the experience. But we wanted a space opera (you remember? Otherwise have a look at part 1 of the Designer Diary). Something epic. So we probably needed about ten of these episodes with a continuous story like a great TV series. An enormous amount of work! We realized it was only viable to put in all that work, if we knew that the game was actually going to be published. So we started to look around for publishers with this first episode, with the caveat that we would still have to do a lot of developing. Thankfully we didn't have to knock on too many doors until we could get Pegasus Spiele interested in this very weird and different game. They were willing to give this a shot and give us the time to finish the game with the knowledge that it will actually see the light of day.
So we started to develop the complete story. At this point we basically became screen writers. With the added challenge of keeping this interesting as a game. Because obviously we couldn't just keep doing the same thing mechanically. Thankfully our base system allowed for all kinds of unexpected twists and turns not only in the story but also in mechanisms. I will not spoil anything here, but I can promise you it won't get boring.
The corona pandemic
We were at the point where we knew what was supposed to happen in the complete story, with a few pages of synopsis for each Episode. And then the pandemic hit. From one day to the next testing was virtually impossible. Because of the nature of the game, tabletop simulator or other such solutions didn't work at all. But we soon came to realize, that we were actually lucky compared to many colleagues. We knew our base system worked, but we had an enormous amount of writing to do, not to mention the almost 40 Systems that at this point needed up to four minigames each. More than enough work that can be done without immediate testing.
And at this point it's time for a little side note: As I wrote above, the complete story with the main plot points was there before the pandemic. What we did after was fleshing this out into actual texts and mechanisms. I say this because you might not believe this when playing the game. More than once actual live events were spookily close to what we had put into our story. I won't spoil anything obviously, but I wanted to state this publicly even though people will have a hard time believing this.
The goal in sight
Jump to the end of 2021. A lot has happened. The game has made a lot of progress. But this whole thing was a lot more work than we originally anticipated. There were also other things to do during this time, that kept us from focusing on this project. Jens and me published Divvy Dice, I published Minecraft Builders & Biomes and life also had a few curveballs in store. But it started to look like we have a game. By this time we had decided to split the story up into two boxes of five episodes each. And by the end of 2021 we entered into the final phase of publishing for the first box, or Season 1.1 as we would call it. That was another extremely intense three months with an enormous amount of work from everyone involved. But we made it! And soon we will finally be able to see people embarking on this exciting journey with the Spaceship Unity! We really hope it will be just as exciting as ours was creating this very special game.
Oh and meanwhile we are hard at work on Season 1.2 with Episodes 6 to 10. If nothing goes wrong you will be able to continue the journey in 2023.
Ulrich Blum
Questions, comments, feedback? Share your thoughts with us at blog@pegasus.de.
