We talk to the team behind the Early Access space roguelike that lets you embrace your inner Picard

10 July 2015 | 4 comments | By Nick Horth

The team at Fugitive Games come from a background that’s pretty shooter-heavy – members have previously worked on titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Battlefield 4 – but they’re trying something very different with their first project as a studio. Into The Stars is a sci-fi roguelike which sees you lead a team of expendable redshirts into the depths of space, on the run from hostile aliens. I donned my captain’s uniform (homemade) and chatted with development director Ben Jones about the game.

GameWatcher: How did the initial idea for the Into the Stars Kickstarter come about? Was it always going to be a roguelike?

Ben Jones: Well, the kernel of the idea really came from our desire to go back to our roots as game developers, and also as children, our love for games and what got us into game development. Early on a bunch of us came together and when we were brainstorming we each independently thought “wouldn’t it be great to do a kind of space Oregon Trail?”. That’s a game we all grew up with at school, and loved for its simplicity and depth, and its approachability. Just how fun and clever it was.

When we started to think about how to bring that into the modern world, our technical director Mark was really adamant about doing it in space, and we all thought “OK, that could work.” So we set about giving it a shot, and in a matter of weeks we’d set up a lot of core components from the game, and at that point we kind of knew we had something here. So that’s how it all started, and then bits and pieces came together after that.

GameWatcher: Why the self-funded/crowd-funded route? Did you take the game to traditional publishers?

Ben Jones: We had always looked at something less traditional. For us, as a company just starting up, it was important that we were putting everything we had into the experience. Potentially we could have taken it to publishers, but it’s not something we really wanted to do. We wanted to do things on our own. Ultimately of course, we settled on a publisher as a distribution partner, but that’s a little different than the traditional route when they own your IP and you’re working for them. We are really happy with the crowd-funding model, not only did it allow us to finish the game in a way that we think is really strong, and what we envisioned in the first place, but it also creates a community around the game that is really strong. They’re really excited about the game, and they can’t wait to get their hands on it, so that’s also been great.

GameWatcher: Why did you go for the Unreal Engine visuals? Typically these kind of games avoid super-realistic, demanding graphics.

Ben Jones: Well, two-fold; one is our team’s overall experience with Unreal over time, we’ve all worked with it at one point or another, and our art director and creative director, they’ve worked with it for a number of years, the majority of their careers. So we looked at it as being very approachable, and when Epic announced their development specs and rollout for Unreal 4, we looked at it and thought it would be a perfect fit. Even in so choosing of course, we could have dampened things down and gone for a… maybe not a cheaper approach, but a less graphically intensive one, but we wanted to push the boundaries. Our art director Alden Filion is all about that. What’s crazy is that he’s pretty much a one-man team. We do have contractors come in, but really everything you’re seeing for the most part is him. He’s an all powerful master [laughs].

GameWatcher: The alien design in particular is very cool, very unique.

Ben Jones: Yeah, so he really drove that with this guy Justin Goby Fields, who’s one of those contractors I mentioned, and talk about masters, he’s amazing as well. He won all these awards last year, and he’s worked on a lot of really big movies like Jupiter Ascending… a tonne of others. He’s really talented, and him working with Alden, they’ve really worked to craft these alien races based off of what we wanted to do in terms of separating them. We wanted to make them really unique, give them their own character, style and feel. So I think the voices really bring them to life, but also the voices our sound team came up with, and the score for each that Jack Wall came up with packages them nicely and gives you this unique feel every time you encounter them.

GameWatcher: What would you consider the overall difficulty to be? Is this another FTL, where you’ll die every five minutes?

Ben Jones: Yeah, I would say more often than not that’s the way we approached development, and it’s the way the game plays. It’s challenging. You can pick it up, enjoy it, and maybe just run through the first part of the game with a random crew, random resources, maybe make it twenty minutes or so, half an hour depending on what you choose. Depending on the choices you make. So yes, it is designed to be challenging, to be difficult. You’ll need multiple playthroughs to get to the end of the game.

And that’s what we wanted, you know, circling back on The Oregon Trail, it was possible in that game to get right to the end, and then you’d try to cross a river and you’d lose everything and your family would die. You’d lose all your supplies and that was it. Some people think that’s unnecessarily harsh, but the way we look at it is, every chance you take is an inherent risk. As a captain, you have to understand that the lives of your crew and the civilians on boar are in your hands. So maybe it’s best to take a more cautious approach with certain things, a more aggressive one with others. That’s probably how you’ll find success.

GameWatcher: So far in my time with the game I’ve been kind of exploring around, but I’ve not really got a clear end goal. Is there a definitive plot, with a clear ending?

Ben Jones: Yeah, so the way that we look at this, and we’ve kind of been talking about it since the beginning, is that this a book-ended experience. So there’s a decided beginning, a deciding ending, and everything in between is kind of a choose your own adventure for players. They decide their path, the things they encounter are randomised, so every time you play it’s going to be a different journey, but you’re going to be familiar with the things that are important. That’s the way we’re going.

GameWatcher: Are you thinking of adding an auto-recommend feature for your starting ship? At the moment you’re kind of guessing what you’ll need in terms of supplies and systems for your ship.

Ben Jones: That’s a suggestion we’ve heard, and I certainly think it’s interesting. Something where you just click one button, and it chooses a simple setup. We might add that down the road, I think it’s a pretty decent idea. But the way it works now, if you just click down the line and add all the default options, that’s a pretty decent setup. We’re not trying to lead you astray there, that’s what I generally go for when I play, with pretty decent results. Of course, from there you have to choose respectable resources and try to select the right crew, buy yes, I could see that being useful down the road, especially for multiple playthroughs, when you die and you just want to get right back into it.

GameWatcher: How far-reaching are the results of the decisions you make? If I send someone down planet-side and they get laser-gunned by an enemy alien or whatever, can they get long-term injured?

Ben Jones: Yes, you actually hit on a big one there, which is injury and permadeath for your crew. It’s your job as captain to keep them alive on this journey, and they’re constantly in peril, whether that’s in combat, on missions, or from events happening on the ship. If it’s a shuttle mission, there’s some really dangerous situations that players might choose to push forward with, just to risk it for the potential rewards. The results can be devastating if it doesn’t work out, you can lose your whole team. We had a playthrough last week where that happened to somebody, they had a mission with like an 18% chance of success. That’s probably going to be fine, right? So yeah, it didn’t really work out that well, they lost three members of the crew, and everything from then on was an uphill struggle. Of course you can find new crew members to recruit through exploration, but that can be kind of rare, so it’s best to try and keep your existing crew alive.

GameWatcher: Do you have concrete plans for content post-launch? New ships, new alien crew members maybe?

Ben Jones: We’d certainly like to, I think the amount of content we create is really up to the community. If people are hungry for it, continue to push suggestions and really want the game to evolve, that’s something that we would love to do. I think we’ve established a really great universe here, and populating it with wider and more interesting content is something we would love to do. We were talking about this yesterday actually. We all come from the shooter realm, right, and in military shooters things are so rigid. “This has to be realistic”, “this isn’t how that would work” and so on, and with this genre and this style of game we have so much freedom that a lot of the wacky ideas we bounce off the wall it’s like, “we could actually do that!” So we’re spoiled with freedom of choice for this, and that’s another reason we want to push things.

GameWatcher: Mass Effect composer Jack Wall is on board, creating the score, and it sounds great. How did you get him involved?

Ben Jones: Absolutely, when we sat down and thought about what we wanted from a score, that we thought would support the journey and the immersion we were looking for, Jack was one of the first people to come to mind. Not only for his work on Mass Effect, but our art director Alden had worked with him on Lost Planet 3, and he said “why don’t we just give him a ring?” Thankfully he was into the pitch, he liked the concept and he wanted to… I think what was cool with us is that we came to him and said “Jack, we want you to do whatever you want to do”. And he’s so incredibly talented that he drew this amazing score from our minimal input. We couldn’t be happier, and I think his score will speak for itself when people get to experience the game.

GameWatcher: The game’s only going to be on Early Access for a relatively short time, a couple of months or so. What was the thinking behind that?

Ben Jones: Well, we haven’t locked ourselves definitely into two months just yet, I think what we’ve said is that it’ll be a couple, but we do want to truncate the amount of time we spend there. I think for us the situation is slightly different, a lot of games go into Early Access as alpha or pre-alphas, and this game’s in beta. So for us it was an opportunity to bring it to the community, work with them to flesh it out and make sure we’re creating a balanced experience. Because of the number of choices in the game, and the size of the world, it’s simply impossible for our four-man team to go through all those possibilities ourselves, but at the same time we want to make sure we’re delivering a balanced experience. We thought that opening the beta up to an Early Access community would be the best way to do that.

On top of that we feel really confident about the sate of the game, it’s really stable and the content is there, but we want to push things further. Not only in areas that we want to work with the community on, but those bookends that I mentioned; the story, the ending and the beginning, enhancing different gameplay systems and localising as well. Those things take time, so we wanted to do them with the community supporting us. It’s a great opportunity, but hopefully one we can keep to for just a couple of months, and then have a full release that we can iterate on from there.

Many thanks to Ben for taking the time to speak with us. If Into the Stars catches your fancy, you won’t have to wait long to check it out – the game is available now on Early Access via Steam. Try not to get everyone killed, Captain.