Capturing the Feeling of Homeworld

Earlier this week I was listening to the radio and Adagio for Strings started playing. It straight away took me back to a defining period of my childhood, the original Homeworld. This was the first game I played which really made me feel something, probably was the first media that did this actually. If you haven’t played the game you really should, it does so many things right. There is a remake on the way, but I’m sure there are other ways to play it.

Below is an edited version of the mission where Adagio for Strings is used phenomenally well to set the tone of the whole game (obviously that has spoilers, as does the rest of this post). The basic story in Homeworld is that your species found an ancient map which pointed to a system in space labelled “home”. This leads to the invention of warp drive, skip forward a few years and you the player is put in command of the mothership which is to make the maiden warp flight. The aim of the test flight was to meet with an engineering ship which had travelled into space using sub-light engines. You warp and arrive to see this ship has been attacked and destroyed by some unknown force.



After warping back home Adagio for Strings starts playing. You arrive home to see your entire planet burning, you’re tasked with defending some orbiting cryochambers which hold the only remaining survivors of your race. The mothership reads the statistics of numbers of survivors as you bring them on board, it’s very chilling and you can even hear the sadness in the hardened admiral dude’s voice. It is a brilliant moment in gaming and, perhaps surprisingly, it happened in a strategy game.

Homeworld doesn’t stop there to make you feel something. The genius of the game is that there is a finite set of resources throughout the entire campaign. A decision to build 10 weak frigates or 5 mining vessels in the 3rd mission might mean you can’t afford that battleship in the last mission. This really makes you care about every unit and every decision. It makes you try and disable hostile ships so you can salvage them. It makes you stay behind and mine every last asteroid even when the mission is won. It’s the kind of feeling you get playing a game like DayZ scrounging for cans of beans, celebrating finding a single bullet for a gun you don’t have yet. This is the kind of thing I love about games and is something which I failed to achieve with Waltonia.

It is this kind of feeling I want people to have when playing our next game, Slingshot. In the game you take control of a single ship which has lost it’s fleet and damaged it’s warp navigation systems. Your job is to survive and try and find a way home.

The emotions and feelings we are shooting for largely comes from Homeworld. Feelings of loneliness and desperation as you scrounge for warp fuel and aimlessly guess how to get home. These are relatively easy to represent, the scale of the system compared to the player, the infinite (yes infinite – procedural generation for the win) number of systems to search through, seemingly overwhelming odds, correct choice of music.

A slightly more difficult feeling to capture is itself hard to define. It’s something we all experience a lot throughout life, the feeling that you can’t balance things. I need to plan a talk for next week, but I’ve also got to mark some students work, and my shirts need ironing. In Homeworld this comes from trying to micro manage all your units, you can’t possibly look at them all at the same time so you have to decide which units will be fine figuring out stuff by themselves. This kind of feeling comes naturally in strategy games and any games where you are controlling a number of units. Another example of this would be trying to play Broodmother in DOTA 2, if you don’t understand that reference watch this…



So how do you make the player feel like she has lots of things to balance when there is only a single unit to control? This is what we are currently considering now and haven’t really come up with a solution.

Initially I wanted to have some interaction with you and your ships crew, they’re lost as well after all. Do we force the player to have to spend time looking for food for instance? I didn’t like this idea because it would probably amount to having some kind of energy bar which always decreases and some item you have to find, all kind of arbitrary. Perhaps a stress indicator might be a better idea? Much like how in a game like ARMA 3 if you run for ages it’s really hard to shoot anything because you are tired. Would a system like that work, or would it end up just bring another arbitrary bar? We already have a shield charge system, just like the one in halo, which I guess results in the same decisions to avoid combat to charge shields every so often. I did wonder if having a virtual pet style game running to represent your crew might be a way to add this feeling, but might that become too complex, or worse just end up being a set of energy bars and click buttons?



Another, more subtle, way of adding this feeling could be in the controls. What if I forced you to take your finger off the flight controls to fire your gun? That would feel a lot like plate spinning while riding a bike, you would really have to plan your decisions.

The direction we are currently taking is to use the levelling upgrade system to make you feel like you’re balancing something. Barry came up with the idea of using alchemy as a theme for the game, imagine if alchemy was real and chemistry turned out to be the pseudo-science? That is the universe of slingshot, destroying asteroids in the game will be a way of mining gems which represent the alchemy elements, Albedo, Nigredo, Citrinitas and Rubedo (hope I spelt those correctly!). These elements will be how you improve your abilities and skills. Perhaps a certain combination of these elements will improve or change how your weapons fire, but if you save up Rubedo’s you can convert that into rare warp fuel and try warping to a new area. Perhaps your hanger deck will be a puzzle game, putting Albedo and Nigredo next to each other would have dire consequences. How do we dish these out to you? If every time an asteroid blows up all four elements fly off in different directions you would have to make a split second decision on which to grab.



There are lots of possibilities and I think the only way to know which direction to go in is to test them. Maybe a combination of some of these ideas could work quite well together. A four element upgrade system could be quite simple, but if we implement it carefully it will have depth. Now I want to go play some Homeworld…

Slingshot is a roguelike ‘like’ space shooter with realistic orbital mechanics, developed for HTML5 using Phaser. You can play the game here To keep up to date follow me on twitter @DrSeanWalton