It's rare we see anything new from the survival genre these days, thanks to the industry's current fascination with zombies, but Into The Stars looks to breathe some new life into a genre that rarely travels outside of Earth's orbit. And we managed to pin down one of Fugitive Games' four founding members long enough to get the inside scoop on both the studio and its debut project.
iDigitalTimes spoke with development director Ben Jones, whose previous work includes serving as lead designer for Battlefield Premium, about development of Into The Stars and early reactions to Fugitive Games' first public release. The game will serve as the debut offering from Fugitive; a studio formed by four industry veterans who worked on the Battlefield, Lost Planet and Medal of Honor franchises.
Granted, the studio's next game won' be a shooter. But anyone who was enrolled in public school during the mid-/late- 90's should have fond memories of the game that inspired Into The Stars creation. And even if the game wasn't a part of your school's curriculum, you'll probably still be familiar with title.
"A lot of us really honed in on the Oregon Trail experience," Jones told iDigitalTimes. "Then our project architect, Mark, was like 'I feel like this would be a really good fit for a space game. Why don't we give that a shot?'"
In its current form, Into The Stars feels very much like a fleshed-out take on FTL; the incredibly popular indie game about escaping an intergalactic armada. Players must hire a crew for their ship, from a pool of developer-designed candidates with varying strengths and weaknesses, and lead what's left of the human race on a final search for mankind's next home planet. Along the way, you'll be forced to fight a variety of alien races, mine planets for the resources needed to keep your ship (and crew) going, and respond to whatever other situations you find yourself in along the way.
The setting is certainly different, with distant stars and nebulae replacing the mountains and fields that accompanied players on their cross-country journey, but it's easy to see how Into the Stars has been inspired by Oregon Trail's mechanics. It certainly doesn't take long for the task, of keeping your entire group alive, fed and protected, to feel like an impossible one
To be successful, you'll need to manage a small handful of resources, all of which can be used to power the various systems onboard your ship. You'll also have some say in the kinds of technology available to your crew, with each carrying their own pros, cons and cost of operation. You'll need to plan wisely, and be as resourceful as possible once you've set out, if you ever hope to find mankind a new home. '
It only took a couple of weeks for Fugitive Games to put together the first prototype of Into The Stars, using Unreal Engine 4.0, and it only took seeing some of the game's core mechanics brought to life to convince the Into The Stars team they were onto something. At that point, Fugitive Games turned to Kickstarter, where the studio raised more than $100,000 to finance development of Into The Stars.
"The support on Kickstarter was a happy surprise," Jones told iDigi. "We felt like we had a strong product and that really resonated with people...For us, it's now [a matter of] living up to the expectations of that, and making sure we have the content and polish required to really fill out a game like this. Because with a small team it's a lot harder."
It would be another five months before Into The Stars would show up on Steam Early Access, during which time Fugitive Games raced to complete as much content as possible. And the studio has already made impressive progress on the game's lone solar system. The planets currently found in the game are quite different, both in appearance and composition, and it's clear that Into The Stars will benefit from being one of the first Unreal Engine 4 projects on the market.
Into The Stars doesn't currently feature anywhere close to all 90 of the explorable regions promised in the game's Kickstarter, and it's not clear just how different the gameplay experience in each will be, but the content present in the current build of Into The Stars certainly has us hopeful. Players can freely explore a sprawling galaxy, populated by four alien races and a few dozen minable planets, but the game still doesn't have much narrative explanation for humanity's predicament.
The game does include more than 100 random events, like fuels or viral outbreaks, which can have serious implications for the civilians under your protection. And Jones says the Into The Stars team has plans for dozens of additional setbacks, windfalls and other random occurrences. But, if Into The Stars manages to find a sizable audience, there will almost certainly be a segment of the community hoping to see (or create) a rainbow of mods for the sci-fi survival adventure.
When asked about mod support, Jones acknowledged the many benefits of allowing outside parties to tweak an existing project. But a lack of personnel at Fugitive Games means the studio can't afford to put new game content on hold while creating a mod API for Into The Stars. But that doesn't mean the studio has ruled out the possibility of introducing mod support at some point down the line.
"I came from the mod community, so I have a lot of appreciation for mod support and any developer who opens up in that regard," Jones said. "But for right now, we're focused on finishing the game first."
That said, the team certainly isn't going to go the Rockstar route, intentionally making it more difficult for would-be modders to tweak the Into The Stars experience. In fact, one player has already reached out to Fugitive Games with images of his own Into The Stars installation, tweaked to use pictures of Futurama characters in place of the game's existing crew photographs.
Into The Stars has been available on Steam for just over a week now, joining the thousands of titles currently taking up residence in the store's Early Access section. Reactions on Valve's digital marketplace have been mixed thus far, though still leaning positive, and Jones says some of the ideas from the Into The Stars community have already made their way into the current version of the game.
"We actually released our first patch on Tuesday," "We scrambled over the weekend, and over the last couple of days, to try to [fix] a bunch of those requests. Either things we had on the backburner, that we thought we could prioritize later, or stuff the community came up with on their own."
According to the patch notes, most of the changes in this week's Into The Stars update are relatively minor. In addition to optimizing the game, Fugitive Games expanded the display options available to the Into The Stars community, including support for a number of 16:10 resolutions, and gave players the option of running the game windowed instead of full screen.
But the Into The Stars community has also had a small impact on gameplay, requesting a "Take All" button for resource retrieval that the dev team is now preparing for the game. Fugitive Games also released a handful of random events, some of which are even beneficial to your crew, along with some new music to keep the soundtrack from getting stale.
The game's Early Access listing makes clear that Fugitive Games is prepared to implement as many of the community's ideas as it can without breaking the core Into The Stars experience. The studio has been open about its desire to expedite the development process, saying it's not out of the realm of possibility for Into The Stars to ditch the Early Access label before the end of 2015. But Fugitive Games is also prepared to dedicate quite a bit of time to investigating the viability of community suggestions.
"For us, it's about being very reactive, while sticking with our plan of implementing content," Jones said. "There are still a number of things we want to do and know will make the game better. But I think the community has been really open about what they'd like to see and what they think would make the game better. And we've got to ensure we do everything we can to mix those two [viewpoints]."
Into The Stars is being developed for PC & Mac. The game currently has no timeline for its official debut; however, the latest build of Into The Stars is available via Steam Early Access.
Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes.com and follow Scott on Twitter for additional Into The Stars coverage throughout the game's remaining time in development and for however long Fugitive Games continues to support Into The Stars in the months ahead.
