Sci-Fi Author Timothy Zahn Is Creating a Video Game

An anonymous reader writes "Timothy Zahn, one of the most influential Star Wars Expanded Universe authors (creator of Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade), and writer of 40 novels and 90+ short stories, will be trying his hand as the Creative Director for a new video game, Timothy Zahn's Parallax. From the Kickstarter page: 'The game concept is heavily inspired by the original Master of Orion but, because Timothy Zahn is the co-creator, a major focus is going to be on making sure that each alien race is as fully-realized as possible, and that the interactions with the other aliens are realistic: talking to one alien race will be different than talking to another, and the choices you make in the game will have side effects and the computer players will remember them — and treat you differently because of them.' Other highlights: 'The game will include at least 5 of his non-Star Wars alien races (Modhri, Kalixiri, Zhirrzh, Qanska and Pom); Backers will be active participants in the game creation process; No Digital Rights Management foolishness.' The Kickstarter starts at 6pm MST today."

Comments

Priced out of Market

[tuppe666]

$30 for the game?

$10 only gets you a star name?

Seeing how they can still sell the game after, I think he could do better on (digital-only) pledges.

I have been priced off kickstarter (at least for games) which used to be more reasonable about my support, where I could afford to have little expectation, and the possibility of getting a lot for my money. Now I have stopped looking at all.

My money will go to Humble Bundle 9 https://www.humblebundle.com/ which currently includes FTL, Fez and Trine 2 and others(the weekly bundle is Duke Nuken 3D and Shadow Warrior with DLC which is better than the original games). In contrast Humble Bundle has hit $2million already with another 11 days to go.

Re:Priced out of Market

[abramjablonski]

[As the developer of the game]

Anti: $10 doesn't just get you a star name, it gets you an entire year of talking about the game, and having a vote and a voice in the final product. As for the $30 license (and the $500k Kickstarter comment as well), we're putting everything into it up front, so it's the game we want to make right from the beginning, and the customers/ backers get as much as we can give them (rather than hoping to get funded for stretch goals). There's going to be a lot of content, and it's going to be expensive to generate - aside from paying my living expenses, the rest is going to be spent developing the game. "No DRM foolishness" means everybody in your family can use it if they want (yes, all at the same time), so it's not exactly price-gouging.

Pro: I'd actually rather charge less, but I had to find a balance between reasonable reward levels and enough to meet the Kickstarter goal, and I made a judgment call. And yes, there are some projects on Kickstarter that don't need to be there, or are too high, because the creators don't actually need that much money to complete the project. Timothy Zahn knows my plan for the game, and he was also worried that we might be setting the Kickstarter target too high (but it's not just my name on the line, and there's no way I'm going to waste all the time and energy he is putting into this by turning out a sub-par game that will disappoint the backers, or risk running out of funds because I cut the budget too close).

In general, it's a valid comment/ concern, but it's not as cut and dry as it seems from the outside, when you're dealing with all the myriad variables and considerations.

Re:Names...?

[oodaloop]

make sure your readers have some way of guessing at the correct proonunciation.

Yeah, I read the Conqueror's Trilogy, and I had to rely on my imagination! Can you believe it?! In a sc-fi novel, no less!

Re: My eyes must be going

[Geoffrey.landis]

I had to zoom the screen to 150% to verify that the first po was followed by m, and the second by rn.

Re:Excellent! Sort of..

[Samantha Wright]

More perplexing still, the funding goal is half a million dollars. Not quite the shoestring budget that Kickstarter dreams are made of. At last, a crowdfunding project that has something for everyone... to sigh at!

Meh!

[godel_56]

I've always regarded Zahn as a bit of a hack.

He writes what I call sausage machine books; he turns the handle and out they come, one after the other. His books are inoffensive but unmemorable, the kind of thing you pick up in a bus or airline terminal when there's nothing better to do while you're waiting for your ride to show up.

Oh well, I suppose it pays his bills, but I'm not expecting to see Zahn's name on any of the Hugo or Nebula Awards' lists anytime soon.

Re:Just show me ANY EXISTING PRIOR finished game.

[VortexCortex]

Honestly, I hope he can pull it off, because to me it sounds just like every ideas-man wanna be game designer who's never made a game before. Not trying to be harsh, but seriously, it does sound like the crap newbs spout about their first game when they haven't even completed a tetris or mario clone, let alone a branching world where everything has consequences. It's easier said than done, just ask Peter Molyneux. He's not really a liar, he wanted to do all the stuff he spouted off about, but it wasn't feasible given the technological limitations of this decade...

Game Engines Are Free. My advice is the same for everyone else: No prototype? No backing. If you can't scrape together even a simple prototype first, even with just colored boxes moving around, then I can't put any money down. I don't care if you're John Carmack. No prototype, no money. Ideas are a dime a dozen, really, they are. It's the execution that matters. Many game developers go through tens or hundreds of iterations trying out different stuff, finding a novel core mechanic that works, and is fun.

Here we're being asked to throw half a million dollars in on a project that no one even has an inkling as to if it'll be fun or not... Hell, maybe if there were concept art some battle scenarios and a few races, you don't have to go all in, just get something in an engine. Contracted out graphics, contracted out engine, contracted out game-play, ideas man who's got no experience in the driver's seat... $500,000.00 and we'll build a race car, we've never done it before, but how hard can it be? Maybe his status will attract some actual gamedev talent? I mean, face it, that's what he's asking for: "I'm an ideas man with a lot of reputation, and you're giving me money due to the reputation..."

Personally, I'd tell him to go work on one of the many 4x indie-games, he could lend his skills to a team who can at least make pixels move. I fear this will not end well.

So why is MoO2 still the gold standard?

[denzacar]

- Modular ships and technology that can make a difference. Both in tactical combat and civilization/empire building.

- Species traits that really matter during the entire course of the game. Same goes for leaders.

- A simple interface that didn't require you to go back to the main screen for every single action, select a submenu, then another one, then choose an option...

- Build queues that worked and didn't require scrolling.
Also, everything that you could build was always on a single screen, available by a single click but it was separated so you didn't have to scroll through your buildings looking for ships and vice versa.
And you could sort your colonies by how fast they will build stuff - i.e. by production.

- Pretty graphics. Planetscapes were simple yet beautiful. Elerians were hot AND a very powerful race.

- But most importantly, HUMANOID SPECIES. Even Silicoids looked somewhat bipedal.
Which is very important if you're supposed to empathize with the species you're playing.
Among other things MOO3 managed to fuck up was the look of the game - most species now looked like bad modern art.
Practically all of them could be considered "repulsive".

Really alien looking species are a nice touch from time to time on an episodic show like Star Trek but there is no appeal for a weekly show whose main characters resemble puddles of mud.
We want to see humanoid aliens with humanoid expressions on their humanoid faces.

Which is why I'm having a bad feeling about this whole "as fully-realized as possible" thing.
Smells a lot like MOO3.11 for workgroups.

Re:So why is MoO2 still the gold standard?

[abramjablonski]

It's a valid point and, unfortunately, one I've run into repeatedly - users don't really know what they want until they actually have something to play with, so it becomes the developer's job to help them figure it out. I've been on a number of projects that ended up in trouble because the development team (including the management) was afraid to say "no" to the customer.

I'm not afraid to say "no": I've already said that multiplayer isn't going to happen unless someone can think of a way to avoid having one person waiting on/ rushing the other, and the Kickstarter itself states that the vision and architecture are already set. The users will be helping to shape the content of the game, and I also said that we won't always be able to give them what they want. At the same time, Agile development works (when done properly), I've done it, I'm good at it and - most importantly - having user feedback right at the beginning is one of the best ways to prevent a project from heading off in the wrong direction and ending up as something that nobody wants. That is the biggest risk, and that is the one I need to address right at the beginning, which is why I chose to take this approach: the users have significant input, enjoy themselves, and the risk of turning out a bad game is reduced by orders of magnitude...

Re:Just show me ANY EXISTING PRIOR finished game.

[abramjablonski]

Ouch.

..........

I've actually been developing software for 15 years, and have made a game before (XNA on Windows Phone, and Xamarin to port it to Android, ported from an original 3D WPF version that looked great but ran like crap on a phone/ tablet and had too small a playable area there) - there are screen shots on the Kickstarter page. And you can't tell from the screen shots, but the pixels do move.

That is, of course, the least of what I've done - I specialize in highly-complex modular systems that push around and transform data on the server tier, as well as UI/ UX presentation of that data in the simplest way possible (lots of complex third-order-effect stuff going on behind the scenes, pretty colors for the user). I got an MCSD way back when it meant something. I've redesigned $60,000 per-seat systems and saved multi-million dollar projects... I'm not the idea man - I'm the architect that the idea men go to when they want something to actually get built.

But for this... none of that really matters. Yeah, I'm going to move pixels around on a screen and create a dynamic shell driven by XML-based files that loads the content on the fly, but the content generation itself is the long pole. I had photoshopped screen shots that were serviceable but, since I decided to let the backers help generate all those reams of content, I stopped working on them. The community management and organization is going to be critical, and my main job is going to be to mentally juggle hundreds of different ideas all at once and make them fit together - and then listen to the backers and fix it when they tell me I messed up. as for the novel core mechanic, I'm stealing it from MOO[1], cherry-picking cool features from other games, and fixing the stuff that tends to annoy me.

But the cool part is that you don't have to believe me, and you win either way: either I fail miserably and you're right, or I succeed reasonably well and you get a fun game to play.

:D