As the first sci-fi entry to the Age of Wonders series, Planefall has come with a brand-new sci-fi universe with its own lore and in game stories. The campaigns are where this new galaxy centered around the fallen Star Union and its secrets comes to life the most, and where we encourage the players to dig into the past and explore the background, goals and motivations of the 6 playable races and their smaller brothers, the NPC factions – or let them say “screw it!” and go on a rampage to obliterate everyone!
That’s right: it is not actually required to complete even a single story quest to play through the Age of Wonders Planetfall campaign. So if you feel like a murderhobo that wants to stomp on every player including his own allies, the Planetfall campaign allows it, like it allows many actions that would be blocked in most other 4X campaigns.
“Player freedom” was in fact one of the main design pillars of the Planetfall campaigns and in the following two dev diaries y I will shed some light on how we tackled infusing our missions with enough robustness and flexibility to be able to give our players a customizable campaign experience as well as on the obstacles and challenges this provided during production. This week we will be looking at the choices outside the missions. Next time we cover everything that happens within the missions themselves.
(There will be some minor story spoilers in the following passages, so people who want to explore every bit of the Planetfall campaign by themselves should stop reading here!)
Open Campaign Structure
It all starts in the front-end: Which mission do I pick first?
In Planetfall the base game campaign has three starting points following the story of either the Kir’Ko, the Vanguard or the Dvar. From there you can continue the story with the missions of newly unlocked races and even ignore a race entirely if it isn’t your cup of tea, all while still being able to complete the final campaign mission. It is possible to do a campaign run where you play the Vanguard as the last race before the final mission or to do a run where you only complete the Dvar and Amazon missions and then directly proceed to the finale.
This kind of open structure put a lot of constraints on the stories of each racial mini-campaign. Not only did it mean that the timing of all the campaign events and happenings had to be non-linear and make sense in any given order. But it also limited how much we could re-use characters, since any character that would appear in a mission could get killed or would have to act and react differently if they had been involved in different events before. This led to a large cast of 55 different commanders that can potentially show up in the base game campaign under specific circumstances. Ever wondered why there are three different Cos’Rax in Planetfall? This is because Jikuku shows up in three different campaign missions: Zemestian-4, Avium SK-51 and CNex-3. If he dies during his first appearance, his cousin Roto fills in the second time. If Roto dies as well, Tiri makes the third appearance the charm! Just like in a regularbug infestation supportive family!
Originally, I wanted there to be an achievement for killing all three Cos’Rax cousins in a single campaign play through. Sadly, there are too many Kir’Ko supporters in the office…
Customizable Leaders
Still before the actual start of any mission, we give the player the opportunity to customize the protagonists of each racial campaign. The looks, name, gender and perks can be changed, while the race and secret tech stay fixed to protect the integrity of the story.
You’d like to play as Jackie Gelder? No problem!
This decision provided the biggest problems to our programmers, who had to find their ways of storing and reapplying all leader data to up to 6 different characters when the player’s creations all meet in the final campaign mission. Among all the crazy problems we ran into there, I still distinctly remember the “all leaders are you” bug that turned every player on the final mission into a copy of your leader if you had previously customized him or her…
Let’s negotiate with myself!
But the two possible genders of all playable characters except the Amazon also created a series of challenges in our texts and quests. Suddenly it wasn’t so simple anymore for Jack Gelder to uncover the fate of his lost ex-girlfriend if said girl-friend could lead to a homosexual relationship. Which is why the player is now left with the choice of Jack or Jackie Gelders sexual orientation to play out that part of the story in a way that he deems to be the most fitting – or seek out other explanations for Gelders troubled past…
Or was it the cat all along?
Of course we also had to make sure that any text referencing the leader would have a text version for each gender and that our systems would swap in the right text where it made a difference – which is in English much more rarely the case than in most of the languages that our texts got translated to. E.g. a simple question like “Why are you so stupid, Jack?” does require an alternate female text in languages where the adjective “stupid” gets adjusted based on gender (e.g. “estúpido/estúpida” in Spanish).
That’s it today for my Dev Diary about player choice in the campaign front end – the next time we will be taking a closer look at the in game choices and options, so stay tuned!
That’s right: it is not actually required to complete even a single story quest to play through the Age of Wonders Planetfall campaign. So if you feel like a murderhobo that wants to stomp on every player including his own allies, the Planetfall campaign allows it, like it allows many actions that would be blocked in most other 4X campaigns.
“Player freedom” was in fact one of the main design pillars of the Planetfall campaigns and in the following two dev diaries y I will shed some light on how we tackled infusing our missions with enough robustness and flexibility to be able to give our players a customizable campaign experience as well as on the obstacles and challenges this provided during production. This week we will be looking at the choices outside the missions. Next time we cover everything that happens within the missions themselves.
(There will be some minor story spoilers in the following passages, so people who want to explore every bit of the Planetfall campaign by themselves should stop reading here!)
Open Campaign Structure
It all starts in the front-end: Which mission do I pick first?
In Planetfall the base game campaign has three starting points following the story of either the Kir’Ko, the Vanguard or the Dvar. From there you can continue the story with the missions of newly unlocked races and even ignore a race entirely if it isn’t your cup of tea, all while still being able to complete the final campaign mission. It is possible to do a campaign run where you play the Vanguard as the last race before the final mission or to do a run where you only complete the Dvar and Amazon missions and then directly proceed to the finale.
This kind of open structure put a lot of constraints on the stories of each racial mini-campaign. Not only did it mean that the timing of all the campaign events and happenings had to be non-linear and make sense in any given order. But it also limited how much we could re-use characters, since any character that would appear in a mission could get killed or would have to act and react differently if they had been involved in different events before. This led to a large cast of 55 different commanders that can potentially show up in the base game campaign under specific circumstances. Ever wondered why there are three different Cos’Rax in Planetfall? This is because Jikuku shows up in three different campaign missions: Zemestian-4, Avium SK-51 and CNex-3. If he dies during his first appearance, his cousin Roto fills in the second time. If Roto dies as well, Tiri makes the third appearance the charm! Just like in a regular
Originally, I wanted there to be an achievement for killing all three Cos’Rax cousins in a single campaign play through. Sadly, there are too many Kir’Ko supporters in the office…
Customizable Leaders
Still before the actual start of any mission, we give the player the opportunity to customize the protagonists of each racial campaign. The looks, name, gender and perks can be changed, while the race and secret tech stay fixed to protect the integrity of the story.
You’d like to play as Jackie Gelder? No problem!
This decision provided the biggest problems to our programmers, who had to find their ways of storing and reapplying all leader data to up to 6 different characters when the player’s creations all meet in the final campaign mission. Among all the crazy problems we ran into there, I still distinctly remember the “all leaders are you” bug that turned every player on the final mission into a copy of your leader if you had previously customized him or her…
Let’s negotiate with myself!
But the two possible genders of all playable characters except the Amazon also created a series of challenges in our texts and quests. Suddenly it wasn’t so simple anymore for Jack Gelder to uncover the fate of his lost ex-girlfriend if said girl-friend could lead to a homosexual relationship. Which is why the player is now left with the choice of Jack or Jackie Gelders sexual orientation to play out that part of the story in a way that he deems to be the most fitting – or seek out other explanations for Gelders troubled past…
Or was it the cat all along?
Of course we also had to make sure that any text referencing the leader would have a text version for each gender and that our systems would swap in the right text where it made a difference – which is in English much more rarely the case than in most of the languages that our texts got translated to. E.g. a simple question like “Why are you so stupid, Jack?” does require an alternate female text in languages where the adjective “stupid” gets adjusted based on gender (e.g. “estúpido/estúpida” in Spanish).
That’s it today for my Dev Diary about player choice in the campaign front end – the next time we will be taking a closer look at the in game choices and options, so stay tuned!
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