Bay 12 Games Forum

It'd be interesting to see if your station would end up like that if you pushed it in that direction

With dystopian gangs? Totally possible. People form social groups based on shared ideals and shared personality traits (as well as external forces bringing them together or apart). If things collapse, and a group of friends are particularly aggressive or self-serving ,then you are going to get these sorts of situations arising naturally.

I don't know about the war-paint though, that might be cut.

The video looked fairly scripted but I believe the UI interface for selecting people and possibly the camera movement may have been in game video. Unsure about that notification area. I think the statues need to be a little more.... enhaced.

Tobel is pretty much exactly right. The notification window is an experimental feature in-game but seemed to work well for communicating things in the trailer.

He's also right about it being mainly scripted but we have kept it as true to game-play as possible.

We actually wanted to release a build to the press instead of a trailer. It looked like it wouldn't be together quite in time for Christmas press though so we put out a trailer instead.

Which means you can expect more game-play footage over the next month or so! We actually leave our day jobs and go full-time on this soon, which is nice

Hey guys

Karl here (Creative lead) from Human Orbit. I thought I would drop in and answer a couple of the questions:

... what's progression through the game going to be like? You've said that you'll start off with a small crew and you'll get more people as you get more important, but how does the station get more important? Getting the crew to do research? Will there be a campaign with some sort of plot, or just a pure sandbox? Win conditions? Any particularly interesting failure conditions (beyond the obvious everyone dies, losing power, etc)?

That's a big question but I'll do my best to keep it short!

Progression is subtle but it's there in a number of ways. In the early game you don't even have access to all of the station and have to 'infiltrate' the systems to gain control of them first.

I can't give you specifics on the mechanics of that as we are trying a few different things out, but we are thinking along the lines of virus-laden e-mails and droids. Of course the security and maintenance crews keep a sharp eye on anomalies so you will have to draw their attention elsewhere whilst this is all going on...

Later progression is built from manning the station with the highest quality people you can. It's also about dealing with the individual dramas that arise on ship. On the macro level you are assessed regularly by the corporation that funds the station as to how well the station is preforming. The corporation may wish the station to be used as a prison ship, a 'space-utopia' (good PR for the corporation) or even the research station it was actually designed to be!

There are a lot of failure conditions. Besides the more obvious failure conditions, you can bring on board space-junk from the planet to research. The junk may turn out to contain alien spores or addictive medicines or a wide range of items/things, with all the failure conditions they suggest...