Plan for Jay Barnson

Void War is a novel take on one of my favorite genres - the space combat sim. It was born partly out of frustration with the multiplayer space combat games right before the genre died a commercial death. We THOUGHT we knew what these games really needed to be "fun" again. A couple years after I left game development professionally, I got cracking on a little experimental project in my spare time that would evolve a year later into Void War.

The grand experiment was to take the space combat genre retro. I drew upon the vector-graphics space shooter classics of the 80's - such as Asteroids, Starcastle, Space Duel, and Omega Race - as inspiration, as well as the great-grandaddy of videogames, Spacewar! While we've got the trappings of more modern (1990+) space sims, such as shields and a very basic form of power allocation, the point is to emphasize marksmanship and piloting / navigation. We're going for simplified, extremely accessible controls, with the goal that your average Quake fan should be able to jump in and figure out how to fly and fight within a couple of minutes.

The problem is that by reducing the breadth of player interaction, you REALLY need to increase the depth, or you end up with the equivalent of Quake on a flat, featureless plain. We left the taste of Newtonian physics in the game, which is tough when you are playing the game from a first-person perspective. Figuring out which way you are REALLY flying is a challenge. The earliest working version of the game had an instant "suck-factor," as in the void, there's really no "terrain" to speak of... and as stupid as the AI were, they could still nail you with horrible accuracy as you struggled to change your movement vector.

I think we've managed to lick most of these problems, and the game is finally getting the right "feel" I imagined when I first started playing with a tech demo in the latter part of 2002. The trick with this is giving the player a LOT of interactive possibilities within the basic gameplay components of "move" and "shoot." This is exactly what they did with Spacewar! in 1962. The game had devolved into a contest of who could turn and shoot the other player first. Not a simple feat, as accuracy was an issue, but ultimately boring. By adding a star with a gravitational pull between the two players' starting positions, Slug Russell and company gave the game a new dimension, requiring maneuvering and planning. And this did NOT add any new complexity to the existing controls. This was a baby steps, but the same kind of thing that often gets forgotten by modern game designers.

Spacewar! circa 1962...


And Void War from about 2 weeks ago (I've fixed the exhaust so they look better now):

By the way - if you are interested in how the "first" videogame came to be, here's a great article written about 20 years ago (which is where I picked up the above photo).