Star Trek Bridge Commander Designer Diary #1

By , GameSpotPosted Dec 21, 2001 5:54 pm PT

Project Lead and Programmer David Litwin relives the months leading up to the initial creation of Star Trek Bridge Commander at Totally Games.

Entry #1 - 12/21/01

By David Litwin
Project Lead and Director of Technology

In the late months of 1998, Activision contacted Totally Games about doing a Star Trek: The Next Generation space combat game. At the time I was the technical lead on X-Wing: Alliance, and the team was in crunch mode putting the final touches on the game. We were busy with the task at hand but nonetheless found time to consider the road ahead, and it was in this environment that we contemplated what it would involve to make a Star Trek game after having a long and productive history of making Star Wars space combat simulations.

At first, the jump from Star Wars to Star Trek seemed like a challenging one to make for Totally Games.

Over the finishing months of X-Wing: Alliance many ideas and directions came out of multiple meetings and e-mail threads. There was a long period of research and brainstorming through the company as things wrapped up, so we had time to probe many different ideas and concepts for a Star Trek space combat game. One concept involved similar gameplay to our previous titles with Defiant-class ships. Recent Star Trek licenses had created these smaller and more maneuverable ships that might fit the faster, joystick-controlled gameplay of dogfighting. Unfortunately Activision did not yet have the Deep Space Nine license, so all these new craft weren't really available to us. My thoughts were that a Trek capital ship space combat game had to be slower moving and more tactical, and the only way to do that was from the third-person perspective, because a cockpit view was too limited. A third idea was to take a completely different track and simulate the bridge view from the captain's point of view, with character interaction forming the interface of the game.

Once finished with the seemingly endless supplemental versions of X-Wing: Alliance (extra feature patches, bundles, demos, and so on), I was named project lead on the new endeavor. One of my first tasks was to filter through all the ideas and concepts to get something that resonated well with the team and also fit into the practical restrictions of design, technology, art, and, of course, time. Around March of 1998 we buckled down, and as the team considered these many options, a few themes surfaced as most important:

A Star Trek: The Next Generation game with a joystick control felt wrong.

Star Trek's most recognizable elements are the captain, a bridge, and a large, powerful, slow-maneuvering capital ship.

Characters and character interaction form the bulk of Star Trek episodes, not space combat sequences.

A large ship with slow maneuverability needs tactical awareness, and you can't get tactical awareness from a first-person view without quick maneuverability.

At Totally Games we have always taken pride in doing a license right. Everyone knows that putting licensed assets in a preexisting game is a quick way to get a licensed product out that may grab sales from name recognition, but often these mergers leave both the fan of that game style and the fan of the license disappointed. Not all licenses and game styles are a good match. With the Star Wars X-Wing series of games, Totally Games took the crucial elements of that experience (WWII-style flight, fast action, hordes of enemies) and put them in a game that presented them like the movies. When we set out to do a Star Trek game, the same applied: getting the core elements and then faithfully presenting them.

The license and "feel" issues ruled out the Defiant/fighter-style game. The third-person tactical space simulation satisfied the feel and addressed the tactical awareness issues of large capital ship combat but was still missing a large part of what made Star Trek what it is: the characters and the bridge. The bridge concept satisfied this but was lacking the tactical awareness needed to make a space combat game really work well for a hard-core audience. The logical solution seemed to be a merger of the bridge and third-person concepts, which would give the best of their strengths and cancel out each other's weaknesses. Although far more ambitious than limiting ourselves to one or the other, we felt this was the best way to do the license properly.

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1 Comments

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jakeboudville
Posted Sep 21, 2006 7:20 pm PT

kinda impressive
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