An Interview with Blind Mind Studios

Star Ruler… the name immediately conjures up an image of an iron-fisted tyrant atop a throne of alien skulls, directing waves of interstellar warships on a path of conquest across the galaxy – but that might just be me.  Regardless of the particular mental imagery, Blind Mind Studios’ forthcoming 4X sci-fi strategy game is promising to make a lot of would-be galactic, er, ‘star rulers’ giddy with excitement.  Boasting a diverse range of features, including procedurally generated galaxies, intricate ship design and extensive moddability, Star Ruler could well be a super nova of the genre.

GameSquad’s shuttle (yes, we have one of those…don’t you?) recently docked at a secret space station and chatted with Blind Mind Studios’ Clayton Woodall and Andrew Ackermann to get the facts on being a Star Ruler.

GS:  Could you tell us a little about yourself and your involvement with the project?

Clayton Woodall:  I'm the Jack-of-all-Trades of Blind Mind Studios and I do everything from interface art to sound effects to particle effects to in-game dialogue messages to marketing and advertising.   Andrew, my boss, handles all the nitty-gritty mathematical and programming stuff that I can't quite do much with.  We're the only two developers on the project.

GS:  How did Blind Mind Studios come to be?

Andrew Ackermann:  Well, back in 2008 I started working on Star Ruler as something of a small project and as it began to grow I decided to make it more of a serious project.  Then I started collecting random people to get random things done, all the while running without a budget.  I brought Clayton onto the project initially as a beta tester for the game but his role and activity with the project has grown immensely since then.
Star Ruler sports some stellar graphics
GS:  Tell us a bit about Star Ruler.  How would you describe it to people who are totally unfamiliar with your pending title?

Clayton Woodall:  Star Ruler is a real-time space strategy game where you direct and control an interstellar empire as it attempts to survive, be it through peace or war, in a hostile and space-limited galaxy against a number of opponents, stars, and systems of your choosing.  It's very mod-friendly, will enjoy numerous upgrades post-release, and runs well on both new and old computers. 

GS:  Right now, there is sort of a ‘Holy Trinity’ of 4X sci-fi games:  Stardock’s classic Galactic Civilizations II, Ironclad’s Sins of a Solar Empire, and Kerberos Studios’ Sword of the Stars.   All three have succeeded in developing a devoted following by offering a unique take on interstellar mayhem.  What will Star Ruler bring to the table that will set it apart from these other games?

Clayton Woodall:  Scalability.  Star Ruler scales down to 1 system or up to thousands; down to just a few ships fighting or thousands fighting thousands.  The tech tree is as detailed or as simple as you'd like it to be, the AI is as numerous and as challenging as the user desires, ship designing is as simple or as complicated as you wish, and so on.  We also run on very old rigs and very new rigs, making the most out of both that we can.  The myriad strategies that our ship layout and diplomacy systems engender also help to add a unique flavor and pacing to the game.

GS:  Is Star Ruler turn-based, real time, or a mix of both?

Clayton Woodall:  Star Ruler is real-time with a time-multiplier.  The game can be slowed down to a crawl of its default speed or up to ten times its default speed at the user's option.

GS:  One of the things that really has me excited about Star Ruler is the mention that ships will be comprised of systems and sub-systems that can be targeted, damaged, destroyed…and even repaired by the crew!  Could you elaborate a bit more on this?  And how does the player handle this level of detail? I mean, when I click on a ship, will I get some sort of damage control report?  Or will the player be able to tell what’s going on with a ship just by visual cues?

Clayton Woodall:  I'm not sure I indicated that systems and sub-systems could be targeted, but damaged, destroyed, repaired, and renovated: yep.  Crewed ships will have repair rates proportional to the amount of crew aboard.  Particle systems light up when subsystems are destroyed, ships become disabled, and so forth to keep user-feedback.  We'd like to do some sort of damage control report but performance concerns have pushed that to a 'future addition' status.

GS:  What type of ship classes can we build in Star Ruler?

Clayton Woodall:   Theoretically, every ship class you can assemble with the parts available in the game.  Star Ruler does not have explicit 'classes' of ships except by name alone as ships are a collection of subsystems which work together to create a functional design.  Ships are as single-role or as multi-role as you design them to be.

GS:  How is fleet management handled?  Is it just a matter of lassoing a bunch of ships, or can you actually organize the ships within a fleet (sort of like how you can create a formation in Sword of the Stars) and give detailed fleet orders?

Clayton Woodall:  That is currently being developed and I can't really remark much on it.  We do make a distinction between ships you have selected and ships you've made into a fleet; there will be fleet-based command, there will be formations.

GS:  Tell us a bit about the diplomacy system.  Is it of the simple variety (i.e., basic war and peace treaties) or is it more complex with trade agreements, tech sharing, etc.?  Is there espionage?

Clayton Woodall:  It will be of the more complex variety.  Treaties with durations that users set, trade agreements, trade of ship blueprints between empires, trade of research, restrictions and sanctions to impose on weaker opponents, alliances to band weak empires together, et cetera.

We're not expecting espionage to be available at release at this time; it is possible for us to add it in post-release and we're pursuing the creation of a complex and flavorful approach to espionage.

GS:  The game claims to procedurally generate “a galaxy”.  You don’t really mean that, do you?!? And if you do, just how detailed will this galaxy be?  The game boasts a realistic Newtonian physics system…that would suggest a lot of potential for generating detailed planetary systems.

Clayton Woodall:  Star Ruler does indeed generate galaxies.  Granted, by 'galaxy' we mean from one to tens of thousands plus systems (a system being anything from a star with surrounding planets to a black hole).  Each system has the potential to contain a plethora of elements, from planets with moons and rings to asteroid belts, comets, and et cetera.  Planets do utilize the Newtonian mechanics but their routes are pre-calculated as gravity does not exist (with some clear exceptions) in Star Ruler.  All of this is moddable by the end-user and can be much more complicated than we present in the base game.

GS:  The research tree is described as “web-like”.  What does that mean?  How big is the research tree?  With ships that sport systems and sub-systems, I would think it would be rather expansive.

Clayton Woodall:  The research system consists of a series of scientific fields and disciplines, collectively called 'technologies'; these Technologies can be either discovered or undiscovered.  Technologies link to each other through Nodes and each Technology comes with a number of them that we define in advance. To unlock Technologies, you need to find a Node that links to it from another Technology.  Technologies inter-relate, and some can link and be linked to multiple times: all of this working together creates a web-like structure with Technologies linking to each other in a non-1:1 relationship. 

Currently, there are 23 Technologies available. All of them provide their own small benefits; decreasing the usage of fuel with thrusters if you level Propulsion Sciences, for instance.  They also unlock subsystems for your ships, structures for your planets, and large-scale constructions like Dyson spheres.

A space hulk drifts off a ringed planet

GS:  Tell us a bit about colonized planets.  Can you build structures on them to specifically influence their role in your empire?  Or are they of the more abstracted ‘resource generator’ types?  Also, how are planets captured?  Can there be more than one habitable planet in a system?

Clayton Woodall:  The player builds structures on planets to suit their goals, yes.  Planets have a number of slots based on their size, structures take up slots, and what is put down on a planet is determined by either the player's manual guidance or through a scripted set of planet governors whose behaviors the player can alter.  Currently, planets must be bombarded from orbit to be captured.  When a planet's population drops to zero, the Empire which controlled it loses ownership of the Planet and then it may be captured; any structures that remain may be captured whenever the planet is re-colonized.  We're pursuing having a well-rounded invasion mechanic but it is unlikely to be in by the release of the game.  There can be any number of habitable planets per system and potentially any number of hostile planets.

GS:  There is a rather impressive screenshot of what looks like a carrier transiting a ringed planet – the sense of scale is awesome!  Since planetary systems seem much larger and more realistic than what is presented in other 4X games,  is it possible to fight a detailed battle within a single system, using its various planets and other ‘terrain’ for offense and defense? Using our solar system for an example, could I retreat from Jupiter to Mars during the course of a hypothetical battle? Or hide out in an asteroid field waiting for a chance to ambush an enemy on its way to Earth?

Clayton Woodall:  Yes, but the default game will use a less realistic scale to better simulate the diversity of a galaxy; Star Ruler can scale up to close to real scale but simulating our solar system takes up the majority of the galaxy space we use in the default map.  The larger the systems are, the fewer systems we can place in the galaxy space.  The scale of the systems, the contents of those systems, the distance between them, the number in the galaxy, and the organization of the systems are all moddable and configurable by the player.

GS:  Star Ruler seems to be very mod friendly.  Why was that important to the Blind Mind team?

Clayton Woodall:  Taking a look across the most popular and long-lived titles, you'll find a common thread between a lot of them:  Games which have modding communities last many times longer and enjoy a much larger and tight-knit fanbase.  Very few games last nearly as long without that kind of community.  We also wanted to extend the opportunity to people who aren't in the industry to 'test the waters'.  We both are prolific modders and enjoy greatly when developers open their game up to our interpretation.  On the whole, it's important to us both as a business, as gamers and modders ourselves, and to the game's lifespan.

GS:  What comes after release?  Are there plans for expansions, DLC…something else?

Clayton Woodall:  At least for a few months we're definitely going to be updating the game (fixing bugs, adding content, helping out modders by improving the engine); after that, we'll see.

GS:  Thanks for the interview!  We look forward to conquering the galaxy with Star Ruler!