Space Horror
The Banished Vault — Design Diary 04
This week’s blog is the first major step in cementing the game’s theme, taking it from a prototype of moving resources around a solar system into somewhat of a horror game, as best a strategy game can. You can find the other design diary entries here. Wishlist the game here.
I’ve come to realize my favorite space fiction is usually in the horror genre, or has a horror tinge characterizing it. While I love more fantastical space fiction full of goofy aliens and easy life in the stars, Alien remains my favorite film. The horror in these films and games feels like an abstract but appropriate depiction of what space is actually like, which is perhaps the most hostile natural environment humanity has tried to inhabit.
My favorite historical space movie is First Man, the Neil Armstrong biopic. What resonates for me is the depiction of spacecraft: cramped, overstimulating, rattling, creaky machines built out of screws and with visible seams. These are not sleek machines made for comfort and casually exploring the galaxy — your body is crudely stuffed into them or they are built around you. Nor is space travel a majestic extension of man’s will into the stars — every step of the process is difficult, and potentially lethal. Together you are exposed to the violence of gravity, atmospheres, and rocket engines. These machines and the crew are symbiotic, where death can mean a violent explosion or simply orbiting a star for eternity.
When The Banished Vault originally started, the horror aspect of the game was not yet present. I actually wasn’t even sure humans would be a major component. My ideas were weighed down with more realistic science, and my initial sense was to pilot a fleet of robotic explorers or self-replicating probes around the galaxy. Perhaps humans would be more of an abstract population. Those themes never really materialized, and discussions at the studio made me realize my favorite space fiction has the horror element, which I wanted to reflect in the game.
So the first of a couple thematic shifts from the original prototype took place, in the form of adding a distinct human crew. You would have a squad of only a small handful of individual people navigating these solar systems, hibernating in between solar systems. The humans would be responsible for doing the meaningful actions the player can do in the game.
Hazards
This allows for an addition that otherwise would be less impactful: hazards. Hazards are a classic trope in space games, representing the world pushing back on you. Roll a die to see if space weather, meteor showers, earthquakes, etc give your team trouble while you’re playing the game. When abstracted, space can become too mathematical, less a simulation and more of a clockwork progression. For The Banished Vault, hazards provide a much needed unpredictability to a somewhat rigid world.
Unpredictability can provide different qualities as needed for a game. For hazards, these all take the forms of your characters passing a dice check when doing an action. Dice themselves are a great source of tension and drama, so a lot of work has gone into how the system is structured, which I’ll detail in a future blog.
The important part here is that the dice checks are directly situated with the characters, not the planets or environment, or even the ships. There is randomness there, but only the results are shown, the player doesn’t need to understand everything that results in a planet being generated. For randomness and dice to provide tension, the player needs to be aware of the entire process. And the dice directly affect a small group of humans that the player invests in over the course of the game. The end result is a dramatic moment of a crew landing on a spinning asteroid, or frantically gathering resources during an earthquake. Hazards will hopefully make the planets and world feel alive, and hostile.
