Designer Diaries: An Intro to CSC’s Game Design
Greetings, Commanders! Welcome to my first blog post discussing the game design of Crypto Space Commander (CSC). We’ll review a variety of design elements throughout the course of the game’s development.
As a game designer, I’ve worked in the video game industry for about 20 years now — wow, that feels like a long time! I’ve had the opportunity to work on a variety of platforms at several studios throughout my career, starting out at Konami and then THQ, Crystal Dynamics, and Capcom on such large franchises as WWE, Tomb Raider, and Lost Planet. After my tenure at some of these larger studios, I moved into mobile free-to-play development on several top-grossing mobile titles for Mattel. Most recently I’ve had to opportunity to join Lucid Sight to design games for AR, VR, and emerging technologies like the blockchain, which is the basis for Crypto Space Commander.
For CSC, our goal is to design a game where the player experience is immersive, interactive, and continually engaging. By incorporating what we’ve learned from our prior dApps along with aspects of successful ones currently in the market, we intend to push the boundaries of dApp gaming. With CSC, we’re creating a game where players can have fun traveling through space, discovering new planets and species, gathering resources, crafting, and ultimately exploring what a complete space economy can become utilizing blockchain technology.
Today, I’d like to go a bit into owning a starship and the overall experience of mobility and travel within the world of CSC. At the very start of CSC, players will experience becoming the commander of a starship which they can fully customize to their preferred style of play. They can be a miner searching for valuable resources to refine and sell in the marketplace or a pirate who hunts down other starships to salvage parts for profit. Starships come in a variety of shapes and sizes with the smallest being the Shuttle and the largest being the Dreadnaught. And even though players can only actively command one starship at a time, they can own an entire fleet.
To travel in CSC, the player will open the Galactic Map to access different systems. The player will use their starship’s FTL drive to initiate a jump to various systems and view their progress on the Galactic Map. In CSC, 1 light year of travel time is equal to 1 hour of real time, but ships can also be modified to decrease travel time. Once the player has reached a designated system, the Galactic Map will zoom into a System Map view. On the System Map, the player can view all the planets, asteroid belts, pirate outposts, and other astronomical objects in that system. Players can then select a travel location from the System Map and watch their starship travel to its destination through slip stream. Slip stream travel is quicker than sub light speed travel and allows the player to move more quickly throughout a system. Once the player has reached their target location, they’ll drop out of slip stream and enter local space where they’re free to explore and the majority of gameplay occurs. Here, players can mine asteroids, battle pirates, scan for life on different planets, and meet up with other players. Controlling their starships is as simple as a point-and-click in the direction the player wishes to travel.
As the development of CSC progresses, we’ll have more details to share with the community, including space travel and other aspects of the overall game design. Feel free to discuss and comment on any of the design ideas, as community feedback is important to us!
Check out more info at https://www.csc-game.com
