Iridium Moons

When you hear about the development of many great and classic games, there's very often a part early on where a small team or just a single guy is sitting down to start working on a great ambitious idea, that has barely any resemblance to the game that  actually saw release a few years later. The stories of finalizing the vision for Fallout or Halo are ridiculous. And I think I can now say that I have first hand experience with this part of game development.

Project Wasp and Project Hornet are both great ideas. Games I would really love to see made and love to play. But as I am finding out, a good game concept is not just about being a game that you would enjoy, and having technical requirements that are within your capabilities. For a game with a strong narrative component, it also needs to be a concept where you have a good understanding of the themes that drive the experience and the subjects that the story is about, as well as plentiful ideas for game content that expresses these themes and subjects. The two concepts for gameplay mechanics for a fantasy RPG still feel really solid to me. But when it came to combing the mechanics with the themes to create an outline for locations, characters, and stories, I was making no progress at all. My previous work on the Kaendor setting has been serving me very well for pen and paper RPG campaigns, where the story emerges from the interactions with the players. But this just doesn't seem to translate well into planning experiences for a single-player videogame.

But in contrast to that, my Space Opera Iridium Moons is constantly making it back into my mind with really exciting ideas for characters and storylines. This is a world that doesn't just have good potential as a videogame setting, but one for which I also have a really clear vision for what the narrative and player agency of that game would look like. Making an Iridium Moons game has always been on my mind since I started thinking about picking up videogame development as a new hobby, but I had set it aside pretty early on as something that I could perhaps one day pursue once I had completed working on a Kaendor game. Though with me really having struggled for a good month with the question of what events might actually be happening in such a game, and Iridium Moons persistently trying to get my attention with loads of great ideas, I think it's a really obvious step to flip things around and go forward with my ideas for an Iridium Moons game, with a Kaendor game being something that I might perhaps pick up in the future as a follow-up.

The Iridium Moons Setting

The initial idea for Iridium Moons came to me back in 2021, around the time that the Dune movie came out and I had started playing Cyberpunk 2077 a lot, and I still had Boardwalk Empire fresh on my mind. And I noticed that the Great Houses of Dune play a very similar role in their story and have a great overlap with the MegaCorps of Cyberpunk. The president of the Arasaka Corporation is even commonly known as "The Emperor", whose private wealth and possessions make him a geoplitical power dwarfing most actual countries. A far future with Space Feudalism on a galactic scale always felt a bit of a fantastical stretch to me. Very evocative, but highly implausible. On the other hand, privately funded deep space industry beyond the reach of any government control resulting in remote planets becoming the personal property of a super-rich elite? Now that seems pretty plausible to me. And Boardwalk Empire had me thinking about the industrial barons of late 19th and early 20th century America and Western Europe. Who became fabulously rich with mining, heavy industry, and transportation, living like kings who had nearly full control over the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers. In some places, they build entire towns next to their factories and mines to house their workers, pay their workers in company-issues money, which they could spend in company-owned stores. Put this concept into a space setting, and you go from Company Towns to Company Planets.

For a good while before the idea for Iridium Moons came to me, I had occasionally been thinking about how most science-fiction is full of concepts that are completely implausible to outright impossible, while still being presented as hard sci-fi with full confidence. And not because it was necessary or the story couldn't work, but because the writers just seemed to be lazy and throwing around misinformed technobabble in ways that was less science-fiction than anti-science fiction. Which made me think how futuristic space stories could be done instead, in ways that remain at least plausible in regards to our basic understanding of physics, society, and economy. Iridium Moons is not that kind of grounded hard sci-fi. Iridium Moons is supposed to be Space Opera like Star Wars or Dune, which is really much more fantasy in space than anything that could be called "science fiction". But when I started outlining the basic parameters for what technology and society in Iridium Moons should look like, I still had many of those earlier ideas for what we might see in realistic space stories, and I think many of those are actually just as fun as the fantastical ones we most commonly get to see. From that developed a design paradigm that I would first try to create worldbuilding elements in a way that would be realistic, and then only bend them just as much as is needed to still have something that embodies the overall feel of mid-20th century Space Opera.

The world of Iridium Moons is home to 14 different alien species spread out over a few hundred star system, but nearly all of the galactic population is living on the homeworlds on which their people evolved. Even with the most hospitable planets you can find in the far reaches of space, the gravity is never quite right, and the air smells weird. Also, most habitable planets are still pretty much deserts, and so remote that it's pretty much impossible to get access to most of the goods and conveniences taken for granted in the hearts of civilization. Very few people take the month-long journey on them to leave everything behind for good and settle down on a dirty rock. The only people who leave the home systems for the frontier are doing it for the money. And there's a lot of money to be made in space. The advanced technologies of Iridium Moons, like fusion reactors, hyperspace drives, gravity generators, and railguns all rely on large amounts of rare heavy elements like palladium, rhodium, and iridium. These elements are rarely found in significant amounts on the surfaces of planets, typically only in places where a rare asteroid rich in them impacted long after their planet's formation. Without deep space mining, galactic civilization would not exist. Outside of the home systems, everything revolves around mining, heavy industry, and shipping.

Like many Space Operas take a historical period and translate them into a futuristic space setting, Iridium Moons takes a lot of inspiration from Germany and Great Britain the early 1900s and their colonial occupations in East Africa and India, and the American oil and train boom. These influences are both in the social hierarchies and social issues of the world, and in the design aesthetics of architecture and fashion. Say what you want about the evils of early 20th century society, but their designers had reaches style perfection! Space travel and combat is also based heavily on shipbuilding and weapons technology from that time. Travel between star systems takes weeks or even months, and the rare space battles typically consist of just two ships slugging it out at considerable distances with huge railguns. No laser beams, no starfighters. Even smaller space ships function like ships, not like planes. Communication is limited by light speed, so the only way to send messages between star systems is to send someone delivering the letter in person. As a result of this, planets in deep space are as isolated as Australia and Hawaii were before the construction of undersea telegraph cables. Consequently, if a private company establishes mines and outposts in deep space, they are beyond the reach of any government oversight or control. The owners are typically living a life of luxury on the homeworlds, but the local administrators run their planets like feudal lords.

Unsurprisingly, corruption and exploitation is everywhere. Work conditions for the miners and foundry workers are generally much worse than what the recruiters had been advertising, and largely isolated from the rest of the galaxy, labor protections are basically nonexisting, and returning back to the home systems before your contract is completed nearly impossible. But occasionally, some fed-up miners are risking everything to try heading out on their own, scavenging abandoned mining equipment to keep digging at sites that have been deemed unprofitable by the big companies. These miners are constantly under threat from pirates and slavers, and even if they manage to send out shipments of ore, the foundries are paying them only fraction of the actual value, while the few supplies traders doing business on the frontier are taking extortion prices on even basic necessities. Every so often, independent miners are trying to organize, pooling their resources together for mutual protection and for more bargaining power when selling their ore. Neither the big companies nor the trader cartels have any interest in seeing such attempts come to fruition, and there's always a high demand for both professional leg-breakers and smugglers.

The Game Concept

The general idea behind Iridium Moons is an open-world ImSim. It is taking huge influences from Thief (1998), System Shock 2 (1999), Deus Ex (2000), and Prey (2017), but my current plans probably have the greatest resemblance to Stalker (2007). Ultimately, the game world is meant to consists of seven space ports on different planets and space stations, that are each a self-contained open-world environment, but for the first version of the game I plan to build just a single space station. Once that starts looking like a functional game that can be played, additional locations can be added later.

Similar to Cyberpunk 2077, the player's character is an unaffiliated agent with some skill in infiltration and sabotage. Both the companies and the independent miners are always on the lookout for someone doing dirty work targeting their enemies that can't be easily traced back to them. For the player, it's an opportunity to earn a lot of money and get accessed to better gear. But unlike the fancy high-polish commercial games, the big idea is that by choosing what jobs to take and how to execute them, the player can significantly influence how much bigger events will unfold on the greater stage. The reason we rarely see much freedom to go off script and affect the game world in unforeseen ways in prominent big-budget games is that their high graphical fidelity and cinematic approach to conversations and cutscenes make it very time consuming to script and animate all the possible paths that players might want to take the story down. With low-fidelity graphics and no voice acting, it is possible to have much more freeform and dynamic play, even with vastly fewer resources at hand. I am very convinced that it is possible for me to make such a game as a beginner by myself, but only because I made the decision to make the game look like it was made in 2002.

Something that is quite important to me, and which I think would really set the game apart from most of the ImSim games out there, is that I want to make the game in a way that deciding to use violence is a very big deal. I want gunfights to be difficult, and the oppositions that players will face in many situation completely unfair. One person who is specialized in breaking into places undetected has very little chance to stand up to a dozen soldiers in combat armor and high-powered weapons. And at the same time, most of the people who might spot you and raise an alarm will be unarmed factory and office workers. Killing them when its convenient is an option, if the player decides to play such a kind of character. But I want the game to be possible to play in a way that doesn't involve playing as a killer. This is something that is a great component in the gameplay and tone of Thief, but somehow something all other ImSims since then seem to have discarded. Most of them are designed to be fully playable as a shooter.

I want to design the game environments and storylines in a way that allows to play it as a stealth game. But I think it also makes a lot of sense for the setting to play it in a way that is very dialog focused. You can either break in during the night and hack the systems to unlock the doors to the vault, or just walk in through the front door during the day and distract an employee to steal his key. Let players decide between assassinating a corrupt administrator that is causing trouble, or leak manipulated evidence to his boss. I want players to have the option to play as an anti-corporate revolutionary who never touches a gun, or as a professional leg-breaker, and everything in between. I think in many ways, this game idea is what I had hoped Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) would be, but then turned out to be something rather different (though still similar in some way).

It's been very clear to me very early on, that the Godot Engine is really the only sensible choice for me. And as it turns out, someone has already created the COGITO template for Godot, which is a free package of code for all the typical mechanics found in an ImSim. This means that with this game concept, the development is much more like making a total conversion mod rather than actually creating a complete game from scratch. This will easily save me literal years of development time. As for a visual style, I have become very endeared with the look of Unreal Engine 1, as in Unreal (1998), The Wheel of Time (1999), Deus Ex (2000), and Undying (2001). I think this style has the perfect balance for me between looking pretty nice with elaborate lighting, while using texture resolutions, level geometry, and character model details that can be done with limited artistic skill and much more importantly fast. I think it's also about as realistic as you can make character faces look before you have to make the game fully voiced. Which is just completely off the table for me.

I think this is a really nice idea for a game that could be really impressive, and one that I feel is manageable by a single person learning the tools on the go. And one that will work on a fairly small scope, but can also be expanded step by step by adding new planet locations to the existing content. And most importantly, I'm having so many exciting ideas for possible storylines.