Star Trek: (in)Finite - Today is a Good Day to Die...

Developer Log #1: The Genesis
Developer Log - Star Date: 23705.8
In today's log, I wanted to talk a bit about why we wanted to make this game. A passion project like none other, and now finally everyone can learn about it.


The Idea
Every game starts with an Idea, and for Star Trek Infinite the idea was to recapture the feeling of the Star Trek Strategy Games of the early 2000s. That mix of playing with the Star Trek ships, on big maps, and fighting the other empires for supremacy.

An important part was not to simply do a remake of Birth of the Federation or Armada. We wanted a game that captures the feeling of playing these. A modern take on the concept that they had, stories and gameplay from the Federation level perspective.

Something like that feeling you get from playing Stellaris.


Charting the Stars
We quickly knew that Nimble Giant was the perfect studio for this game. Firstly we saw the strength of their Master of Orion remaster, and then during early milestone delivery where they were able to prove their mastery of the Grand Strategy Game. They quickly built up trust with Paradox and Paramount with their passion for authenticity and great gameplay ideas.

We laid out a path for the game to be in the established series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. At the point when we started this game, Discovery and Picard was still ongoing, and we wanted to avoid making something that would be directly contradicted in the shows at a later point. The Original Series and the Animated series could be referenced, but our style and tone should be set in the shows of the 90s.

It should mainly occur in the timeline of these series, and we should pick our visuals to match them, and our stories should reflect the storytelling they used.

We needed Diplomacy to remain a prime part of the game, and we needed to balance the perspective between major and minor powers in the Alpha and Beta quadrant. We needed to be better at telling the long story, focusing on the events that play out in the show, and how players can affect these.

With these choices made, a lot of the questions we had were answered, who were the major players in the game, what important events needed to happen, and how were we going to work these stories into the game, no matter what empire you selected to play.


Turbulences and Triumphs
The Trek universe is huge, and we really needed to focus on what stories we wanted to tell and what would amplify these and not distract us.
Should we have fallen empires like Tkon, Talosian or Iconians? No, these could appear in stories, but making them a faction with their own faction would not improve our stories.

Should we have all the quadrants? - While Voyager takes place almost exclusively in the Delta quadrant, the stories we were trying to tell were about the Major Powers in the Alpha and Beta quadrant. Including the Gamma and Delta quadrant was a distraction from our goal of telling stories about these four Powers. They can influence the stories, and we can have some interaction, but play should focus on the Alpha and Beta Quadrant.


Did we pull it off?
I believe we did, and we were lucky to get this confirmed when we started doing previews. People seem happy with our vision, and we are looking forward to showing this to more people.

In the coming weeks we will have several more developer logs, where we discuss all the aspects of making this game. How we approached new features or reworked old ones, how we're-focused on art and what type of new gameplay we added.

The work that has been done by Nimble Giant on this game is amazing, and I am so happy to have been able to work with them over these last few years.

We have already started showing a few pieces of gameplay in our trailer that was released last week (here, in case you missed it) and some folks in the gaming press have had opportunities to get hands-on, share their experiences and conduct interviews with myself and the team at Nimble Giant. Soon we will be giving content creators access to the game, so expect more from them in the coming weeks!

That’s not all, though, we will be creating more dev diaries over the next few weeks in preparation for the launch, so we’d love to hear your thoughts as we publish those. Our Discord server has been steadily growing with Star Trek fans since the pre-order announcement, so if you want to come and say hello, that’s where a lot of us will be!

I can’t wait for you all to see more.

End Log,

PDX_Ruk
Producer for Star Trek: Infinite

Dev Log #2 - A Matter of Perspective

Developer Log - Stardate: 23724.7

The Statement
Last week, in Dev Log #1, PDX_Ruk described the genesis of Star Trek: Infinite. But how do we actually build a grand strategy game of Star Trek? I love these kinds of games, and I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours in Paradox games. If there is one thing that has always been clear to me about them, it is that they always allowed me to tell my own story. So my vision statement for Star Trek: Infinite is very simple: "This game allows the player to live their own Star Trek story" in the iconic timeline.

What is not simple is to execute it. Difficult decisions needed to be made. The first three of these being, When, Who and Where?

When?
Of these three questions, the real difficulty was to answer When?. In reality, we considered all options, but the final choice was between two, the Archer Era or the Picard Era. Archer had many reasons to be the winner, but our statement was clear: we wanted the player to live their own Star Trek story. We felt that if we focused on this era, the player was only going to be able to live their story as the Federation, and Star Trek is so much more than the Federation. The Next Generation era brings a lot of other challenges, but the political map it presented was the perfect canvas for the player to experience different civilizations’ points of view and develop their own story.

The choice was clear.

Who?
Not every species in the Alpha and Beta quadrants are equal or have the same capabilities. When it comes to choosing the other paths that the player can develop, in addition tothe Federation, we looked for other Powers that have similar importance and means for fun competition. At this time, three new players joined the mix, The Klingon Empire, The Romulan Star Empire, and The Cardassian Union.

Now, does that mean that we leave all the other species in the quadrant out? No, many other species join our game in the form of Support Powers—species that have a certain degree of power, but concentrate on providing services to our Major Powers, such as the Ferengi.

In addition, we will meet other species with FTL capabilities, but are not so developed. These species are called Minor Powers and will serve as opportunities for expansion and conflict for the Major Powers. Among them you can find Bolians, Talarians, Boslic, and many others.


Where?
The Star Trek Milky Way is a vast space, mostly unexplored but with a rich lore. If we wanted to do it justice we had to focus on a smaller area and fill this with as much Star Trek as possible. That's why we chose to have our game concentrate on the Alpha and Beta quadrants.

Wait a minute! Exploration is iconic! If we present a galaxy that the player already knows, how much can they explore? Finding a way to balance the known with the unknown was one of our first technical challenges.

Seeing a familiar star system like Vulcan (also known as 40 Eridani) placed randomly in the map would feel jarring since we know its a close neighbor to the Sol system; a similar issue would arise with the relative positions of the four Major Powers, so we created a bespoke representation of the core neighborhood of the Federation where the series take place most of the time, and left the rest to be procedurally generated so players can’t anticipate what they will find when exploring the farther reaches of the quadrants.

But those 3 questions were just the beginning, and many decisions followed. Warp being the one that changed everything.

Warp Travel
One of the challenges of space strategy games is geography, how to give shape to the vast emptiness of space and how that shape affects its travelers. A very common and effective approach used by many modern games of the genre is the starlane graph we all know from Stellaris, and while this system can be controversial at times, in Star Trek it's simply a non-starter. You must be able to boldly go, in a straight line at warp 9, but then what stops you from reaching the extremes of the galaxy from the get go?

Well, speed is one, but Voyager was actually an inspiration for the solution! The difficulties of finding fuel, supplies and repair opportunities while deep in alien space far from home present a great challenge.

Warp range was the inevitable approach, provided by your space stations, forcing you to plan your infrastructure to enable your fleets to deploy and move about. Another factor in geography are political boundaries: you can’t just cross someone else’s space without permission (well, spies can…), even in a straight line towards a star outside of their domain. This of course changes war considerably, mostly doing away with choke points.

You can no longer amass a 200-ship fleet in the doorway to your empire, confident that the enemy cannot get through. Since they can simply go past you, strongholds and a more evenly spread deployment of your fleets become paramount (pun intended), reinforcing that space geography. There is a lot more to war, thanks to our warp approach, but that is a story for another log.

Balance of Power
Another thing that comes with the territory of the Picard era is the political stage of the Alpha and Beta quadrants. Unlike many strategy games, in the Star Trek universe constant, all-out war is something even sworn enemies strive to avoid! There are reasons to seek peace, to quell the tensions between the Powers, and in part this tension is kept by a constant balance with no single Major Power ever gaining a definitive advantage over the others.

To reflect this in Star Trek: Infinite, we added two systems that interact with each other to push the galaxy into this back and forth in a way that seems organic and justified. The first is the balance of power, where you can clearly see the relative power of all four major players, and make decisions of who to befriend and who to ostracize, because the A.I. surely will…

The other system is galactic tension, because war does not affect only those involved in it! War pushes all factions into uncertainty and instability which, in turn, puts them under threat too! The longer the duration of a war, the more extreme measures will be considered, and the less you can trust that the crosshairs won’t fall on you next. Any action of aggression and violence increases this tension, and any move for collaboration and conciliation reduces it. If you let it go too far, society itself may crumble!

But if an all-out war is something we want to avoid, how can we expand without going to war? One answer we came up with is our new Principles mechanic.


Principles
Instead of having ethics, each “pop” (meaning population, the citizenry on your planets) may feel more attracted to the principles that represent each of the Major Powers. Among other gameplay elements, spies and governors become extraordinarily important in influencing how affiliated they are with these principles. Now why would I want a pop to seek to follow the principle of my power? A pop that follows a different principle than the power they belong to has a chance of defecting to his new affiliation!

I wanted to be brief and, much like sitting down to watch “just one episode of TNG,” time flew by and we ended up going through a lot. I would like to tell you much, much more but I think that is quite a lot for this week already! I hope we can meet again soon!

End log,

Ezequiel Maldonado
Game Director

Developer Log - Stardate: 23743.9


The Artistic Vision

In today's Dev log, I will discuss the artistic vision and the decisions made to respectfully expand the franchise, and showcase the extensive content that made this game possible.

To grasp the intricacies of our artistic decisions, it is essential to recognize that this game offers four distinct gameplay perspectives. Crafting a tailored user experience for each of these major powers stood as a paramount factor in shaping the development of each asset. This challenge presented an incredible opportunity.



The artistic vision of Star Trek: Infinite focuses on five core pillars that make up the visual proposal of the game.

The first of these pillars is Consistency. We wanted the Star Trek IP to be presented in a respectful, consistent, and synergistic way, to better help us visualize the wondrous universe of grand strategy games. These three key elements will help us analyze the treatment to give to each of the artistic elements integrated into the game. Each of the assets must fulfill these three purposes, without exception.



This brings us to the second pillar, Classic Trek. The goal is to fulfill trekkie expectations so that they are comfortable with, and can identify with, the use of the classic IP vision for the game. Establishing this rule greatly simplified our decision-making when choosing the characters, the places they occupy within the canon (both for the actors and the audience), the models of the ships, and above all, faithfully representing the source material, as the franchise was built over many decades.



In order to apply all of this correctly, another pillar, Stylization, is defined. In the spaceship stylization for this type of strategy game, legibility will always be prioritized, and will respect the IP boundaries. One of the biggest challenges in the styling proposal came with the 3D models of the ships and structures. Although I was aware that the ship designs had to be adapted to be able to be used in the game engine, the methodology that was used when reducing information was to reverse-engineer the key elements of each design, extract them, and preserve their essence in the redesign.








For the design of the new models, this same criterion was used. A deep research and analysis was done on the structure of the original models, in order to interpret and replicate the decision-making in the designs that made this franchise great.
Regarding the multiple aspects of gameplay, each piece of art corresponds to a different perspective of the game, while some have shared use across all four. This encompasses 3D models, event illustrations, loading screens, iconography, mini illustrations, portraits, VFX, and more





Taking into account that style makes functionality, we find the next pillar, Gameplay First. The UI must always inform gameplay first, in each of its decisions. The user experience posed a great challenge to us, since we had to define an artistic proposal for the user interface, sufficiently clear and defined, that could coexist with realistic graphics support, with a 90's photographic style.



The influence of the original interface used in TNG, combined with some of the most current graphical resources of the franchise, made it possible to achieve a clean and flat style topped with gloss resources that make a high-end interface emphasizing functionality. Both for the iconography and the mini illustrations, functionality is always prioritized. The same applies for the VFX and animations.
In terms of diversity, this was one of the most crucial aspects to consider when creating content, as the franchise has prioritized it since its inception. To achieve this, we collaborated closely with Paramount to carefully curate and define both the event content and the character portraits.



Finally, we find the last pillar, Faithfully Representative. The informative and functional content of this kind of strategy game will be enhanced by the Star Trek IP and its components. The visual content of the original TNG series will be used as faithfully as possible in each artistic decision.

End Log,

Maximiliano Dajtscher
Art Director for Star Trek: Infinite

The canon

Star Trek and the particular era we chose to base ourselves in is brimming with rich material, many stories already told, small and large, it has been studied, memorized, dissected and analyzed by one of the most intensively passionate audiences in pop culture, and Star Trek now encompasses multiple generations of audiences.

We've all (the fandom at large) discussed what is canon, where canon contradicts itself, what is not up to the quality of the canon, and similar topics, we've reinterpreted rationalized and theorized how to make it all make sense and be as coherent as a work of so many different authors can be.
This sets up a challenge with high expectations on us and also everyone will want to see that episode they love be somehow represented in our game.

The canon gives us a great starting point, the known characters and political stage and their relationships, something that adds meaning to the events that will unfold from the point the player takes charge, but from then on, the story must be told by the players.



The Themes

Some stories we referenced explicitly, repeating specific events seen in the shows, others are more like Easter egg subtle references, where people will be trying to remember what episode was that from, but we couldn't just lift episode by episode all the happenings of the quadrants.

We needed to tell our own stories while making sure they fit the universe and feel authentic.
To achieve this, it was important to understand what Star Trek is about. You might think that having so many different shows, movies, authors and fans this would vary wildly and make it hard to pinpoint, even when focusing just on the 1990’s shows, but it’s not.

Star Trek is about exploring all aspects of the human condition and learning to understand and live with one another no matter how different we are or if we used to be enemies. It’s all about empathy, both when it succeeds and when it fails.
Another key aspect of Trek is always looking at how things can improve, even when telling its darkest stories. The world and our lives can be made better through empathy, we can get there, so it’s also fundamentally about hope.



Your Story

There are many ways to tell a story in a strategy game. The most obvious of them are the narrative events, but it goes beyond just a text in a popup. Because we know who the four powers are, the event may mean something different for each of them, and when you make a choice (if you don't look only at the mechanic rewards), you are telling a story about who the power you are playing really is.
This philosophy was extended to all possible interactions between story and player action. When we set out to design the four playable factions, we didn't start by "what would be fun? what would be powerful?", we started with "who are these people? what do they believe in?" and their mechanics and traits flowed from there almost naturally.

For the Mission trees we asked ourselves “what are the significant history pivotal points?”? And what happened in-between? How can we fill the story gaps with beats fitting who they are and what player actions would tell those stories? It’s not enough to have the right text in the mission node; the player must live that story.



Additionally, it won’t be your story if you can’t make a few choices and possibly change the very identity of the character you are playing. We went back to the canon and looked into what-if possibilities, the alternate paths that were always there in the stories told by the franchise. What if the Federation failed to uphold its own values? What if the House of Duras took over the Klingon Empire? How would that affect the lore we know of this universe?

This is how the story becomes yours. While some things are destined to happen, like invasions from the other side of the galaxy, your choices about who you are, the actions you take and what that means within this world will tell more stories than we can write.

I hope you tell good ones, and I look forward to you sharing them with the community.

Andres Chamarra,
Technical Director and honorary Loremaster.