Starship Simulator Dev Talks Favorite Sci-Fi Designs, FTL Science, and More

The immense popularity and immense expectations surrounding games like Starfield show a hunger for space sandbox games. As it winds down a successful Kickstarter campaign, the newest contender in that genre Starship Simulator seems poised to capture players’ love of the stars next. Fleetyard Studios, the developer behind Starship Simulator, is aware of those high expectations and knows space sandboxes have a propensity to let feature creep distract from the goals of developers. Famously, No Man’s Sky’s launch failed to match its expectations, but its laudable redemption arc also shows the love poured into it.

Fleetyard doesn’t deal in comparisons but knows that it’s a trend in the genre the studio has to confront head-on. To do so, it intends to use a model of transparent development and being accountable to fans and supporters, as well as having a solid groundwork that can be seen in its publicly available demo already. Game Rant spoke to Fleetyard Studios’ Director Dan Govier in the final week of Starship Simulator’s Kickstarter campaign about those expectations, as well as what makes starships so special and where the game fits in the broader landscape of science fiction. The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Designing the Starship Simulator Fleet

Q: Can you introduce yourself?

Govier: Sure. My name is Dan Govier. I’m the developer behind Starship Simulator, a project I’ve been working on for the past three years, where you can live aboard a deep space exploration vessel while exploring the Milky Way galaxy.

Q: What inspired Starship Simulator?

Govier: I think it goes back to my childhood. I’ve always been fascinated with architecture, engineering, and sci-fi. I grew up watching all different types of sci-fi from Babylon 5 to Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica. One of the things that I focused on the most was the actual starships themselves. I love starships, the designs of them, and thinking about how they might work. That’s led me to this point where it became a thought experiment on how we would build a starship if we were building one for real. How would that work? How would it be organized? And that’s really what the project is all about. It’s about working with that thought experiment.

Q: Tell us about some of the ship designs and what inspired them?

Govier: Yes, we’re starting with the Magellan class. That one is designed in the game’s universe as an experimental vessel. It’s the first vessel that is properly FTL capable, at least to the point of being fast enough to be worthy of exploring the galaxy. Throughout the design process, it’s been a case of answering questions like: what facilities will the ship need? What rooms do we need? Where do the bathrooms need to go? How many crew quarters do we need and then what facilities do the crew need to be able to live aboard a vessel for a long period in space?

It’s 50% that sort of architectural work and thinking about how humans live aboard a vessel, and then another 50% on the actual design and construction of that vessel. For that, I’ve been researching how we build real-world mega-vessels, things like aircraft carriers and cruise liners. How are they constructed? How are they designed, how are they put together? And then combining all of that with modern manufacturing techniques and how we might be doing that in 200 years? That all came together to create this Magellan class vessel.

Q: We’ve seen screenshots of the Magellan, but what are the vibes when you’re on board the other ships?

Govier: The next major class, the Pathfinder, is like we built a building. That’s going to say it’s going to look and feel very much like the Magellan in the sense that it’s going to be like a corporate office in space. It’ll have those luxury interiors, carpeting and such.

The carrier-class vessel–which at the moment we’re probably going to call the Agamemnon class–is going to have a much more militaristic feel. It’s not going to have carpets, it’s going to have practical interiors that are easy to maintain and aren’t robust. It’s going to be a lot grungier with a lot more metal.

When we build the multitude of trading vessels we’ll have for the third campaign, all of those are going to have a very different feel depending on which manufacturer made them. They’ll be anywhere in the spectrum from really old and grungy all the way up to sleek and pristine.

Then throughout, while we’re building those three campaigns, we’ll also be releasing much, much smaller, intimate ships based around maybe a five-man crew. Those ones, again, are going to have a very different look and feel depending on the manufacturer. You want to give players a lot of different scopes as to the look and feel that they are most attuned to.

Q: What starship designs from science fiction media have been particularly influential in setting your style?

Govier: I think the obvious one would be Star Trek. Obviously, in terms of the wealth of resources out there related to ship designs. Whatever you think of, there would have been a Star Trek ship made that looks like that, either officially or in fan art. But that aside, one of my favorite ships of all time is actually the Destiny from Stargate Universe. I love that ship, and I’d love to build one with more of that aesthetic at some point.

Actually, our ship interiors are designed around architects that I like, so there’s an architectural style by an architect called Zaha Hadid. I also took influence from the movie Passengers. We went with that same architectural style, kind of that retro-futurism style. I have a love of that style, just from an architectural perspective, so that’s what our ship interiors on the Magellan class are based on, as opposed to sci-fi on TV.

I absolutely love the Destiny and, in a broader sense, Ancient architecture from Stargate in general. Just gorgeous.

Govier: Yeah, I think if I had to pick my favorite starship of all time, it would be the Destiny from Stargate Universe. I think it’s a beautiful ship.

The Realism of Space Exploration

Q: How realistic do you think that 200-year timetable is for being able to go to the stars?

Govier: I think we’ve certainly taken sci-fi license with a few things–things like artificial gravity and the FTL itself, but most of the ship is actually fairly low-tech. You’ve got touchscreens, which we have today. It is just normal LED lighting circuits, which we have today. Fusion reactors, which we practically have today, are not particularly energy-positive, but the tech is there. Other than the FTL and the artificial gravity, practically everything else we have already now.

I think, in 200 years’ time, if we can answer the energy equations for things like FTL, then it could very well be possible. I don’t think artificial gravity is practically going to be possible anytime soon, though, so I think we’re on the way there, give or take a few necessary steps.

Q: As a fellow science fiction nerd, I have to ask, what is the technobabble around how your FTL works?

Govier: We based it very closely on Dr. Miguel Alcubierre’s famous paper about FTL design that has some commonality with Star Trek’s warp drive, and more recently than that, the Dr. Erik Lentz version which removed the need for negative mass. That was one of the sticking points without Alcubierre’s work is that you needed negative mass for the math to work. Lentz solved that with his equations.

I won’t pretend to know exactly how and why that works, because that’s a level of math far beyond what I understand, but I know in principle you don’t need negative mass, you just need enough energy. That’s kind of where we based it. That’s why the new updated design for the Magellan has a ring around it, so yes, it’s very much based on Alcubierre and how Lentz modernized our Alcubierre drive.

Q: That’s a good segue into: how much research did you do into space science?

Govier: Quite a lot. Not just space itself, but also things like electrical engineering. Every aspect of the ship obviously has a subject matter associated with it, be it the electrical system or the astrophysics of the galaxy. All of it has required a lot of reading, a lot of research, going through science papers, and trying to understand if the thing we’re building is in line with at least theoretical physics, if not actual physics. There was a lot of reading over a long period of time.

Q: How did you balance all of that research and realism with gameplay considerations?

Govier: It’s about 50/50, I would say. In some areas, we have to put gameplay first, because at the end of the day, it is a game and it does need to be entertaining. On the other hand, we do also want physics and realism to be one of the main things we’re focusing on. It’s really a constant balancing act between how accurate we can make it and how physically accurate it can be right up to the point where it is beginning to become boring. So through playtesting, we’re constantly, constantly balancing how real we can make it before it gets dull, and then dialing it back a bit from there.

Q: What kind of ship maintenance tasks will players be confronted with?

Govier: From an engineering perspective, everything will wear out. Everything takes wear and tear, and everything could take physical damage from weapons fire or accidents. But beyond that, you also have things like more general day-to-day maintenance, like cleaning. We’re going to have a janitorial role and, over time, things like the carpets on the wall panels will start to grunge up. Your job will be to go around cleaning them. Obviously, that’s entirely the player’s choice as to what role they choose to play on the ship. We’re trying to simulate what it would be like as realistically as possible, and general routine maintenance is part of life and space.

Q: What were the maintenance tasks that were most interesting to design?

Govier: I think it was more the way it all fits together–the bigger picture. When designing the fusion reactor, and then working backward from the reaction itself, to what fuel does it need, what coolant does it need? And then thinking about how that is stored? How do we get that into the reactor? How are those things powered? And you’ve got a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario where you need power to feed the reactor, but then you need the reactor to provide the power. The whole thing is a complex puzzle. There’s been numerous iterations on the design, taking things into account like redundancies, and if this thing blows up, how can we make sure the ship still works? What backups are in place? It’s that it’s the bigger picture and how everything connects.

Q: Will these maintenance tasks be a lot for solo players to keep up with?

Govier: With the role-based system, the way we have designed it, you don’t need to worry about anything outside your chosen role. If you just want to command the ship, then there’s an NPC crew that takes care of literally everything else. You’re just making decisions, telling people where to go and what to do. You don’t need to get personally involved in the routine maintenance of things. Similarly, if you’re playing as an engineer, then that’s what you have to worry about is the engineering tasks. You don’t need to worry about what the medical team is doing or what the janitorial team is doing. It’s all very focused on what you’ve chosen to do personally.

Q: What are the teams?

Govier: Off the top of my head, we’ve got the command staff, the engineering team, tactical, the deck crew which deals with both piloting the ship and moving cargo around, and then we’ve got the chef, janitor, science roles. I think that’s actually all eight distinct roles that you can choose from. Some of those have both a command version and a general worker version. The only difference between the two is that the command version will be able to assign tasks, whereas the worker version just performs tasks.

Q: As a player, what role do you like taking in the crew?

Govier: I think chief engineer. Of all the things that I’ve experimented with from a design perspective and played around with, the one that I found most rewarding was running around tinkering with systems and making sure that everything stays online. It’s nice if you join a multiplayer game and someone’s pressed all the buttons and nothing’s working, that reactor is offline, it’s nice to be able to sort of step in, as someone who knows how to bring everything back online, and then save the day by getting the ship up and running again. I think I find that the most rewarding.

Making Starship Simulator’s Galaxy

Q: What are character customization options like, and can I customize my crew?

Govier: Right now, we do have basic character customization in the game, where you can select things like body shape, hair color, skin color, and hairstyle. You can also swap out a few clothing pieces. One of the first new people we’ll be bringing on board is a character specialist, so we expect that system to be expanded greatly.

When starting a new game, you’ll be presented with a full crew roster, and from there you will be able to name and customize any of the individual NPC crew members. The level of customization there should be no different to your own character.

Q: How do you keep a procedurally generated galaxy interesting?

Govier: That’s perhaps one of the most common questions we get actually.

Obviously, there are a lot of examples out there from the likes of No Man’s Sky to Elite Dangerous. In games where procedural generation is the main tool for designing the play space, it’s very easy for that to become repetitive quite quickly. We’re focusing on procedural asset generation to make the assets themselves as visually unique as possible, but again, you still need that deep asset pool. Over time, when we expand the team and bring more people on board, we want a team of developers focusing 100% on deepening those asset pools. We’ve always got something new and unique to pull from when designing procedural systems.

Q: Tell us about the aliens in Starship Simulator?

Govier: The aliens themselves will be coming in two forms. There’s going to be the manually created Story Mode aliens that will be in our campaign. They’ll be handcrafted with deep backstories and an expansive presence in space. Alongside that, we will also have lots of procedural aliens, and the procedural aliens will be the ones that populate the whole rest of the galaxy. Like with, say, planetary services or planets themselves will have a very deep asset pool and a deep data pool to pull from when creating those procedural races. Each one you meet should feel and look different from the last.

Q: You mentioned the campaign. Could you tell us anything about what that would be?

Govier: We have a three-part story planned. The first part is going to be very much focused on exploring the galaxy and seeing what’s out there. Where the Magellan class is the testbed that humanity has sent out to test the technology of space exploration, the first campaign is going to be called the Pathfinder class. That’s the actual first mission of humanity going out there and exploring the stars. While doing that, you will meet the hero races in the galaxy and also the big bad in the galaxy as well.

The second campaign is about that big bad in the galaxy finding where humans come from, then the Sol system is at war with that race. The second campaign, the Agamemnon class, is very much a military-based campaign set aboard a carrier-class military vessel. And then the third expansion is about rebuilding from that conflict and expanding out. It’s about expanding humanity’s presence in the stars, and that was going to focus on trading and building up those human colonies.

Q: And this is dependent on hitting the stretch goal, or is this separate from that?

Govier: Rhese are things we have planned anyway. Whether or not we hit that stretch goal, the idea with the stretch goal was we’d build the first campaign in parallel to the Early Access sandbox release. But it doesn’t look like, with only a few days to go, we’ll be hitting that one, so that will happen after Early Access. With Early Access, we plan to have some ships for sale as DLC content, and we’ll be using that to pay for the development of the actual campaign itself.

Kickstarter Success and Star Citizen Comparisons

Q: How are you avoiding pitfalls of similar games that, as Fleetyard put it, “overpromise and underdeliver?”

Govier: Generally speaking, we’re doing this in open development, so the community can see exactly what we’re doing when we’re doing it. We have quite a well-established roadmap and design of what it is we want to achieve, so we’re trying to keep things like feature creep at a minimum. By approaching this in a very methodical, step-by-step manner, we can get towards that end goal without any other features creeping in and waylaying our development tasks.

Q: How else do you differentiate yourself from Star Citizen?

Govier: Star Citizen is a very different game to what it is we’re making. Obviously, Star Citizen is an MMO, it’s a live service game, and we’re not, so from that very basis, we’re completely separate. We’re just completely separate products.

Star Citizen is also more about focusing on you as an individual and your journey in their universe, building up your own personal wealth, buying new ships, bigger and better every time. It’s very combat-heavy, which is something we won’t be. By contrast, we’re more about being a part of a crew living and working in space. We focus on the exploration side of it, exploring the galaxy and seeing what’s out there, with combat and conflict being generally a consequence of failed diplomacy, rather than the main gameplay loop. So they’re very different products with a very different focus.

Q: Basically being classic Star Trek, but in your own way.

Govier: Yeah, yeah, I think you could probably describe what we’re doing as Star Trek, but realistic. How would we really do it? If we wanted that Star Trek-style future for humanity, as it stands, how would we do that? I think, in some ways, many aspects of Star Trek aren’t realistic, and they’re perhaps a little too clean and not very human. We’re looking at this from the perspective of being human. How would humans actually do this? And I think again, it’s a really fascinating thought experiment.

Q: Given things like a successful Kickstarter, an ambitious space game, and ships as DLC, you can see where the Star Citizen comparisons come from. How do you feel about those comparisons when they’re made?

Govier: I don’t think we’re concerned about comparisons. I mentioned to someone recently that being compared to Star Citizen, when we have a tiny team and a very, very small budget, versus multiple studios with over half a billion dollars in funding, I think we take that as a compliment really, to be compared at that scale.

We don’t mind charging for ships as DLCs, for example, because we’re giving the base game away for free. As I stated before to other people: for me, it’s an either-or. Either you charge for the base game, or you charge for the ships. You don’t do both. So we’re choosing to give the base game away for free, and then charge for additional ships, because we want to remove all barriers to entry.

Q: What’s the feeling around Fleetyard about your Kickstarter success?

Govier: I’d say it’s definitely a lot more successful than we were expecting. When the campaign first launched, we really thought we’d probably scrap through with the baseline funding target. I guess I secretly hoped we’d make it as far as VR, but to blast through the VR stretch goal and go all the way to planetary landings? Yeah, I never expected that at all. So definitely pleasantly surprised, and definitely very excited about what we can do with this now.

Q: Are there any other stretch goals that you would really like to hit?

Govier: Yeah, I was hoping we’d hit £500,000 because that would give us enough to be able to take on some permanent developers to really flesh out the galaxy. We’d be able to have a team work, essentially, 100% only on fleshing out the galaxy with content.

With £300,000, or however high it is going to go–I think we’re projecting maybe about £350,000? Yes, it’s a lot of money at a basic level. But when you start thinking about the cost of developers and being able to give someone a secure career as a developer, it’s not enough for that, for that level of studio development. At the funding level that we’re at, we’re still at a point where we can take on contractors, but we can’t really take anyone on properly full-time and give them a stable, secure career as a developer in the industry.

I think we would have loved to have made that £500,000 so that we can establish ourselves as a studio and as an employer of developers.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Govier: I think the one thing I’d like to say is that we’re hoping that the game becomes an educational experience as much as an engaging gameplay experience. Something I found is that through designing the game, I’m learning astrophysics just by having to build the galaxy.

At the same time, all of the instrumentation and all the readouts on the ship are obviously astrophysically correct, the numbers it shows you are correct. By simply playing the game, you are learning astrophysics–you start to learn what the different regions of the galaxy look like, what they represent, and how they work. You learn things like O-class stars exist in open clusters because that’s what’s making new stars. For someone who’s coming into it maybe as a space enthusiast, but not as someone who knows those things yet, you can literally learn actual astrophysics just by playing the game.

One of my dreams is to have an astronomer with a class of students all together on the ship, learning astronomy by actually flying around the solar system and looking at all the different planets. I think that would be really cool. I’d love to see the game used as an educational tool.

I think one of the things that as a studio we want to give people is that love of space exploration, and really inspire that in people. I think so many games these days just focus on blowing stuff up. We want to be different. We want to focus on that science and that exploration and progressing humanity in that way.

[END]

Starship Simulator will enter Early Access on Steam in late 2024/early 2025.