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@raphkoster
Recommended posts, 2017-2025
It’s been over five years since the last time I gathered up recommended posts in one place and added them to the menu above. I figured I was due. As usual this will include talks and interviews as well as articles. Just think of it as “my take on what the best stuff to look at on the site is.” Previous collections of recommended posts can be found under the Blog heading on the menu bar or at…
I never posted widely about the public health simulator design I wrote as Covid was shutting down the world. Until now.
Game design is simple, actually. Except when it isn't. Here are the 12 things you need to know.
We've been working on overhauling the visuals in STARS REACH for a while. Here's a look at what's coming up!
I've been bad about blogging when stuff got added to my site. So here's a catalog of the last couple of years including a bunch of podcasts and talks!
Site updates
It’s been quite a while since the site was refreshed. I was forced into it by a PHP upgrade that rendered the old customizable theme I was using obsolete. We’re now running a new theme that has been styled to match the old one pretty closely, but I did go ahead and do some streamlining: way less plugins (especially ancient ones), simpler layout in several places, much better handling of…
Stars Reach doesn't look like you remember
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One week of Stars Reach Kickstarter
Wow, it has been an intense six days. We launched on Tuesday, which feels like an eternity ago. It’s a mad scramble to get everything done, make sure you have all the content ready, to answer the huge inflow of questions, find all the spots where you weren’t quite clear enough… but you just survive on little sleep and keep pushing. And sometimes you get a good result! Last night we hit the…
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STARS REACH Kickstarter funded in 1 hour
I can’t tell you how much of a rollercoaster yesterday was. We hoped to see a strong Kickstarter but reaching our goal is less than one hour is just amazing, and a real expression of support from the community. Thank you all so much. (You can check out the Kickstarter here!) We’re not stopping here. As I write this, we are on track to double our initial goal today! We hit our first stretch goal,…
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STARS REACH Kickstarter is live now
Today we are launching the Kickstarter for Stars Reach. I've been dreaming of making this game for thirty years. Please consider backing it. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starsreach/stars-reach
Today we are launching the Kickstarter for Stars Reach. Why a Kickstarter? Well, the funding climate is rough. But we have seen that players love what we are making. So we want to prove to the industry that people want a modern sandbox. An alternate world that feels alive, not like a static cardboard set. A game where different sorts of playstyles come together to make an immersive and dynamic…
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Flooding Gaiamar
A true story of what happened in the pre-alpha testing last night in Stars Reach. It began as an upwelling under a basement. Oh, ever since the crater lake next door had overheated and spewed a geyser far into the sky, water was everywhere… condensing on every surface. But this was something more. It bubbled up from under Leric’s house, right there by the fountain in the middle of the…
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Old movement stuff for STARS REACH
We have a new post up on the Stars Reach website about movement and camera... and as usual, here's a "director's commentary" post to go with it!
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The neverending griefing discussion
I’ve been doing MMOs and online worlds a long time. And that means that I’ve written and said a lot of things on the Internet over the years, about designing them. One of the funny things about reactions to the various vision blogs for Stars Reach is the number of people who have popped up on various MMO forums whose entire impression of me and my design approaches is formed by their experience…
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Using a vision exercise to define what Stars Reach is about
Long-time blog readers may recall that I have posted about my standard “vision exercise” before. It’s a simple four question exercise you can use to think through what your game is about: What is the game system about? What is the game’s experience about? What is the player’s goal (in the system)? What is the player’s goal (in the experience)? The point of this little exercise is to clarify…
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SR Pillars three: the vibe!
The third post in the series on the game pillars for Stars Reach is up. This one is all about the vibe of the world, and the thematic goals for the game… and how those things then reflect into the game mechanics. Stars Reach is a game about hope and optimism. The real world is grimdark enough. We want to capture that sense of possibility that was present in Golden Age sci-fi, that sensawunda…
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SR Pillars Part 2: Easy Surface, Much Depth
Yup, another week so I wrote another long post about the design pillars we are using for designing Stars Reach. (If you missed last week’s, it’s here, and I expanded on it on the blog here.) This week, it’s all about the second set: The Ease of Nintendo Meets the Depth of the Sandbox MMO The game will be deep: a set of proven game mechanics brought together in one universe. Controls and…
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Wishlist STARS REACH and its living world
Over the years, I’ve tried many ways of making living worlds. This video here explains how we are doing it on Stars Reach. Which you can now wishlist on Steam. The Living World of Stars Reach As you can see if you watch the video, we’re already pulling off something a bit unusual: modelling a world at MMO scale using cellular automata. What that means: we know the humidity, the temperature, the…