Elite: Dangerous

Take control of your own starship in a cut-throat galaxy.

400 Billion Star Systems. Infinite Freedom. Blaze Your Own Trail

Start with a small starship and a few credits, and do whatever it takes to get the skill, knowledge, wealth and power to stand among the ranks of the Elite.

In the year 3300, across the vast expanse of an epic, full-scale recreation of our Milky Way, interstellar rivalries flare as galactic superpowers fight proxy wars.

Some may know you as an ally; others will call you a pirate, a bounty hunter, a smuggler, an explorer, an assassin, a hero... Fly alone or with friends, fight for a cause or go it alone; your actions change the galaxy around you in an ever unfolding story.

The Official Launch Trailer for Elite: Dangerous

Elite: Dangerous is a grand scale, AAA space exploration and combat game and the third sequel to 1984's classic game Elite.  We created a 1:1 scale replica of the milky way galaxy, using real world star library data to plot the positions, sizes and types of known stars and planets, and procedural generation to generate the remaining stars based on current scientific theories on the galaxy.  By the end of this process we had a gameplay space with 400 billion stars to visit, including several thousand colonised systems in human space!

Working on Elite: Dangerous, I designed the gameplay around exploring the galaxy, as well as designing the core weapons in the game, the background simulation and working to balance trading and rare goods.  I also helped implement the mission system and made contributions to many aspects of the flight model, including designing the supercruise flight mode, and provided designs for numerous other game systems.

As a game that does not feature a traditional narrative, and is very light on tutorials, one of our key concerns as a design team was identifying the potential careers and entertainments that players would pursue in the galaxy, and ensure that there were numerous hooks to guide players into them, as well as both skill and financial progression paths within each career.  

As an example of this, in exploration players will passively discover the main star on arriving in an unexplored system and will have a new target added to their radar listed as "Unexplored", which can then be targeted and scanned to 'Explore it'.  This is designed to draw the player into the process of discovering and scanning new stellar bodies.  Players could also purchase 'Discovery Scanners' that allowed them to detect nearby stellar bodies, although the upgrades for these cost an ever increasing number of 'credits' (the currency of Elite), creating a financial progression through the career.  

Once players have gathered exploration data on a star system they can sell that data to interested factions,  Data on different planet types is worth different amounts, with Earth like worlds worth the most and rocky or ice worlds worth the least.  Larger worlds also naturally carried more value than smaller.  As player's explored and traded they would begin to notice which of the planet types held the most value and seek these out specifically, as well as searching for larger, more valuable planets.  Some advanced players also discovered methods of locating secondary stars in a system (stars that are a long distance from the primary star that the player arrives from hyperspace at), without needing to rely on the expensive or bulky equipment that an unskilled player would require.  I'm very pleased with the skill based progression curve that we created around exploration.

A video demonstrating advanced exploration scanning techniques

One of my other main focuses when working on Elite was ensuring that the systems I designed coordinated and meshed well with others systems in the game.  For example, the player has three main forms of travel in Elite Dangerous:

• Normal Speeds
• Used for combat, Docking, low speed manouvers
• Top speeds approx 500m/s
• Supercruise Speeds
• Used for travelling between planets within a system
• Top speeds of approx 2000 C (2000 x the speed of light)
• Even at this speed it would take 4.2 hours to reach Proxima Centauri from earth
• Hyperspace
• Used to instantly jump to stars within range of the player's hyperdrive (usually several Lightyears)

One of the issues I identified when designing the Supercruise flight system was that, due to the procedural nature of our game world, it was very possible to end up in systems where stars and planets were very far apart from each other.  This could leave the player with periods of travel where they didn't have much to do but simply head towards their destination.

One simple fix was to ensure that in many locations where the player may have to make a long journey (for example, to a distant space station), was to ensure that many of the furthest flung stations had unique trade goods or items that could only be purchased there.  This blank space reward provided the player with some reward for taking the long journey, and mitigated some of the time of travel.

Another part of our solution to this was to ensure that players could perform exploration scans while at supercruise speeds, and from appropriate distances based of the planet's generated size.  When travelling, players could gather valuable data on the system, earning credits and potentially discovering locations that could hook and introduce them to yet more career types. 

One of the challenges working on Elite: Dangerous was creating gameplay that could work universally, but still deliver experiences that reflect the location the player is in.  Working on the background simulation, I tried to ensure that the system's type and statistics could change and flex based on player actions, and that specific thematic events could be unique to certain system types.

A funeral procession.  These can only spawn in Theocratic governed systems.  In Theocratic systems with a low security statistic, Criminal Funeral Processions can spawn, giving the player the opportunity to pay their respects, or attack to gather bounties.

One of the interesting and unexpected challenges that came up while working on Elite was the community interaction that we had the opportunity to offer.  As the game was funded through kickstarter, there were a number of pledge levels that offered access to the Design Decision Forum.  The intention of this forum was to give a place for these backers to review proposals from the design team, suggest improvements, and generally give feedback.

As a Designer it was a really interesting challenge to really test my documentation skills when presenting to the public.  Although those reading the proposals were enthusiasts for the game, few had experience of the games industry or design processes.  It was very rewarding and helpful for me to learn how to present my documentation in a way that could (and had to!!) be understood even by someone completely inexperienced.  Many of the topics posted included some very complex game mechanics, and expressing those in a way that could be understood was very rewarding.  Watching as the community around the forum learned and began to understand our design philosophies from exposure to the design team was fascinating as well, as was seeing how it changed their interactions with the normal public forums.  It was definitely an interesting experience and one that I believe made the game better.  A link to the public archive of those discussions is as follows:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=36

When working on elite, I took efforts to ensure that a lot of my designs were modular, in order to be flexible with the ever changing resources and deadlines.  I believe this allowed us to release a product that gives a great experience of exploring the galaxy, that has a great deal of good future content already in the works.  I look forward to seeing where the game goes in the coming years.