Elite Dangerous - Beyond - Noteable Stellar Phoenomena

Elite Dangerous - Beyond

As part of the Beyond series of updates, I returned to Elite Dangerous.  Part of my work on this update was to seed the galaxy with discoverable, non-sapientalien life forms for players to search for and learn about. 

Exploration content is something in Elite that I am really passionate about, and it was really fun to create something for our explorers that was so evocative and mysterious.  Elite Dangerous often throws up galaxy sized design problems to solve, and in this post I'm going to discuss a few interesting elements that came up when developing this content.

What is Elite Dangerous?

 

 

A quick refresher on Elite Dangerous: Elite Dangerous is set in a procedurally generated simulation of the Milky Way galaxy, in the 34th century.  Players are charged with blazing their own trail across this galaxy, and can participate in a variety of activities to earn credits, rank and reputation.

The Codex

The Codex menu

 

In order to help players track their accomplishments, as part of the beyond series of update we added the codex to the game.  The codex has several functions, allowing players to review information about their commander (character), view shared galactic discoveries, and learn about the game's setting a lore.

 

Discoveries begin in the codex as "rumours".  A rumoured item has a few breadcrumb trail clues to help our players narrow down where to search for something.  Once a Player discovers an item it becomes "Reported" for all other players, adding additional information on the location of the discovery for other commanders to follow and then confirm the discovery for themselves.  

 

The Codex tracks discoveries about star types, planets, and lifeforms, and would go on to later include details on planet atmospheres and surface biologicals too.  It functions like a galaxy sized pokedex, creating structure for for the games explorer community, and encouraging them to "catch 'em all".

Lifeforms 

 

   A Roseum Squid Mollusc lifeform

Lifeforms are non-sapient spaceborne life that can be found in certain systems.  They may be flora, such as interstellar seeds or mycelial structures, or fauna, like the squid mollusc shown in the image above.  Some other types of lifeform defy categorisation, existing as mysterious forms of energy.  

All lifeforms exhibit different behaviours, based on their characterisation and often in response to player activities, such as firing weapons on shining lights on them.  Discovering all the potential responses and interactions will 100% fill the player's codex entry on that species.

Designing which behaviours to exhibit in which species was an exciting task, giving lots of opportunities to build narratives on how each lifeform survives and reproduces, as well as allowing us to hide a few surprises and hazards for players too.

Placement of Lifeforms

The galaxy is divided into regions.  At the topmost level we decided to spread lifeforms out to the different regions of the galaxy, but there was a lot more thought and effort besides this. A number of elements helped us to establish a theme and narrative with which we could guide the designs for each lifeform.

Visuals

The art team did a fantastic job creating evocative, believable, exciting alien life. As the lifeforms began to take shape, we were able to draw on details to imagine, and could influence their visual development based on themes and ideas from other areas.

For example, the umbrella mollusc has a large, mushroom like top.  We developed an internal narrative that this shielded the mollusc from harmful radiation, which in turn informed it's placement around stars that produce dangerous radiation. This idea would then go on to inform the lifeform's behaviours and reactions too, such as turning to face it's closest star, or turning to face the player if they approached with their ship's lights on.

Behaviours

A seed pod reacting to the player's ship lights

 

Each lifeform exhibits different behaviours driven by a variety of triggers. Lifeforms could move towards and away from things, impulse suddenly along specific axis, create area of effect damage zones, and directly attack each other and ships.

Using these actions, we began building archetypes for different behaviours, focusing on natural motivations like hunger, reproduction or aggression. Once we had assigned an archetype to a lifeform, we could extrapolate a narrative to justify it's behaviour.

For example, many of our red tinted lifeforms exhibit aggressive behaviours (an attempt to visually telegraph some behaviours). Most of our aggressive species have a central point, or home planet, that they have aggressively expanded out from.

One of our lifeforms performs a sudden "squirt" forward when a ship's lights are shined on it.  This interaction was very playful and fun for players to mess around with.  We established the concept of a home planet with low gravity where these seeds spend their adolescent years, before blasting off and breaking orbit and scattering into various corners of nearby space.  Working from this idea we found a system with an appropriate planet and star type to be our center point, ensuring it was an unexplored planet close to human space (this was hoped to be the first lifeform most of our players would discover).  With that established we created a ruleset where those seeds could spread to nearby systems and, where appropriate, establish colonies and thrive.

Galactic Geography

In some cases we simply used important locations in the galaxy as an inspiration, places we knew players would be drawn to, and then chose and developed lifeforms that fit well to those areas. Players who visit the highest, lowest and furthest on each compass point systems in the galaxy should find interesting and appropriate lifeforms on their way. They serve both as enriching content for largely empty areas of space, and a s a reward for intrepid explorers.

An example of this method is lifeforms that can be found near Guardian systems. We created a narrative of a domesticated or farm species that may once have been managed by the Guardian race.  After the annihilation of the guardians, their livestock simply continued to breed and spread unmanaged. Players who find these species can assume there is a guardian ruin somewhere nearby.

 

Resources like the galactic mapping project were really useful in establishing important locations in the game - You can check it out here!

Special events and cases

The Distant Worlds 2 Expedition Patch

Players embarked on the Distant Worlds 2 expedition in January 2019.  The aim of the Distant Worlds expedition was to travel as a group to the furthest point from Earth, on the galactic rim on the far side of the milky way.  Commanders would travel Prior to their departure, we liased with this player group to help facilitate the expedition, adding community goals, new space stations, and seeding their route with exploration content to discover.

We took two separate approaches to this:
General placement - I wanted our energy based life forms to have unique or identifying rules that support their mysterious and enigmatic nature.  Knowing that the Distant Worlds 2 expedition was heading to Sagitarius A* (the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way), I identified an opportunity to catch 2 birds with one stone.  There is a high number of small nebulae that surround the galactic center, usually home to less that 50 stars.  These nebulae are eyecatching and attractive, achieving part of the "Galactic Geography" condition stated above.  Exploration players are bound to be drawn to them.  Creating a ruleset where energy based lifeforms spawn in systems with certain star types within these nebulae created a consistency among the different life forms, and created natural, hollistic exploration content for our expedition to discover.  We also made our energy based lifeforms exhibit more dangerous behaviours, overheating player ships or draining their shields, allowing us to inject some danger and excitement into the mostly safe and danger free expedition.

Specific Placement - We also explored opportunities to create a web of specifically placed liforms, using an internal narrative of a rogue asteroid carrying and dispersing seeds across multiple systems as it hurtled across the stars.  This rogue asteroid just so happend to cross the path of the oncoming expedition, on the far side of the galaxy, and continued perpendicularly to their path.  The goal was to create a diversion as they discovered the lifeforms, and were able to follow the path of the asteroid, discovering rare variants of the lifeform as they followed the breadcrumb trail.  If the players had missed the lifeform, we were ready to send a message from an in-game character to call them back to the correct location, but fortunatly the lifeform was picked up as the expedition passed through.  They found some of the special variants, but not all and so for months after the event, other players continued to visit the area to locate the remaining variants.  The setup for this was probably the hardest one to achieve in the lifeform system (creating rulesets that make sense on a galactic scale is tough!), but the player reaction, and subsequent delay and diversion of the expedition as they interacted with it made it worth the effort.  It added some valuable content and engagement on what was expected to be the more mundane half of the expedition.

Does it work?

The final, and perhaps most challenging aspect of this work was testing to see that our lifeform's spawn rules had created content that was:

1. Interesting, appropriately rare and engaging
2. Actually discoverable in the game

To ensure the first point, we performed lots of user testing, using members of staff with varying levels of familiarity with the game, and asking them to use the hints in the codex to attempt to locate a lifeform.  We also made use of our selective player testing group, giving some players a preview of the content, and benefitting from their feedback and data.  Armed with this, I feel confident saying that we shipped this feature in good shape, with players stating that it is some of their favourite exploration content in the game! 

On the second point, we created a number of tools to help us ensure that we hadn't made our spawning rules too strict.  I was able to request data from star systems around a certain point, and could gradually build a map of information in critical areas of space, identifying where important or interesting star types are, and locating appropriate areas of space to seed life.  We also created a bot that could search the galaxy in fast forward, working overnight and then presenting a report in the morning of any lifeforms it discovered.  This tool was critical in confirming that lifeforms were indeed spawning in their target areas of space, and were available to be discovered by players.  It saved me hours and hours of testing time, and proved useful for QA to develop their testing plans too.  It also ended up serving a really useful secondary function to help me identify clusters of interesting star types.  By setting up a simplistic spawn rule, looking for an interesting feature or combination (E.g. black holes with other stars in the system), I could set the bot to find them, and then in the morning, add more conditions and limitations to the spawn rules until I had achieved the level of scarcity we were looking for.  If the bot came back with no discovered lifeforms, we knew I had gone too far.

I'm really proud of how this feature turned out, and how it called on me to use so many different aspects of game design knowledge.  From handling data and probabilities to get the spawning right, technical implementation for setting up behaviours, user experience design in applying those behaviours, and narrative design to build the story behind each lifeorm.  I even had to call on my experience in level design, setting up the different cloud layouts and creating "daisy chains" of interesting objects to draw the player into the heart of each cloud. Another area I'm really proud of with this feature is the documentation.  Aside from design documents and data tables, I also created explainers and guides on how to repeat the processes I performed to add more of this sort of content to the game in the future (something that would come in useful with the dawn of the Odyssey update).

There are still lifeforms that are in the rumoured state, and players still engage in hunting for them to this day, and for some Commanders, finding a lifeform is a career highlight.

A player exploring for lifeforms